Software Advice (online survey of 243 US business owners/managers) — 5% of SMBs report using a BI dashboard to analyze data; Excel/Google Sheets dominate at 65%

Claim: Software Advice, How Dashboards Impact SMB Confidence in Data Analytics (online survey of 243 US business owners / managers): "BI dashboard adoption rates are very low, with only 5 percent of SMBs reporting that they use such a system to analyze data." Excel/Google Sheets dominate at 65%; built-in platform analytics at 23%. Top barriers: lack of awareness 39%, system cost 30%, comfort with existing tools 23%.

Source: Software Advice.

Confidence: Single-source — vendor-adjacent; treat as directional.

Caveat: Software Advice is a software-comparison site (adjacent incentive). Small sample (n=243). Directionally consistent with BARC / Gartner but should not be quoted as a precise number.

Why this matters for Candid: SMB-specific adoption is far lower than enterprise adoption — most SMBs run on spreadsheets. When recommending dashboards to a spreadsheet-comfortable client, the bar is high.