06 Dashboards & BI · Cross-industry
Numbers that arrive in time to matter: Power BI and custom dashboards for management decisions
For a range of clients we replaced the monthly Excel pack — assembled late, read once, already stale — with Power BI and custom data dashboards on live data. Revenue, margin, receivables, cash and the operating metrics of each business, refreshed continuously, so management sees the number when the decision is being made rather than after.
- Dashboards connected directly to the accounting system and operational data — no exported spreadsheets
- Refresh measured in minutes or hours, not weeks
- One screen per audience: founder, finance, operations — each with the metrics they act on
- Variance against budget visible as it develops, not discovered at month-end
- The monthly Excel pack retired; the review meeting now opens on the live dashboard
The situation
The management information pack in most SMEs is a monthly Excel workbook. Someone exports the trial balance, someone reformats it, someone adds the operating numbers from another system, and the result circulates a fortnight after month-end — by which point half the month it describes is a month and a half old. It is read once, at a meeting, and the questions it raises are answered at the next one.
The consequence is that decisions are made on the last pack, or on gut, or not at all. A margin that started slipping in the first week of a month is not seen until the middle of the next.
What we built
- Direct connections. Power BI semantic models wired to the client’s accounting system — Zoho Books, Tally, QuickBooks — and to the operational sources that carry the business’s real drivers: the CRM, the order system, the payroll, the inventory. No intermediary spreadsheet.
- A data model per business. Not a template. Each client’s dashboard is designed around what actually moves their P&L: for a distributor, receivables ageing and stock days; for a services firm, utilisation and billing lag; for a D2C brand, contribution margin after fulfilment and returns.
- Screens by audience. The founder’s view is cash, runway, revenue against plan and the three numbers they have told us keep them awake. Finance sees the ledger-level detail. Operations sees the leading indicators. Each opens on what its reader acts on.
- Scheduled refresh and alerts. Data refreshes on a schedule matched to the source — every thirty minutes for some, nightly for others — and threshold alerts flag a metric that has moved outside its band without waiting for anyone to look.
What changed
The monthly pack was retired. The management meeting opens on the live dashboard, and the conversation moved from what happened to what do we do. Variances are seen as they form. And because the dashboards run on the same reconciled books our outsourced accounting and Virtual CFO engagements maintain, the numbers on the screen are the numbers in the accounts — there is no second version to reconcile.
Why a CA firm, not a BI vendor
A dashboard is only as good as the data model beneath it, and the data model is only as good as the accountant who defined what revenue, margin and receivable mean for that business. We build the dashboards because we already keep the books they read from. That is the whole of the automation practice: the compliance is the floor, and this is the edge.
Next step
Have a process like this one?
Book a 30-minute discovery call. We scope the build, confirm what it changes, and give you a fixed-fee proposal within 48 hours.