A treasury dashboard: knowing today whether you make it to the end of the month
Most small businesses discover a cash problem once it is already on top of them. What a treasury dashboard has to show, where the data comes from and why it is not the same as looking at the bank balance.
· Data and BI
There is one question almost no small business can answer in under half an hour: do I have the money to pay next month's bills? The bank balance does not answer it, because it does not know which invoices are still to be collected, which direct debits hit next week or how much of that balance is VAT that is not yours.
A treasury dashboard is the answer to that question, kept up to date by itself.
Why the bank balance misleads
Three reasons, and all three are what sink companies that were making money:
- The VAT is not yours. You collect with the tax included and settle it every quarter or every month. Today's balance includes money that already has an owner.
- Profit and cash are not the same. You can close the month in profit and have nothing to pay the wages with, simply because your customers pay at sixty days and your suppliers collect at thirty.
- Recurring charges are not seen coming. Contributions, insurance, loans, quarterly taxes: they are predictable to the cent and almost nobody has them in front of them until they land.
What the dashboard has to show
Not a board with twenty colourful charts. Four things:
- Cash available today, net of what is already spoken for: accrued taxes and committed payments.
- A projection at thirty, sixty and ninety days crossing invoices issued and uncollected, invoices received and unpaid, and the known recurring charges.
- Overdue receipts, by age and by customer. It nearly always turns out the cash problem is not a sales problem: it is a collection problem.
- The date of the next squeeze. The day of the next quarterly tax bill or the next double payroll, marked in the same place.
Where the data comes from
From where it already is, which is the part people do not expect. You do not have to change systems:
- The invoicing software supplies the invoices issued and their due dates.
- Accounting supplies the invoices received and the accrued taxes.
- The bank supplies the movements, by periodic download or by direct connection.
- A simple sheet supplies the recurring charges that are not recorded anywhere.
The real work is not drawing the dashboard: it is leaving those four sources coming in by themselves every day. A dashboard that has to be fed by hand stops being looked at within three weeks. Every time.
Power BI, Looker Studio or a spreadsheet
A spreadsheet is enough if it is just you, you have few customers and you do not mind giving it twenty minutes every Monday. It is honest to say so: plenty of people need nothing more.
Looker Studio is free, lives in the browser and connects well to spreadsheets and simple databases. It is the natural option when the volume is small and you want to share the dashboard with a partner or with your adviser.
Power BI makes sense when the data comes from several systems that have to be crossed, when things have to be calculated that the source does not provide, or when you already work inside Microsoft 365. It costs more to build and more to maintain.
The choice matters far less than the data circuit. A bad dashboard with fresh data is useful; a beautiful one with three-week-old data is no use for deciding anything.
The sign that you need one
If you have ever put off a decision — hiring, buying, accepting a large order — because you did not know whether you could afford it, you have already paid the cost of having no dashboard. That deferred decision is usually worth more than the whole dashboard.
We build it as a fixed-scope job, with your sources and updating itself: your treasury dashboard. If what you want is something broader — business indicators, not just cash — that is data analysis and BI.
General guidance. The tools mentioned are third-party and their terms and prices are set by each manufacturer.