The few numbers your team should see monthly.

The first is too many metrics. A dashboard with thirty numbers on it gets read for the two people already cared about, and the rest become decoration that someone spends a day a month maintaining.

The second is no comparison. A revenue figure on its own is not information. Revenue against what you planned, and against where it was a quarter ago, is. Without both, a good month and a bad month look identical.

This template takes a deliberate position on both. Eleven metrics, each calculated from data you already have, each shown against a target you set and against three months earlier, with one word for how it's doing. If a metric isn't worth a target, it isn't worth the row.

They cover the four questions a founder needs answered every month, and little else.

• ·Is the business growing, and profitably? Revenue, gross margin, EBITDA.
• ·Will it survive? Net burn, runway, receivable days.
• ·Are customers worth having and staying? Customers, churn, revenue per customer, CAC.
• ·Is the team producing more as it grows? Revenue per head.

Most businesses need one or two more that are specific to how they earn: utilisation for a services firm, orders per day per outlet for a food business, patient repeat rate for a clinic, net revenue retention for software. Add those and delete anything on the list that your business genuinely doesn't turn on.

Resist adding a twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth without removing something. The discipline of a fixed number of rows is what keeps a dashboard read.

The target column is where most of the value sits, and it takes more thought than the data entry.

1. 01Take targets from your annual operating plan where one exists, so the dashboard and the plan tell the same story.
2. 02Where there's no plan, use your own trailing three-month average as the target and set an intention: hold it, improve it, or accept it declining while something else improves.
3. 03Make each target a number someone owns. A target nobody is responsible for is a wish.
4. 04Review targets quarterly, not monthly. Targets that move whenever they are missed stop being targets.
5. 05Be careful with metrics where lower is better, such as burn, churn, CAC and receivable days. The template already handles the direction; make sure your target is the level you actually want, not the level you have.

The status column then does something useful: it turns eleven numbers into a short list of conversations. In a typical month two or three read off track, and those are the agenda.

Three habits make the difference between a dashboard that informs and one that gets admired.

Read the change column before the latest column. A metric that is below target but improving for three months is a different situation from one that is on target and deteriorating. The three-month comparison is there to make that visible.

Read metrics in pairs. Revenue up with gross margin down usually means discounting or a mix shift. Customers up with revenue per customer down means you are winning smaller accounts. CAC down with churn up often means the cheaper channel brings worse-fitting customers. Single metrics mislead; pairs explain.

Then write one sentence per off-track metric, saying what changed and what is being done. That sentence, not the spreadsheet, is what the team will remember.

The file opens with six months of data for a fictional company. Read the dashboard for September and the story is specific. Figures are invented.

Nothing here is alarming, which is itself worth noticing: this is what a reasonable month looks like. Revenue met target while customers came in under, which means revenue per customer is carrying the number. CAC improved sharply but is still above target. Churn has not moved.

So the month's real conversation is not about revenue. It is whether customer growth at 251 against a target of 260 is a sales capacity problem or a churn problem, because the two have different answers and the dashboard has narrowed it to those two.

That narrowing is the whole job. Eleven numbers, four comparisons each, and by the end of a five-minute read the founder knows which single question this month deserves. Without the comparisons, the same data supports any story anyone wants to tell about it.

A dashboard nobody discusses is a report. A dashboard that anchors a short monthly meeting is a management system. The meeting is worth more than the file.

1. 01Fixed day each month, once the books are closed. Thirty to forty-five minutes, with the people who own the numbers in the room.
2. 02Whoever prepares the dashboard sends it beforehand. Nobody presents it line by line in the meeting.
3. 03Each owner speaks only to their off-track metrics: what changed, why, what they are doing, and by when.
4. 04One decision per off-track metric, or an explicit decision to wait and watch for a month.
5. 05Five minutes at the end on cash and runway, which belongs to the founder.
6. 06Notes circulated the same day, with the decisions and owners. Next month starts by reading them.

Companies that hold this meeting for a year end up with something more valuable than the dashboard: a leadership team that expects to explain variances with evidence, which is exactly what a board will ask of them later.

Services firms and agencies

Utilisation and realisation. Revenue per billable person tells you more than revenue per head, and the gap between hours logged and hours billed is where margin leaks.

Software

Net revenue retention and CAC payback. Both take a little more data than this template asks for, and both are what a Series A investor will test first.

Restaurants and cloud kitchens

Orders per day and average order value, by outlet and channel, plus food cost against the recipe standard. Company averages hide which outlet is carrying the others.

Healthcare services

Patient volume and repeat rate, revenue per episode, and utilisation of clinicians or equipment. Payer mix and receivable days matter more here than in most sectors.

Whatever you add, write its definition on the Definitions sheet at the same time. A metric added without a definition is a metric that will mean something different by the time anyone compares two years of it.

• ·Fill it from closed books, not from the accounting software mid-month.
• ·Take cash from the reconciled month-end balance, not the banking app on the day you update it.
• ·Keep definitions stable, and restate history if one has to change.
• ·Use a three-month average burn for runway if your months are lumpy, and say so in the definitions.
• ·Don't quietly drop a metric because it looks bad. Drop metrics when they stop driving decisions, and say why.
• ·Put the same eleven rows in front of the team every month, even in months when nothing moved.