Every reporting tool wants to show you forty numbers. It is easier to build a dashboard that shows everything than one that decides what matters.
The result is a page nobody opens after the first week.
The six
What came in. Enquiries this week against last week. Not visits, not impressions. People who asked you for something.
What it cost. What you spent to get those enquiries, and what each one cost. If you spend nothing on marketing this is zero, which is still worth seeing.
What is owed. Invoices out, and which ones are overdue. Most small businesses find out they have a cash problem three weeks after it started.
What is booked. Work confirmed for the next fortnight. This is the number that tells you whether to worry.
What is running low. Stock, materials, or capacity, depending on what you do.
What changed. The one thing that moved most since last week, up or down, with a reason where there is one.
Why six
Because you will actually look at six. Forty numbers means scanning, and scanning means you stop.
The test for a dashboard is not how much it shows. It is whether you would open it on a Monday morning without being reminded. That is how we build dashboards.
Where the numbers come from
Almost certainly tools you already pay for. Xero has the invoicing. Your CRM has the enquiries. Google and Meta have the ad spend. Your job management software has the bookings.
The work is not collecting the data. It is pulling it into one place so you are not opening five logins to answer one question.
The trap
A number that is wrong is worse than no number, because you act on it.
We have seen a reporting integration return an empty result, get cached, and serve that empty result all afternoon. The dashboard showed zero enquiries. There had been eleven. Nothing failed loudly. It just quietly told everyone a lie.
Anything that comes back empty should be shown once and never stored. If your reporting has never surprised you with a failure, that does not mean it has never failed.
What changes
The business stops living in your head. That is the actual point. You stop being the only person who knows how the week is going.