The Entrepreneur Dashboard
The Entrepreneur Dashboard gives a small-business owner the whole health of the business at a glance, laid out like a car's instrument cluster. Where a car tells you speed, fuel, and engine load so you can drive safely, TechieCRM tells you revenue pace, cash, and workload so you can run the business safely. It sits at the bottom of your Agenda and updates as you work.
This chapter is the reference for using and setting up the dashboard. Administrators preparing a source-CRM database for a client who has not yet migrated should read "Preparing a database" at the end.
In this chapter
- Reading the gauges
- Warning & idiot lights
- Odometer and trip meters
- Driver view vs. fleet view
- Setting your targets (calibration)
- Where the numbers come from
- Preparing a database (administrators)
Reading the gauges
The dashboard has five gauges, left to right: Cash, Work, Revenue, Credit, Runway. The two large dials in the middle (Work and Revenue) are what you steer on daily; the three smaller dials are the constraints that quietly end businesses — cash, credit, and how many days of operating money you have left.
| Instrument | Reads as | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Fuel gauge (E→F) | Bank balance vs. a healthy-cash reference | How much runway is in the tank. Near E you cannot make payroll. |
| Temperature / pressure (C→H) | Credit used vs. your credit limit — high is bad | Running hot means no shock absorber left for a bad month. |
| Tachometer (RPM) | Scheduled calendar items in the period — the appointments and meetings your calendar returns for those dates | Below the idle line the engine stalls — too little booked work to keep running. The redline is overbooked / burnout. |
| Speedometer ($/period) | Revenue paid + committed this period | The speed limit is the income you need. Under it you won't arrive on time; over it is fine — you get there sooner. |
| Runway (days) | Days of operating money left at your current burn rate — bank balance ÷ daily burn | Reads 0–180 days, with 90 days marked as the comfortable floor. It only shows a figure once you have both a bank balance and a burn rate recorded; otherwise it reads SET UP. |
The speedometer is shown in dollars per period (monthly until you set a Dashboard Period; see Setting your targets). The coloured bands on each gauge are your thresholds: green where you're healthy, amber where you should look, red where you must act.
Warning & idiot lights
Gauges are for trends you watch over time; the warning lights are for exceptions that need a decision today. Each light stays dark until something crosses a line, then glows amber (look soon) or red (act now).
| Light | Meaning | Lit when |
|---|---|---|
| Oil pressure (red) | Accounts receivable overdue — cash is the oil | An invoice is past due |
| Battery / charging (amber) | Pipeline not being replenished | Few/no new opportunities created recently |
| Check engine (amber) | Something needs a look, not on fire | Opportunities aging past their stage; a key client gone quiet |
| Missed meetings (amber) | No-shows / un-actioned meetings | Meetings past with no outcome logged |
| Lost sale (red) | A deal was lost | Opportunities marked Lost this period (flashes the lost value) |
| Seatbelt | Exposure | Unsigned quotes / expired agreements |
| Temperature/capacity | Overload | Open cases or committed hours exceed capacity |
| Cruise control (green) | Income on autopilot | Share of revenue that is recurring |
Odometer and trip meters
The central display is your mileage:
- Odometer — lifetime revenue ("business mileage"). It only goes up: milestones, tenure, proof of how far you've come.
- Trip meters — revenue for this year, this quarter, this month, and this week, all shown at once so you can read momentum at every horizon without changing screens.
- Runway — days of operation left at your current burn rate. It is the fifth dial in the gauge row (see Reading the gauges), reading in days, e.g. "47d" — the most actionable number on the panel.
Which won sales count, and which date they're filed under. The speedometer and odometer total each Won opportunity's Forecast Revenue — the same figure the Sales list shows as "Revenue", not Actual Revenue, which TechieCRM does not yet record when a sale is won (Chapter 24 explains why). A won sale is filed under its real Close Date; a won sale with no close date recorded is filed under the year it was opened instead, rather than dropped from the totals — the same rule Sales Quotas uses (Chapter 24, "Which year a won or lost sale counts in"), so a sale missing here would otherwise be invisible to the odometer rather than merely approximate. That fallback answers a different question from "when did this close", so as with Quotas, four situations are possible: every won sale carries a close date (measured); some do and some do not (mixed); none do, so every figure is filed under the year those sales opened (opened-year-only); or there are no won sales at all, in which case a $0 reading is real (no settled sales). In the two middle cases — where some or all of the won sales behind the figures have no close date — an amber DATE lamp lights in the warning row at the bottom of the panel, and its tooltip says which year those figures are filed under. When every won sale is close-dated the lamp stays dark, so seeing it lit is the signal, not something to check for.
