Monday is reporting day
Someone exports four CSVs every Monday morning, joins them in Excel, formats them, emails them out. By Tuesday afternoon the numbers are stale. By Friday nobody remembers what they said.
The view of
the business you wanted.
You've been trying to build the dashboard in spreadsheets. Or buying three tools that each show a third of the picture. Or asking someone to send you a PDF on Monday morning. We build the one screen — and the underlying pipes — that show you what's actually happening, refreshed continuously, in the language of your operation.
02 / Signals
Five signs you need
real reporting.
Dashboards are the most underrated service we ship. Boring to talk about, transformative to use. If two or more of these are true, you're operating in fog.
Numbers disagree across systems
Revenue per the CRM doesn't match revenue per the accounting system doesn't match revenue per the founder's gut. Three answers, all wrong, no canonical source.
You found out late
Last quarter, something went wrong (a metric slipped, a customer churned, costs crept up) and you noticed two months in. The data was there the whole time — just not visible.
Board prep takes a week
Every quarter someone spends a week building the deck. Half the time goes to pulling the numbers, formatting them, double-checking them. The other half is writing.
You can't answer 'how are we doing?'
Someone asks. You hedge. You'd have to log into three systems and do mental math. So you say 'good' and move on. The number you can't speak fluently is the number that walks away from you.
03 / What we ship
Six dashboard shapes
we build most often.
Dashboards earn their keep when they're built for one person, doing one job. The all-purpose dashboard helps no one. Below are the six shaped audiences we build for most weeks.
/01
Operator Dashboard
One screen. The 6–10 numbers the person running the operation looks at every morning. Pipeline, pulse, problems. Pulled live. Annotated with what's normal and what's not.
An example
Manufacturing client built a single operator screen. The CEO replaced three subscriptions and a Monday meeting with a 5-minute coffee check.
Typical inputs
- KPI definitions (what counts)
- Source systems (CRM, accounting, ops)
- Refresh cadence (live / hourly / daily)
- Annotation rules (what's normal)
- Web dashboard, responsive
- Mobile-friendly
- Annotated thresholds
- Source-of-truth drill-downs
/02
Sales / Pipeline Dashboard
What's in pipeline, what's slipping, who needs a nudge. Pulled from your CRM (any of them). Real conversion rates by stage, sales cycle by deal size, win-rate by source. The view sales leaders wish their CRM dashboard was.
An example
B2B services firm spotted a 31% drop in mid-funnel conversion two weeks earlier than they would have without the dashboard. Saved a quarter.
Typical inputs
- CRM access (HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Close, etc.)
- Stage definitions + conversion criteria
- Quotas / targets
- Slicing dimensions (rep, source, segment)
- Web dashboard
- Slack digest (daily / weekly)
- Email summary (Monday 7am)
- Per-rep views
/03
Financial / FP&A Dashboard
Revenue, gross margin, runway, cash flow. The view your CFO (or your future CFO) needs every Monday. Pulls from QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, Stripe, your bank. Reconciled, dated, drilldown-able.
An example
Services firm caught a $40K monthly margin erosion two months earlier than they would have. Renegotiated supplier costs in time.
Typical inputs
- Accounting system access
- Chart of accounts (we can map it)
- Bank / payment processor data
- Reporting cadence + audience
- Web dashboard
- Monthly PDF for board / lenders
- Cohort + segment analysis
- Cash-runway projection
/04
Operations / Production Dashboard
For shop floors, service teams, warehouses, kitchens. What's running, what's behind, what's broken. OEE for manufacturing. Job status for services. Inventory health for retail. The screen that hangs on the wall.
An example
Manufacturing client put a live production dashboard on the shop-floor TV. Quality slips caught the same shift instead of the next quarter.
Typical inputs
- Production system data
- Schedules / job orders
- Quality + incident logs
- Thresholds for green / yellow / red
- Wall-display web view
- Shift-summary digest
- Mobile manager view
- Alert thresholds
/05
Customer Health Dashboard
Per-account health, usage, support load, expansion signal. Identifies the customer about to churn before they do. Flags the customer ready to expand before they ask. Built for CS leaders or owner-operators with a retention motion.
An example
Services firm cut churn by 28% after surfacing low-engagement accounts 60 days before contract renewal. Retention motion got proactive.
Typical inputs
- Customer data + usage signals
- Support history
- Contract dates + values
- Health-score logic
- Web dashboard, account-level + portfolio-level
- Slack alerts for at-risk accounts
- Renewal-prep weekly digest
- Owner assignment + handoff
/06
Marketing / Performance Dashboard
Spend, leads, MQLs, conversions — by channel, by campaign, by week. The dashboard your fractional CMO actually trusts. Pulls from ad platforms, your CRM, your site analytics. Reconciles them. Tells you which campaign to kill this week.
