What does a great KPI dashboard for a CFO and an operations manager actually look like - and how does SolveBI build one for an SME?

Two very different jobs, one screen

In most Australian SMEs the CFO and the operations manager wake up to different versions of the truth. The CFO opens Xero, MYOB or NetSuite and looks at last week's invoices, debtors and cash. The operations manager opens an ERP, a job-management tool or a warehouse system and looks at throughput, on-time delivery, utilisation and cost-to-serve. Both believe they're looking at "how the business is doing". Both are right - and both are working from numbers the other one can't see.

Then the CEO walks in on a Wednesday and asks "why is gross margin down 4 points but production volume is up?" - and nobody can answer for two days, because finance is in one system and operations is in another, and reconciling them takes a person, a spreadsheet and a long afternoon.

What a CFO actually needs on the dashboard

A CFO in an SME isn't trying to win prizes for financial elegance. They're trying to answer four questions, fast and reliably:

1. Are we making money? - revenue, gross margin and EBITDA by month, by product/service line, by customer segment
2. Do we have cash? - real-time cash position, AR ageing, DSO, AP commitments and a forward cash forecast that respects reality
3. Where is the risk? - customer concentration, supplier concentration, overdue debtors, covenant headroom, FX exposure
4. Are we tracking to plan? - actuals vs. budget vs. last year, with drill-through to the underlying transactions and a single trusted variance number

Crucially, every one of those numbers should reconcile to the source ledger to the cent. If the CFO can't trust the dashboard against the trial balance, they will (correctly) refuse to use it - and the whole project quietly dies.

What an operations manager actually needs on the dashboard

The operations manager has the same intent - run the business well - but a completely different vocabulary. They want to know:

1. Are we delivering? - on-time delivery, on-time-in-full (DIFOT), service level vs. SLA, backlog, throughput
2. Are we efficient? - utilisation of people, vehicles, machines or beds; OEE for manufacturers; productive hours for service businesses
3. What's it costing us? - cost-to-serve per job/order/patient, labour cost ratio, freight cost per unit, scrap and rework
4. Where will it break next? - leading indicators: inventory days of cover, maintenance backlog, complaints trending up, staff vacancies, supplier slip

CFO view vs. operations view - the practical comparison

On a SolveBI build, both pages sit on the same Power BI semantic model - the same definition of "revenue", "customer", "product", "job", "period". That's the bit that quietly does all the heavy lifting: when the CFO and the ops manager drill in, they end up at the same row in the same source system. No reconciliations. No "my number is right".

How these KPIs look across different industries

Every SME is a special case, but the patterns are well-trodden. Below are the dashboards SolveBI builds most often - each one links to the full industry reporting guide on solvebi.com/reports, where you can see the specific report set and KPIs we deliver for that sector.

Manufacturing

For a manufacturing SME, the CFO and the plant manager both live or die on the same questions - just dressed differently. The CFO wants gross margin by product line, cost variance vs. standard cost, and working capital tied up in WIP. The plant manager wants OEE, production output, scrap and waste, maintenance backlog and inventory levels. The connection between them is gold: an OEE drop on Line 3 today is a margin hit on the CFO page next month - and the dashboard shows both in the same picture. The full set lives in our manufacturing reporting guide.

Retail trade

For a multi-store retailer, the CFO is watching sales by store and channel, gross margin after markdowns, and aged debtors from wholesale customers. The operations manager is watching inventory turn, store operations, customer behaviour, marketing performance and supplier performance. When both views share one model, you can finally answer questions like "is the margin drop in the Joondalup store a pricing problem or a shrinkage problem?" in the same conversation. The full set: retail trade reporting.

Transport, postal & warehousing

For a transport or warehousing SME, the CFO is looking at revenue per customer, gross margin per lane, working capital tied up in fuel and parts, and aged debtors by account. The operations manager lives in fleet utilisation, delivery performance, route efficiency, warehouse operations, inventory turnover and fuel consumption. The combined dashboard answers the question every transport board asks: "which customers, lanes and depots are actually making us money once you load all the costs back in?" Full guide: transport, postal & warehousing reporting.

Logistics & supply chain

For supply-chain-heavy SMEs - shippers, 3PLs, distribution-led businesses - the CFO is watching freight cost per unit, working capital in inventory, and supplier payment terms. The supply-chain or operations manager lives in DIFOT, warehouse efficiency, inventory accuracy, transport cost and carrier performance. Connecting the two means the CFO can finally see which carriers and which inventory positions are eating their margin - and the ops team can put a dollar value on every service-level decision they make. Full set: logistics & supply chain reporting.

