## 4 Conclusions and Implications  
Managers acknowledge that performance analysis supported only by financial indicators is insufficient, considering that these reflect the past and do not guarantee the organisation's future sustainability. Thus, it is acknowledged that organisations should not only consider the financial perspective, but also the other perspectives, namely the customer, internal, and learning and growth perspectives. Once again, it is clear that organisations started to emphasise the use of the BSC management tool more than two decades ago, not only for strategy alignment and monitoring, but also as a tool capable of assessing organisational performance. The analysis of the empirical results reveals that, despite the recognised interconnection between the perspectives, managers attribute greater importance to the financial perspective. This result is understandable to the extent that, despite all developments concerning the assessment of organisational performance, financial indicators still continue to receive special emphasis from managers. The results reveal that the customer perspective is in second place in terms of relative importance, i.e., right after the financial perspective. This position is unanimous in both organizations (with and without BSC), however, organizations without BSC attribute a significantly higher importance compared to organizations with BSC. Learning and growth perspective is outstanding, as it differs in organisations with and without BSC. Organisations with BSC allocate this perspective at the third ranking while organisations without BSC recognize its ranking at the last position. Despite the growing importance of the strategic objectives associated with the learning and growth perspective, this perspective occupied the third position in organizations with BSC, having even reached the last position in organizations without BSC. This difference in the level of importance proved to be statistically significant. In our view, this result stems from the difficulty managers feel in assessing their employees, since organisations mostly measure generic satisfaction, absenteeism and punctuality. However, they have difficulties in connecting this perspective with the organisational strategy [20]. It is precisely in this sense that the literature highlights the fact that qualitative indicators (intangible) cannot be objectively measured through indicators, which hinders their inclusion [30]. Regarding the importance assigned to the individual critical factors, related to the four BSC perspectives, it is highlighted that only the importance assigned to the value creation (financial perspective) revealed significant differences, with organizations with BSC attributing greater importance to this dimension compared to organizations without BSC. The main contribution of this study lies in the identification of the high level of importance that managers (of organizations without and with BSC) attribute to the BSC contribution, with regard to strategic focus and organizational performance; it is possible to assess that the BSC is a management tool with strong contribution not only by those who use it, but also by those who, despite not using it yet, recognize its strong potential contributions. Based on the above defined rankings in organisations with and without BSC, managers are able to define a strategy map, designing the order of their own perspectives, so as to identify the ranking of each indicator. This ranking is significant, to assure a correct interlinkage between indicators and their lead and lag effects. This calculation of relevance implies that the BSC still has the potential to increase its level of implementation, especially in the context of Portuguese organizations with greater export capacity. Despite its contribution, this research is not exempt from limitations. The first limitation relates to the sample's size and scope, as it does not represent the entire organisation or population. The second lies in the geographical context.