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.
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.