Health care & social assistance

For a healthcare provider, day-hospital, aged-care group or community-services organisation, the CFO is watching billing, claims, debtors and funding mix. The operations manager is watching patient flow, bed occupancy, clinical quality, staffing ratios and medication inventory. When both views share a model, board reporting becomes one conversation about outcomes, occupancy and viability - not three. Full set: health care & social assistance reporting.

Professional services and other SMEs

For consultancies, engineering firms, agencies and other professional-services SMEs the pattern is identical, with different KPIs. The CFO watches revenue per partner, gross margin per project, work-in-progress and lock-up. The operations manager (or COO / delivery lead) watches utilisation, realisation, project burn, pipeline coverage and resource availability. The integration mechanics are the same as everything above - we cover them in detail in our companion guide, Power BI dashboards connected to accounting and operations data.

The decisions a CFO + ops dashboard actually changes

The whole reason to build this is to make better decisions - faster. The pattern we see across every industry above is the same. Within a quarter of go-live, leadership teams stop arguing about which spreadsheet is right and start having conversations like these:

• "Customer X looks profitable in the P&L, but the cost-to-serve dashboard says we're losing money." - the kind of conversation that ends with a price increase or an exit, instead of another year of quiet bleeding.
• "Margin is down 3 points - is that pricing, mix, freight, or labour?" - drill-throughs answer it in 30 seconds, instead of a two-week working group.
• "We're hitting capacity on Line 2, but Line 4 is at 56% utilisation." - capex and hiring decisions get rebalanced before the budget round, not after.
• "Aged debtors over 60 days have doubled with the top 3 customers." - the CFO and account manager have the same conversation, with the same numbers, the same day.
• "DIFOT dropped 4 points after we changed carriers - and our freight cost only fell 1.5%." - the kind of supplier-performance fact you can take to your next contract negotiation.

How SolveBI actually builds a CFO + operations KPI dashboard

1. 1

   1. Start with the decisions, not the data

   We spend the first session with the CFO and the operations manager together. What are the five decisions you make every month that the current reporting doesn't help with? Everything we build is reverse-engineered from that list - not from "whatever's already in Xero".

2. 2

   2. Map the systems and the definitions

   Accounting (Xero, MYOB, QuickBooks, NetSuite, SAP B1, Dynamics), operations (ERP, job-management, WMS, TMS, EHR, PMS), spreadsheets that matter, and any custom databases. At the same time we agree the shared definitions - what is "revenue", what is a "customer", what is a "job" - so the same word means the same number on both pages.

3. 3

   3. Build the integration layer

   Power BI gets the credit but the engineering happens underneath. We pipe each source into a Microsoft Fabric / Azure data layer (or Power BI Dataflows for smaller stacks), handle authentication and refresh, dedupe customers and products across systems, and load it all into a clean semantic model that both pages share.

4. 4

   4. Build the CFO page and the ops page on one model

   Two pages, deliberately different in tone and layout, but driven by the same DAX measures. CFO page leads with cash, margin and budget variance. Operations page leads with service level, utilisation and cost-to-serve. Drill-through and bookmarks let either role explore the other side without leaving the report.

5. 5

   5. Forecast, alerts and mobile

   We add a forward-looking cash forecast for the CFO and capacity / SLA alerts for the operations manager. Both views work on a phone, because the most useful KPI is the one you can check in the car park before walking into the meeting.

6. 6

   6. Security, training and a weekly iteration loop

   Row-level security so commercially sensitive data is only visible to the right people. Hands-on training so the CFO and ops manager can run the report without us. Weekly iterations for the first six weeks - we'd rather adjust three times in six weeks than discover problems at sign-off.

Realistic cost and timeline for an SME

Every engagement is a fixed-scope, written quote after a free 30-minute scoping call - not an open-ended day-rate. If we don't think the project will pay back, we'll say so before you spend anything.

What you need to get started

Very little. To give you a realistic quote we typically just need:

• A short list of the systems your CFO and operations manager use today (e.g. "Xero, HubSpot, ServiceM8, an internal SQL database")
• The five decisions you wish you could make better, faster - the dashboard is reverse-engineered from these
• Whether you already have Power BI licences (we'll advise on the right Pro / Premium / Fabric tier if not)
• A 30-minute call - on site in Perth, or via Teams anywhere in Australia