An example
B2B firm reallocated 40% of monthly spend after the dashboard surfaced a channel that looked successful in the ad platform but converted nothing downstream.
Typical inputs
- Ad platforms (Google, LinkedIn, Meta, etc.)
- CRM + lead source attribution
- Site analytics
- Targets / budgets per channel
- Web dashboard
- Weekly Slack / email digest
- Attribution + multi-touch view
- Spend pacing alerts
04 / How it works
The five stages,
shaped for Dashboards.
Every Sling engagement runs through the same five stages — Assess, Design, Build, Train, Optimize. Here's what that looks like specifically for Dashboards & Reporting. See the full Framework →
What matters, why
30-min sessions with the people who'll use it. We don't accept 'all the numbers' as a brief. We narrow to 6–10 metrics that drive decisions, by user role.
Spec + screen sketch
Spec document with metric definitions, refresh cadence, drilldown paths. Wireframes for each screen. Sign-off before we touch the integrations.
Wire + ship
Pipe the data, build the views, deploy. Weekly working builds. By end of stage, you're using it on real decisions.
Read the dashboard
Train the users on what to look at, when, and why. Document the thresholds. Identify the in-house Champion who'll own metric definitions going forward.
Tune as the business changes
Metrics evolve. New questions emerge. AaaS retainer covers ongoing tweaks, new screens, new integrations. Most dashboards mature over 3–6 months.
05 / Toolbox
What we typically reach for
on dashboard builds.
Anthropic-first, tool-flexible. We pick what fits your data, your stack, and your team's appetite for new platforms. Nothing here is locked in — if you've already standardized on something else, we work with it.
Primary
Custom (Next.js + Postgres)
Our default. Most flexible, most owned, most future-proof. We build the dashboard as a real app.
Primary
Claude
Narrates the dashboard — explains variance, drafts the executive summary, flags what's unusual.
BI tool
Metabase · Hex · Mode
When the team wants self-serve analytics on top of what we build. We integrate when it makes sense.
Data plumbing
Airbyte · Fivetran · custom
How data gets into the dashboard. Off-the-shelf for common sources, custom when needed.
Sources
Your stack
HubSpot, Salesforce, QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, Stripe, Google / Meta / LinkedIn Ads, your warehouse.
Distribution
Slack · Email · PDF
How the dashboard reaches your team beyond logging in. Most dashboards win when they show up in inboxes.
06 / Proof
One shipped example.
A representative engagement. Anonymized industry tag, real-shape metrics. The full case-study library lives at /case-studies.
$140K / yr saved
Replaced a 90-minute Monday meeting with a live dashboard. Quality issues caught the same shift, not the next quarter. CEO got Mondays back.
The shape
- Assess: shadowed the Monday operations meeting for two weeks. Mapped 11 metrics the team was checking, 6 that drove decisions, 5 that were vestigial.
- Design: two-screen system — Operator dashboard for the CEO, Shop-Floor wallboard for the production teams. Real-time refresh.
- Build: piped data from MES, ERP, and quality system. Shipped in 4 weeks. Wall display went up in week 5.
- Train: 1-hour onboarding for managers, 30 min for shop floor. Documentation in their wiki. Champion identified.
- Optimize: AaaS Standard. Added 4 views over the next 4 months as the business grew. Eliminated the Monday meeting entirely.
07 / Pricing
Published. Honest.
Quoted in 48 hours.
We publish the range so you can scope before the call. The actual number lands inside that range — we quote it after Discovery, fixed-bid for Projects and MVP Sprints, hourly via AaaS for ongoing.
$3K – $8K
- One dashboard, one source system
- Live data refresh
- Source code in your repo
- Best fit for proving the value before committing
$10K – $25K
- Full Assess → Train cycle
- Multiple sources, multiple screens
- Slack / email digest distribution
- Most common shape for this service
$500 – $2K / mo
- Lite or Standard tiers
- New metrics, new views, new sources
- Pipe maintenance
- Pause anytime
08 / FAQ
Common questions
about this service.
What buyers actually ask on Discovery Calls about Dashboards & Reporting. If yours isn't here, we'll answer it on the call.
If you have a data team, those are great. We come in when you don't — when the dashboard needs to be the application, not a tool on top of a tool. We've sent clients to Metabase. We'll do it again when it's the right fit. The Discovery Call is where we figure out which.
09 / Next stepShow us the
Show us the
number you can't
quote from memory.
The number that walks away from you when someone asks. Bring it. We'll spend 30 minutes on what it'd take to put it on a screen you check every morning. Quote in 48 hours.
What this call is
30 min. We learn your operation, scope the work, tell you straight whether Dashboards & Reporting fits.
What you'll leave with
A scoped quote within 48 hours, or an honest "this isn't us" and a referral to a better fit.
Other services
If the work is task automation, see Workflow Automation. If the dashboard becomes an app, see Custom Applications. Most operations need a mix.