Ten Dashboards Every Business Should Have, Even in Google Sheets
With a few well-designed dashboards, you can see sales trends, cash balances, hiring needs, and project load at a glance. You do not need business intelligence software to get there; most of these can live in Google Sheets or your project tool. The goal is to make the invisible visible with simple, repeatable views.
Cash runway: Current cash, monthly net burn, and projected months of runway. Update weekly using your 13-week cash forecast.
Sales pipeline: Deals by stage, weighted pipeline value, win rate, and cycle time. Include owner and next step so follow-up is obvious.
Revenue dashboard: Monthly recurring revenue or monthly sales, broken down by product or segment, with churn/retention and average deal size. Trend lines help spot momentum or decay.
Customer health: Churn rate, expansion revenue, support volume per customer, and NPS/CSAT if available. Highlight at-risk accounts and owners.
Delivery and fulfillment: On-time delivery rate, backlog, cycle time from order to delivery, and quality issues. This keeps operational bottlenecks visible.
Support and response: Ticket volume, first-response time, resolution time, and reopened tickets. These metrics show whether service quality is keeping pace with growth.
Marketing effectiveness: Leads by source, cost per lead, cost per acquisition, and lead-to-customer conversion. Include a simple attribution view so spend aligns with results.
Hiring and capacity: Open roles, time-to-fill, offer acceptance rates, and team capacity by department. Pair with workload indicators to plan hiring before burnout hits.
Financial performance: Monthly P and L highlights—revenue, gross margin, operating expenses by category, and EBITDA. Express as percentages of revenue to normalize across months.
Project portfolio: Active projects, status, risks, and owners in a single view. Color-code by risk level and include upcoming milestones.
Keep each dashboard lean and owner-assigned. Update cadences should match decision cycles: weekly for cash and pipeline, monthly for financials, quarterly for strategic reviews. Simple dashboards built in Sheets beat complex BI that no one maintains. What matters is that the team can see the state of the business quickly and act on it.