Service 12
Dashboards & Business Reporting
The three or four numbers you would actually act on, live on one screen — pulled from the systems you already run, with the definitions written down so nobody argues about what 'revenue' means.
- Timeline
- 1–3 weeks
- Deliverables
- 10 items
- First milestone
- Week 1
Owners who wait until month end to find out what happened
Most reporting projects fail by building forty charts nobody opens. We start from the opposite end: what decision would you make differently if you knew this on Tuesday instead of the 5th? Everything that does not answer that question does not get built.
Typical stack
What you get
Not included
- Data entry backfill
- BI tool licences
- Predictive forecasting models
Listed as plainly as the inclusions. Anything here can be scoped on top — quoted before it starts, never assumed.
How it works
Definitions before charts
Does revenue include GST? Is a sale counted at order or at dispatch? We write the answers down and every view uses them. Half of all reporting disputes are two people using the same word for different numbers.
Every number is clickable
A figure you cannot drill into is a figure you cannot trust. Any total opens the underlying rows, so the first response to a surprising number is investigation rather than doubt.
It comes to you
A dashboard nobody opens is a screensaver. The daily digest arrives on WhatsApp at a time you choose, and thresholds alert on their own — the dashboard is for when the alert makes you curious.
Reads your systems as they are
Built on top of whatever you already run — our software, someone else's, a Tally export, a Google Sheet. Reporting should not require replacing the thing that holds the data.
Delivery sequence
- 01Week 1
Decisions, then metrics
One session on the decisions you make weekly, working backwards to the numbers that inform them. Output is the metric dictionary and a fixed scope.
- 02Week 2
Pipelines and views
Connections to your source systems, the definitions implemented once, and the dashboard built on a preview link.
- 03Week 3
Alerts and handover
Digests scheduled, thresholds set, roles assigned, and a walkthrough with everyone who will use it.
Dashboards FAQ
Straight answers
Including where the honest answer is 'no' or 'buy something else'.
Our data is messy. Is this premature?
Usually the opposite — a dashboard is how messy data becomes visible. We often find duplicate customers and mis-posted entries in week one. What we will not do is quietly clean historical data as an unbilled side project; if a backfill is needed we scope it separately and you decide whether it is worth it.
Can it read data from software you did not build?
Yes, if the data can be reached — an API, a database, a scheduled export, even a maintained Google Sheet. We check access before quoting so there are no surprises after you have paid.
Why not just use Power BI or Looker Studio?
If your data already sits in one clean place and someone on the team enjoys building views, those tools are excellent and we will point you at them. This service exists for the common case: data across four systems, nobody with the time, and a licence-per-viewer model that punishes sharing.