Most growing companies have more numbers than they can use. Google Analytics was installed once and never opened again, the accounting software has a page of reports nobody reads, and somewhere there is a spreadsheet one person updates on a Friday. None of it answers the question a founder actually has on a Monday morning: is the business in better shape than it was last week?
A useful dashboard answers that question in about 30 seconds. For a service business, that usually takes five numbers. Here they are, and what to leave off.
- New enquiries this week23Website 11, phone 7, referral 5
- Time to first reply1h 40mUp from 55m last week
- Became clients (90 days)31%Of enquiries that were a fit
- Owed more than 30 days£6,200Collected this month £41,800
- Deadlines at risk, next 14 days2Nobody with the time booked yet
1. New enquiries, by where they came from.
Count every new enquiry, from every channel, every week: the website form, the phone, email, WhatsApp and referrals. Then split the count by source. This is the number that tells you whether next quarter will be busy, long before revenue shows it, and the split tells you which channel deserves the next pound of marketing.
The usual problem is that enquiries arrive in four places and nobody counts them in one. If counting last month's enquiries takes a day, fix that first, before building any dashboard.
2. Time to first reply.
How long does a new enquiry wait before a real person answers it? Few firms have ever measured this, and it often decides who wins the work, because someone who has enquired with three firms will often go with whoever answers properly first.
At one law firm we worked with, enquiries that arrived out of hours were sitting until Monday. After the intake work, more than 90% of qualified enquiries got a reply from a fee-earner within one working hour, where before it was the next working day. You cannot improve a wait you cannot see.
3. Enquiries that became clients.
Of the enquiries that were a real fit, how many became paying work? Watch the rate, not just the count. A rising enquiry count with a falling rate often means the marketing is working and something after it is not: the reply is slow, the quote is unclear, or the follow-up never happens.
4. Cash in, not just work done.
Invoiced is not the same as paid. Show the money collected this month next to the money owed, and the total that is more than 30 days late. A busy firm can run short of cash while the work looks healthy, and this is the line that shows it early. Most accounting tools, Xero included, already hold these figures. They only need pulling into the same view.
5. Work at risk.
Every service business has deadlines: filings, completions, launches, renewals. The useful number is not how many are coming up. It is how many are coming up without someone who has the time to do them.
At an accountancy practice we built for, the partner used to spend 90 minutes matching deadlines against who had capacity, and skipped it in exactly the weeks it mattered most. An agent now reads the practice system each morning and sends a five-minute digest of the deadlines at risk and who has room. The practice missed no statutory deadlines in the engagement period.
What to leave off.
Page views, followers, total users since launch, and a chart of everything the tool can produce all feel like information, but nobody acts on them. A dashboard with thirty charts gets looked at once, admired, and ignored.
Two rules keep it honest. Every number needs an owner, the person who does something when it moves. And every number needs a comparison, with last week or the same month last year, because a number on its own says very little.
How to build it without a project.
This does not need custom software. Google Analytics 4 for the website, the accounting tool for cash, the practice or job system for deadlines, and Looker Studio to put them on one page is enough for most firms. Keep every account in the company's name, not in the name of whoever set it up.
The part people skip is reading it. A one-page note each month on what changed and why does more than any chart, because it makes someone look. That is how Analytics works at Praxline, from £275 a month: dashboards you can read in 30 seconds and a short note on what moved. If you would rather sketch your own five numbers on a call, drop me a line.