Driver view vs. fleet view
The dashboard reads its per-user numbers from User-ID user-defined fields and your own calendar, pipeline, and financials. That one design choice gives two views:
- Driver view — my dashboard. Your gauges, calibrated to your own targets.
- Fleet view — the manager's wall of cars. Because every metric lives in a per-user field, a manager rolls them up across a team — total the workload, average the pace, sum the cash — or shows one mini-cluster per person, side by side, to see whose engine is stalling and whose credit is red.
Setting your targets (calibration)
A few numbers are your expectations, entered once and adjusted as the business grows. They set where the coloured bands and the idle/redline/speed-limit marks sit. Enter them under Clients ▸ Users ▸ (your user) ▸ User-Defined Fields ▸ Entrepreneur Dashboard, or in the dashboard's own setup.
| Field | Gauge | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Income Target (per period) | Speedometer | The income you need — the speed limit / floor |
| Income Stretch Goal (period) | Speedometer | An above-target stretch band |
| Planned Work – Minimum | Tachometer | The idle line — least booked work to keep running |
| Planned Work – Redline | Tachometer | The redline — overbooked above this |
| Dashboard Period | All | The period the gauges use (Week / Month / Quarter / Year) |
If your source CRM uses Quotas (Sales quotas per user), the dashboard uses your quota as the income target automatically and only reads the Income Target field above when you have no quota for the current fiscal year. Quotas are annual, so the dashboard scales yours down to the period you are viewing: the year shows the whole quota; a quarter or a month shows that period's quota milestones if you set them, otherwise an even quarter/twelfth of the annual figure; a week shows the month's share spread over the days in that month.
Where the numbers come from
The dashboard reuses the data you already keep in TechieCRM instead of asking you to re-enter it. Only the calibration fields above and the company financial figures are new.
| Reading | Source |
|---|---|
| Revenue pace, odometer, trips | Sales — each Won opportunity's Forecast Revenue |
| Income target (speed limit) | Quotas, or your per-user Income Target field |
| Planned work (tachometer) | Scheduled calendar items in the period (appointments / meetings from your calendar) |
| Expenses / burn | Personal ▸ Income & Expenses |
| Accounts payable (bills due) | Accounts Payable / Receivable (see Ch. 13) |
| Bank balance, credit | Company financials (entered per business) |
Bank balance, business credit, and bills payable are things the source CRM never modeled — TechieCRM adds a company-financials layer to hold them (see Preparing a database).
Preparing a database (administrators)
This section is for administrators enabling the dashboard on a source-CRM SQL database for a client who has not yet migrated to the TechieCRM native database.
The dashboard needs a small amount of field structure added to the source database. TechieCRM creates it for you; there is also a standalone script for DBAs who prefer to run SQL directly.
What gets added
- Per-user user-defined fields (the calibration fields above) under an "Entrepreneur Dashboard" folder, in the reserved field range 61000–61019 (Client_Type 16 — user fields).
- Two company tables —
TCRM_Company_Financials(bank / credit / cash target / burn) andTCRM_Payable(bills due). These hold the financial layer the source CRM lacks;Assigned_UserisNULLfor company-wide values or a user id for a person's own.
What does not get added — nothing that already exists. Sales targets stay in Quotas, revenue in Sales, expenses in Personal ▸ Income & Expenses, invoices in the existing billing table. The prep only fills genuine gaps.
To prepare a database
- In TechieCRM: run the dashboard setup (it is idempotent — safe to run again), which calls
EntrepreneurDashboardSetup.prep(). It creates the fields and tables and reports what it did. - Or, for a DBA: run
docs/db/entrepreneur_dashboard_prep_alpha.sqlagainst the target database after setting the@Ownervariable to the acting CRM user. It is idempotent and includes a commented teardown.
The prep does not consume the source CRM's field-sequence counter and works even on databases whose counter has overflowed, so it is safe on any source database. No data is invented — you enter your own targets and financial figures afterward.
Alpha note. The Entrepreneur Dashboard is an early feature. The prep (fields + tables) and the Accounts Payable/Receivable data layer are built and verified; the live gauge rendering and the company-financials entry screens are in progress.