Power BI Executive Dashboard: The 8 KPIs an SME Needs

You run a company of 40, 80 or 150 people. Every Monday you ask for the same numbers: where is revenue, who owes us money, is the shop floor keeping pace. The answers come back as three Excel files, an email and a phone call. They never quite agree with each other.

That is what a Power BI executive dashboard is for: one page, opened on your phone in the morning, with last night's numbers. Not forty charts. Eight indicators, chosen because each one triggers a decision.

The eight indicators that matter in an SME

We have seen them come back with almost every business owner we have worked with. Adjust the thresholds, keep the logic.

1. Invoiced revenue against target, month to date and year to date. The gap matters more than the amount.
2. Gross margin by activity or product family. This is where you find out that the customer with the biggest volume brings in nothing.
3. Order book in weeks of workload: how long the shop or the team can keep going without a new sale.
4. Overdue receivables: the amount past due, and the five largest. One number, five names, one call to make.
5. Cash at 30 and 90 days: today's bank balance, plus what should come in, minus what has to go out.
6. Production load: planned hours against available hours, by workstation or by team.
7. Absenteeism: this month's rate and the twelve-month trend. A social signal before it is an HR figure.
8. Quality: scrap rate, non-conformities or customer complaints, depending on your business.

Missing some of the eight? Start with the first four. They come straight out of invoicing and accounting, so they are the easiest to make reliable.

One page per question, not one chart per table

The structure that works: each page answers a question you actually ask yourself. "Are we selling?" (revenue, order book). "Are we making money?" (margin, overdue receivables). "Can we keep going?" (cash). "Are we delivering?" (load, quality, absenteeism). Four pages, plus a cover that repeats the eight numbers with a warning colour.

The classic trap is to build one page per data source: an invoicing page, an accounting page, a production page. You end up connecting the pages in your head. That is precisely the job the dashboard was supposed to do for you. Our executive dashboard template is organised by question, not by source.

Nightly refresh, mobile reading, Teams alerts

An executive dashboard does not need real time. It needs to be right, and to be there in the morning. In the Power BI service, you set up a scheduled refresh, at 5 a.m. for instance. A Pro licence gives you eight refreshes a day, which is plenty. If your accounting software or your ERP runs on a server on your premises, a data gateway installed on a machine that stays on makes the link.

For reading on a phone, prepare the mobile layout in Power BI Desktop: the same visuals, stacked vertically, big numbers at the top. Without that step, the report shows up as a thumbnail and nobody opens it twice.

Alerts close the loop. On a dashboard in the Power BI service, a card, gauge or KPI tile can raise an alert when a threshold is crossed. Connected to a Power Automate flow, that alert posts a message in a Teams channel: "overdue receivables above 80,000 euros". You stop going to look for the information; it comes to find you.

The two mistakes that kill an executive dashboard

The first: too many indicators. Beyond about ten, nobody knows which ones to look at, and the dashboard turns into a report you open once a quarter. Every indicator needs an owner, a threshold and an action when the threshold is crossed. If it lacks any of the three, it goes.

The second, more insidious: data that is unreliable at the source. If the revenue on the dashboard does not match the accountant's, the dashboard loses all credibility in a single meeting. Before building anything, we check that every indicator has one source, one person responsible and a written calculation rule. And we resist the temptation to "fix it in Power BI" when the gap should be fixed in the books or in the ERP.

One last point, often confused: an executive dashboard is for understanding, not for acting on a specific item. If what you want is to spot a late order and unblock it right away, what you need is an application. The difference is spelled out in Power BI or Power Apps for your dashboard.

The right order: first the eight numbers and their sources, then the dashboard. A two to three day scoping session is usually enough to freeze the list, the calculation rules and the data connection plan. The rest is priced at the end of scoping, and the price does not move afterwards.