One Screen to Rule Them All
The admin dashboard is the first thing our team opens every morning. It shows everything we need to run the business in one view: active projects and their status, pending proposals and their value, team workload and capacity, revenue collected this month, outstanding invoices, and upcoming milestones.
Before this dashboard, getting a picture of the business required logging into whatever project management tool we were on that year - we went through Trello, Monday.com, and ClickUp over the past decade - then checking Stripe for revenue, opening Google Sheets for financial tracking (because none of those PM tools tracked finances, overhead, timesheets, or income), and piecing it all together manually. By the time you assembled the picture, the data was already stale. Now it is real-time, accurate, and in one place.
What We Track
Project Health: Every project has a status - Discovery, Design, Development, Review, or Complete. The dashboard shows a visual pipeline so we can see at a glance how work is distributed across phases. If too many projects are in Development and none are in Discovery, we know our pipeline is about to dry up.
Client Engagement: We track when clients last logged into the portal, whether they have reviewed pending items, and how responsive they are to requests. A client who has not logged in for two weeks might need a check-in call. A client who approved something yesterday is engaged and happy.
Financial Pulse: Monthly recurring revenue from Care and SEO plans. One-time revenue from build projects. Pipeline value from pending proposals. Outstanding balances. The financial picture is always current because it pulls directly from Stripe and our proposal system.
Team Capacity: Each team member has a workload score based on their active project count and upcoming deadlines. When a new project comes in, we can see immediately who has bandwidth and who is overloaded.
Why Custom Beats Off-the-Shelf
We tried building this view in Notion. We tried it in Airtable. We tried cobbling it together with Zapier automations. Before that, we spent years hoping Trello, Monday.com, or ClickUp would add financial tracking - they never did. Nothing worked because every off-the-shelf tool shows you what it tracks, not what you need to see. A custom dashboard shows exactly the metrics that drive your specific business decisions - nothing more, nothing less. Want a dashboard built for your business?