You know the story: six months of project, forty charts, a festive launch — and three months later nobody has opened the dashboard except the person who ordered it. The problem is rarely the technology.
Rule 1: one screen, seven numbers
Management does not need forty charts; it needs seven numbers compared against plan and last year: revenue, margin, cash flow, work in progress, overdue receivables, utilisation, NPS. Everything else is a second level behind a click.
Rule 2: data no older than a day
A dashboard with monthly data is an archive, not a tool. You can only steer by what you see in time — which is why a direct connection to the ERP and invoicing beats a manual export “someone will do on Monday”. And rule 3: every number has an owner who can explain why it moved.
One truth instead of five spreadsheets
A dashboard's greatest value is not a pretty chart, but the end of arguments over whose number is right. When sales, production and finance all look at the same revenue figure from the same source, meetings shorten and decisions speed up. A single source of truth is an organisational change disguised as a technical project — which is exactly why it works.
A dashboard that acts, not just shows
A number you have to remember to look at occasionally gets forgotten. So the best dashboards do not just display — they alert: a receivable crosses a limit, a margin drops below a threshold, an order slips — and the system sends a warning before anyone notices. A passive overview becomes an active guard.
Technically it is cheaper than you think: we build dashboards over existing systems from €9,000 including integrations. Displaying data is not the expensive part — deciding without it for a year is.