There’s a lot of talk about business “dashboards”, and no standard way of doing them. The test should be: if you look at a “dashboard’ item, and it tells you something valuable within 5 seconds, and you might make a change or pull a different lever because of it, then it’s worthwhile. If you stare at it, decide it’s quite pretty but think “so what”, then it’s not worthwhile.

This one’s an example of a project dashboard (“how much of the budget have we used up so far?”) using constantly updated info from overnight data feeds out of the accounting system (Xero, for example) and timesheet system (Harvest, for example).

It’s for operational use day-to-day, rather than SMT or board-level reporting; the point being that you can use your data in real time, for course-correction and control, as well as facilitating conversations with the client about expectations, instead of looking once a month or post-project when it’s too late to do anything about it.