One best practice when selecting financial metrics is to make them leading indicators of potential financial results. What is a leading indicator? It depends on what you are trying to predict. In for-profit companies, the end-state value objective is the income statement.
To find the leading indicators of profitability, we start by mapping your business processes to the income statement. Remember, the focus at this level is not at the business process level, but the aggregated impact of process outcome on financial metrics.