Ask a management team what reporting they need and you will get a long list. Watch what they open at 8am and you will get a short one. The gap between those two lists is where most reporting effort disappears.
Why most dashboards go unread
A report gets used when it answers a question someone already has, at the moment they have it. Most ERP dashboards fail one of those two tests. They present everything the system knows rather than the handful of numbers that would change a decision this week.
If a report does not change what somebody does that day, it is documentation, not reporting.
The four views that earn their place
Across implementations the same small set survives contact with reality. The specifics differ by sector, but the shape is consistent.
| View | Question it answers | Who opens it |
|---|---|---|
| Cash position | What can we pay this week, and what is coming in | Owner, CFO |
| Receivables ageing | Who is overdue and by how long | Finance, sales manager |
| Stock exceptions | What is short, dead, or about to expire | Operations, purchasing |
| Margin by line | Which customers or products are actually profitable | Owner, commercial lead |
Report exceptions, not everything
A list of 4,000 stock items is data. A list of the 23 below reorder level is a report. The second one gets opened because it is already the shortlist of things worth acting on.
Wherever possible, build the view around the exception rather than the full set, and let people drill into detail when they want it.
Deliver reports where people already are
A dashboard nobody logs into is a dashboard nobody reads. Scheduled delivery to email at a fixed time, or a summary that reaches a phone, tends to outperform a portal that requires a deliberate visit.
A useful test
If the report arrived tomorrow morning and nobody chased it, would anyone notice? If not, retire it. Reporting sets should shrink over time, not grow.
Trust comes before sophistication
People stop opening a report the first time its number disagrees with something they know. Getting one number right and reconciled is worth more than ten that are approximately correct.
Start narrow, agree the definition of each figure with the person who will be judged on it, and expand only once the first set is trusted.
