KPI design

Six to ten numbers, not sixty

A UK company drowning in reports usually has the opposite problem to no reporting at all: dashboards nobody opens because nothing on them ties to a choice actually being made this month. We build in the reverse order. First we ask what decision recurs week to week or month to month, pricing, staffing, cash timing, then work backwards to the handful of numbers that would genuinely move that decision.

Sector shapes the list

A construction contractor cares about job margin and retention money outstanding. A subscription business cares about churn and payback period. A multi-site retailer cares about like-for-like sales and labour cost as a share of revenue. There is no universal starter pack; the list comes from your accounts, your sales data and a conversation about what keeps you up at night.

One rule, written down once

Two people calculating gross margin differently is a common cause of arguments in a leadership meeting. Each metric gets a written rule: the exact inputs, what counts and what does not, and which system it comes from, whether that is Xero, QuickBooks Online, Sage or a separate operations tool. That written rule is what stops the number drifting over time.

Live where possible, manual where it has to be

Where your systems connect, the dashboard updates itself. Where a figure depends on something outside the accounting system, footfall, a production count, a satisfaction score, we build a short manual step into the month-end routine so it still updates reliably. Every few months we also look at what has stopped earning its place and drop it, because a dashboard that only ever grows eventually gets ignored again. This connects naturally to FP&A reporting and to fractional CFO reviews, both running on the same agreed numbers.