Too many systems, not enough answers
Ask most business owners a simple question, such as how sales are tracking this month or how much is owed to them, and the honest answer is often “give me an hour”. The figures exist, but they are spread across the accounts system, the CRM, the ad platforms and a few spreadsheets. Getting a clear picture means logging into each one, exporting numbers and lining them up by hand.
Because it takes effort, it does not happen often. Decisions are made on the last report someone had time to build, or on instinct. Problems that would have been obvious from the numbers, such as a slow month for new enquiries or a creeping list of overdue invoices, only surface when they start to hurt.
An automated dashboard pulls the figures together for you and keeps them up to date without anyone touching a spreadsheet. You open one page and see where things stand.
Dashboards we build
Sales
New enquiries, quotes sent, deals won and the value of the pipeline, by week, month and salesperson. You can see at a glance whether this month is ahead of or behind last month.
Cash flow and aged debt
Money in, money out and what is owed, pulled from Xero or your accounts system. Overdue invoices are listed by customer and by age, so it is clear where to focus.
Marketing performance
Traffic, enquiries and cost per lead from GA4, Search Console and your ad accounts, shown alongside the sales figures so marketing activity can be connected to actual work won.
Team workload and capacity
Jobs booked, hours scheduled and open tasks per person, to help you spot who is stretched and when you have room to take on more.
Job or project profitability
Quoted price against time and costs, so you can see which kinds of work make money and which only look busy.
KPI alerts
An email when a figure crosses a line you have set, such as aged debt above a threshold or a week with no new enquiries.
Scheduled snapshots
A PDF or email summary sent at a set time to the people who need it, for those who would rather not open a dashboard at all.
Example workflow. This shows the kind of thing we build. It is not a client result.
Before: the Monday management meeting starts with fifteen minutes of people reading out numbers from different systems, some of them a week old, and arguing about which figure is right.
After: overnight on Sunday, data is pulled from Xero, the CRM and GA4 into a single Looker Studio dashboard. At 8am on Monday, everyone in the meeting gets an email with the headline figures, the changes since last week and a link to the full dashboard. The meeting starts with the same numbers on everyone’s screen and goes straight to what to do about them.
Looker Studio, Power BI or Google Sheets?
Looker Studio is free, works well with Google tools such as GA4 and Search Console, and is easy to share. Power BI is a strong choice for businesses already on Microsoft 365, especially if you have more complex data or want finer control over who sees what. Google Sheets is often the best first step for a small team: simple, familiar and easy to change. We will recommend whichever fits your systems and the people who will use it, and explain any licence costs before we start.
Getting the data right first
A dashboard is only as good as the data feeding it. During the audit we check how each system is set up, whether the same customer or job is named consistently across them and whether anything important is missing. Often there are a few small fixes to make first, such as tidying CRM stages or making sure invoices are linked to the right customers. We will be clear about what needs doing, and keep it in proportion. Most dashboards can start with the data you already have and improve as it gets cleaner.
Who sees what
Different people need different views. An owner may want the whole picture, a sales lead their pipeline, and a project manager the workload for their team. We set up separate pages or reports for each role and share them only with the people who need them, using the sharing settings in Looker Studio, Power BI or Google Workspace.
How we build it
We begin with the questions, not the charts. What do you want to know each week, and what would you do differently if you knew it? From there we choose the handful of figures that answer those questions, connect the systems that hold them and build a first version. You use it for a couple of weeks, tell us what is missing or unclear, and we refine it. Once it settles, we add alerts and scheduled snapshots so the dashboard comes to you.
Which package fits
Reporting dashboards are included in AI Partner (from £2,500/month, 3-month minimum), alongside automations and assistants that we build and maintain, and a monthly AI opportunity review.
If you would like to scope the dashboard first, AI Kickstart (£495 one-off) will identify the figures that matter and the systems they come from.
Tell us the question you wish you could answer in seconds, and on a free consultation call we will show you how a dashboard could answer it.