The 9Spokes glossary

Visualize and monitor your business in one simple dashboard. Get to know us better with our glossary of 9Spokes services and terms.

Track

Track how your business is performing across all areas — from marketing and social media to sales, finance, HR, and inventory — in one place. Your business Tracker delivers a holistic view of your business in real time. You’ll gain actionable insights that enable you to solve problems and run your operations with confidence.

Vital apps and services you use already can be connected to your 9Spokes dashboard. Once connected, you’ll power up data tiles, which track and inform key areas such as sales, inventory, finances, marketing, and more.

Track allows you to set up custom alerts and push notifications — helping you to stay on the pulse of your business while you’re on the go.

Connect

Connect is where you add your existing apps and integrate your bank feeds, to power your dashboard with data! You can also browse and purchase new apps. You’ll find the best-in-class business solutions including QuickBooks, Shopify, Mailchimp, Google Analytics, Google Suite and Expensify — as well as the top social media platforms.

Simply select the apps you’d like to connect — and the data insights displayed for each of these apps — then watch your dashboard come to life! Please note, you will need a customer account or subscription with your selected app to connect it to 9Spokes.

Marketplace

Connect to new apps at Marketplace and discover all our offerings in one place. You can access free trials or sign up right away.

Every app we feature is subject to our rigorous accreditation process. The “Spokes” in 9Spokes refers to nine key areas we have identified as critical for business success: money, customers, product, people, marketing, sales, productivity, information, and specialist.

We have carefully curated a list of the best apps in each of these categories so that you can customize your dashboard to best suit your business and your industry. 

Explore

Explore is the 9Spokes resource hub — brimming with essential industry know-how and business best practices to support your success.

Curated for modern businesses, Explore hosts a repository of rich content on burgeoning trends and best practices in the business world. You’ll get access to relevant news and thought leadership articles from industry titans, as well as useful tools to propel your performance forward.

Data, Information, and Knowledge

Our business model is based on providing you with the data, information, and knowledge you need to powerfully move your business forward.

It works in a synchronized, step-by-step process so you can gain the most value from your business data:

Data is raw, unprocessed metrics extracted from a source, for example, descriptive analytics. By adding context and value to the raw numbers, data will have more meaning.
Information is the next building block, where raw data is put through a process to generate more meaningful metrics, for example, accounting ratios. This is data that has been “cleaned” of errors, making it easier to visualize and analyze for a specific purpose.
Knowledge is understanding how pieces of information connect, to help you understand how to achieve your business goals. For example, using machine learning metrics to unlock deeper levels of insights, enabling smart business forecasting.

Armed with data, information, and knowledge, you can climb up the mountain of wisdom, and gain a competitive advantage by supporting your business decisions with data-driven analytics.

Tiles

Tiles are editable, moveable widgets on your dashboard that display all your aggregated data. They are the windows into your business, providing a complete overview of cash flow, people, sales, stock metrics and more.  

You can organize these tiles into customized boards to suit your business needs, and even share insights with your team to drive collaboration and efficiency.

To learn more about any data displayed, click Tile details from the mini drop-down menu. If a tile’s data isn’t relevant to you, simply click Remove. To learn more about tile features, click here.

Home board

Your home board is the base hub of your business data. You’ll see information from us about our latest feature updates and service offerings, and a snapshot of how your business is performing.

Use the main home board drop-down menu to access your other custom and category boards.

Business offers

You’ll find the latest offers for featured apps and bank services via the Business Offers tile. This is displayed in the top-left corner of your dashboard.

Custom boards

With an abundance of data flowing into the platform from multiple sources, organizing your business metrics for practical everyday viewing can be a challenge. That’s why we created the ability to segment information into multiple custom boards.

You can choose which tiles to add to each board, depending on the connected apps available. Connect more apps to build a rich and diverse data source to use for your boards.

Creating a custom board is simple! To get started, select the Home board drop-down menu then click Create new board. Next, you’ll select tiles from various categories and name your custom board.

Use the Boards master settings menu to manage your dashboard. With the ability to switch between boards, and edit the names and tiles, you can design a flexible, dynamic platform that meets your specific business needs.

Category boards

To make data viewing even simpler, we created pre-built category boards that populate with all tiles from the apps you have already connected.

It’s easy to access category boards! Simply go to your main dashboard drop-down menu. The four default boards display: Accounting, Product, Marketing, and HR.

When you connect a new app, the tiles powered by the app will automatically be added to the respective category board. For example, if you connect QuickBooks, the accounting-related tiles are automatically added to the Accounting board, and the product-related tiles are added to the Product board.

App      

The term 'app' is short for application — software that you use on your devices and computers. The apps we refer to are online business tools. They can be used to support a range of online business functions such as accounting, marketing, point of sale, inventory, and so on.

Connecting your business apps to your 9Spokes tracker will give you meaningful, personalized, and shareable insights. While your 9Spokes dashboard is free, and some of the apps featured on our app store are also free, others require payment. This is managed directly between you and the app.

App trial

Our app specialists are always busy researching the wide world of apps and innovative technology — so you don't have to.

Most of the accredited apps featured offer a free trial, so you can take them for a test run to see if they are the right fit for your business. 

To sign up for an app trial:

Log into your dashboard and select Connect.  You’ll see the full list of available apps in our marketplace. 
Learn more about the different apps to see how your business could benefit from the features. Enjoy browsing what’s on offer!
In the top-right corner of an app’s page you’ll see the option to sign up or try the app. Click here and you’ll be re-directed to the website of the app so you can start the sign-up process.

Alerts

With target values set by you, alerts immediately inform you when the target is reached, or the time period set has lapsed. You can select to receive alerts daily, weekly, or monthly. To get started, go to Notifications from the main Settings menu, found under your user profile.

Push notifications

Push notifications send pop-up messages directly to your mobile device.  Our platform uses push notifications to alert you to important changes in your metrics, triggered by customized thresholds that you set up.

To learn how to set up custom push notifications, click here.

Biometrics

With biometrics login, you can use fingerprint or facial recognition on your supported device to log in to your account. Biometrics authentication enables you to log in via your web app or browser quickly and securely.

To set up biometrics, go to Security from the main Settings menu, found under your user profile.