Dashboards without the enterprise price tag: what you can do with Xero and a custom tool

We spent years building analytics for a large organisation with Tableau, data warehouses and a team to run them. That's the right setup for a company with hundreds of reports. It's the wrong setup for a business with twelve staff that wants to know, on Monday morning, whether last week was good.

What a small business dashboard should actually show

Not everything. Five to eight numbers you'd act on:

• Cash position and what's coming in — bank balance, invoices due this week, overdue by customer
• Sales pipeline — quotes out, quotes won this month, win rate
• Work in progress — jobs open, jobs overdue, jobs per staff member
• Margin — revenue and cost per job or per product line, this month against last
• Customer signals — top customers, anyone who's gone quiet, anyone always late to pay
• The one number that matters in your industry — utilisation, revenue per truck, chairs filled, whatever it is

If a number on the screen wouldn't change a decision, take it off.

Where the data comes from

Xero or MYOB hold revenue, costs, debtors and creditors. Both have good APIs. Refreshing hourly is easy.

Your job, booking or order system holds operational data. Most modern ones have APIs or exports; older ones can usually be read from a scheduled CSV.

Spreadsheets hold the things nobody has systemised yet. Google Sheets can be read live; Excel files can be picked up from a shared folder.

Your own database, if we've built you a tool, is the easiest source of all.

The dashboard pulls from each on a schedule, reconciles them, and stores a clean copy so the screen is instant.

Custom dashboard vs Power BI, Tableau or Looker

Those tools are excellent — for organisations with someone to build and maintain the reports. For a small business the trade-offs usually look like this:

	BI tool	Custom dashboard
Licence cost	per user, per month, forever	none
Who maintains it	an analyst or a consultant	us, under a small support plan
Fits your KPIs	eventually, after configuration	yes, from the first build
Alerts and scheduled emails	possible, with setup	included
Wall screen in the office	possible	yes, one URL
Build cost	consultant time	$2,100–$8,400

The honest rule: if you'll have someone building lots of reports, use a BI tool. If you want one screen that's right and stays right, custom is cheaper over two years and simpler every day.

The two things that make or break it

Clean data. Half the work of a dashboard build is reconciling what "a job" or "a customer" means across three systems. It's tedious and it's the point; skipping it produces a pretty screen with wrong numbers.

A Monday email. Dashboards people have to remember to open get forgotten. The one that lands in your inbox at 7am with the week's numbers against target, and three things to look at, gets read.

Where to start

Write down the five numbers you'd want on a wall in your office. If you can say where each one lives today, you're a two-week build away from seeing them together. If you can't, that's the first, most useful conversation — and we're happy to have it.