HalversonCo

CEO dashboard for small business: start with the books

I have 30+ years in SQL and reporting. Tools: SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, Postgres, SSRS, Power BI, Tableau, Crystal, QuickBooks and more. My view is simple. A CEO dashboard for a small business succeeds or fails on one thing: whether the owner believes the numbers. A plain page that is trusted beats a handsome one that is doubted.

This guide is for bookkeeping and fractional CFO firms that give each client one page.

Start with the owner's last surprise

Before you pick any number, ask the owner one question: when did money last catch you off guard? A payroll that was tight, a customer who paid two months late, a month that looked good and was not. The answer tells you the first thing the page should show. It also tells you what the owner will check first when they open it.

Sort every number into three piles

Write every number you might show on a list, then sort it:

  1. Straight from the books. Profit for the month, the cash balance, the total owed by customers, the bills due soon. These tie to a statement or a report your firm already stands behind.
  2. Worked out from the books. Gross margin as a percent, days to collect, months of cash. These need a written definition. For months of cash, one way is the cash balance divided by the average monthly loss of cash. That only means something when the business is losing cash. If it is not, say so instead of showing a number.
  3. From somewhere else. Pipeline, billable hours, jobs in progress. These come from another system, so someone has to own that feed.

My rule: start with the first pile. Add from the second once the definitions are written down. Add from the third only when a named person owns the source.

Three notes that protect trust

A dashboard loses an owner's trust the first time a number turns out to be old, or to mean something else. Three small notes on the page guard against that:

Do not let color carry the message

Green, amber and red are fine for status. Do not make them the only signal. The web accessibility guidelines say color should not be the only visual way to convey information, so add a word or a shape as well. A quick test: print the page in grayscale and see whether it still reads.

A number you cannot explain in a sentence belongs on page two

If the person reading cannot say what a number means in one sentence, it does not belong on the front. Put it on a second page with its definition. The front stays short enough that an owner reads all of it.

If you serve many clients

Keep the layout and the definitions the same for every client. Change only what has to change: the account mapping and the one number that belongs to that business. In my sample build, one template and one settings file do exactly that. Keep your review step even when the template is the same.

Before a dashboard goes to a client

Check each of these:

  1. The profit figure matches the profit and loss for that period, on that basis.
  2. Cash matches the bank balance in the books for that date.
  3. Receivables match the aging report for that date.
  4. Anything estimated or not yet reconciled is marked where the number appears.
  5. A person at your firm has read the note written for the owner.
  6. The page shows when it was last updated.

If you want one for each client

I am working on CEO dashboards for bookkeeping and fractional CFO firms. See the fractional CFO dashboard.

HalversonCo, Liberty Hill, TX

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