The Monday owner summary
Revenue, cash, new leads, jobs booked and anything unusual, in a short email waiting for you at the start of the week.
Service · Reporting & dashboards
Automated reporting that shows up before you ask.
Your numbers live in five places: accounting, the CRM, the scheduling tool, the ad accounts and a spreadsheet someone updates when they remember. We build automated reporting and business dashboards that pull it all into one view, refresh on their own and tell you in plain English what changed this week.
What it is
One view of the business, refreshed on its own.
Automated reporting connects directly to the systems your numbers come from, copies the data into one place on a schedule, and builds the reports you'd otherwise assemble by hand. Nobody exports a CSV. Nobody pastes into a spreadsheet on Monday morning.
On top of that, a language model reads the results and writes a short summary, so you can understand the week in a minute and open the dashboard only when something needs a closer look.
Examples
Business dashboards people actually open.
A good report answers a question you ask every week. These are the ones we're asked for most.
Sales and pipeline
Deals by stage, win rates by source, quotes waiting on a reply and what's likely to close this month, straight from the CRM.
Cash and receivables
Money in, money out, who owes what and for how long. The receivables list your bookkeeper builds by hand, built for you every morning.
Marketing spend vs. results
Ad spend from Google and Meta lined up against the leads and booked jobs in your CRM, so you can see cost per customer, not just cost per click.
Operations and capacity
Jobs scheduled, crew or staff utilization, appointments per provider and no-show rates from your scheduling software.
Threshold alerts
Cash below a set level, a job over budget, leads down week over week: the right person hears about it the moment it happens.
Plain-English summaries
The numbers, explained.
A chart tells you revenue went down. A summary tells you it went down because one large customer paid early last month, and that nothing else changed. Each summary is generated from the data in the report and links back to it, so you can check any statement in a click.
- What changed compared with last week, last month and your targets
- Why, where the data shows it: a big invoice, a paused campaign, a slow week for one service
- What to look at, without making decisions for you
Illustrative example
Weekly summary, week of Oct 5
Revenue was 12% below the prior week. Most of the gap is one commercial invoice that was paid early in September. Without it, revenue was in line with your four-week average.
New leads rose to 31, mostly from the fall maintenance campaign. Six quotes over $5,000 have had no reply for more than a week.
Two receivables passed 60 days. Both customers are listed in the dashboard.
Data accuracy
One source of truth, checked.
A dashboard nobody trusts is worse than no dashboard. Accuracy is designed in from the first conversation.
- Agreed definitions
- What counts as revenue, a lead, a booked job or a closed deal is written down and agreed with you, so everyone reads the same number the same way.
- Straight from the source
- Data is pulled directly from your accounting, CRM and scheduling systems, not from exports someone edited along the way.
- Reconciliation checks
- Report totals are compared with the source systems on every refresh. If they don't match, the report says so instead of showing a confident wrong number.
- Freshness shown
- Every view shows when its data was last updated, so a stale number is never mistaken for a current one.
- Owned by you
- Dashboards and data connections are built in accounts your business controls and documented, so they keep working if anything changes on our side.
How we build it
Questions first. Charts last.
We don't start by picking chart types. We start by asking what decisions you make each week and what you need to know to make them.
- 01
List the questions
How's cash? Which marketing works? Who's behind? We write down the questions you ask every week, and who asks them.
- 02
Define the metrics
Each question gets a metric with a written definition and a named source system.
- 03
Connect the sources
We set up scheduled syncs from accounting, CRM, scheduling and ad platforms into one reporting store.
- 04
Build the view and the summary
A dashboard in the tool that suits your team, plus the written summary and any alerts you want.
- 05
Review together and adjust
After a few weeks of real use, we look at what you read, what you skip and what's missing, then refine.
Tools
Built in tools your team knows.
We build dashboards in Looker Studio, Power BI or Google Sheets, and connect data sources like these. Reports can be delivered by email, Slack or Teams on whatever schedule suits you.
- Looker Studio
- Power BI
- Google Sheets
- Excel
- QuickBooks
- Xero
- HubSpot
- Salesforce
- Pipedrive
- Google Ads
- Meta Ads
- Google Analytics
- Shopify
- Stripe
- Square
- Jobber
- Slack
- Microsoft Teams
FAQ
Automated reporting questions.
Which dashboard tool should we use?
Often the one you already have. Looker Studio pairs well with Google Workspace, Power BI with Microsoft 365, and a well-built Google Sheet is enough for many small businesses. We recommend based on your tools and who needs to see the numbers.
How do the AI-written summaries work?
After each refresh, a language model reads the numbers and compares them with earlier periods and your targets. It writes a short note on what changed and the drivers it can see in the data, such as one large invoice or a paused ad campaign. It describes the data; it doesn't make decisions for you.
How do we know the numbers are right?
We agree a written definition for each metric, pull directly from the source systems instead of copied spreadsheets, and add checks that compare report totals against the source. When a check fails, the report says so.
Can reports come to email or Slack instead of a dashboard?
Yes. Many owners prefer a short summary in their inbox or a Slack or Teams channel on a set schedule, with a link to the full dashboard for anyone who wants to dig in.
Can we get alerts when something needs attention?
Yes. You set the thresholds, such as receivables past 60 days, a drop in new leads or a job running over budget, and the right person is notified when one is crossed.
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Know your numbers without building them.
Tell us which reports you put together by hand today. We'll show you where the data lives, how it can flow into one view, and what a weekly summary could look like. No cost, no obligation.
or email tom@columbusinnovate.com