Guides4 November 202614 min read

Small Business Dashboard: The 10 Numbers to Track Weekly With AI

A small business dashboard in 2026: the 10 numbers that matter, where each lives (bank, invoicing, CRM, analytics, ads), tool prices and how an agent builds it.

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A small business dashboard needs ten numbers, read once a week: cash in the bank and its runway, cash due in, invoices overdue and how late, the pipeline, conversion rate, average job value, repeat rate, response time, what the ads return, and visits that became enquiries. Each lives in a system you already pay for; this guide shows which tool exposes which number, what it costs on 3 November 2026, and how an agent puts them on one page.

The numbers matter because the ones you do not look at are the ones that close businesses. The Department for Business and Trade's July 2025 research put the cost of late payment at almost £11 billion a year, with about £26 billion owed to UK businesses at any moment and 14,000 extra closures a year, 38 a day. The Office for National Statistics found in June 2025 that 16% of trading businesses had no cash reserves at all, the highest since it began asking in 2020. A small business dashboard is not a chart for investors. It is the Monday habit that catches the overdue invoice in week one instead of week nine.

Below: how we judged, the ten numbers in one table with where each lives, then one section per source with the tools and prices, the automation glue that joins them, the data-cleaning tools nobody mentions, and the weekly page an agent can write for you.

Want the ten numbers in your inbox every Monday without opening six tools? Give the job to a Jobbit agent, with 100 free credits a day and no card.

How we judged

Prices from each vendor's own page on 3 November 2026, in the currency shown; where a page would not load or showed a promotion not yet started, we say so.
Does the tool let the number out? Export, an API, a Zapier or Make connector or a Google Sheets link. A number trapped in a screen is not on a dashboard.
UK first. Tools without UK support are named as such, and one well-known free invoicing tool is left out for that reason.
Benchmarks from primary sources with the date and the sample, and the two numbers we could not find a benchmark for are marked.
A three-person firm can run it. Enterprise dashboard tools get one line.

The 10 numbers

Number	What it tells you	Where it comes from	Benchmark or target
1. Cash in the bank	Whether payroll and rent clear	Bank account	Three to six months of costs is the common rule of thumb; 28% of UK SMEs had two months or less in April 2026 (iwoca, 1,005 owners)
2. Runway in months	Cash divided by monthly outgoings	Bank plus accounting	16% of trading businesses had no reserves in June 2025 (ONS)
3. Cash due in	Invoices issued, not yet paid	Invoicing software	Compare with next month's outgoings
4. Overdue invoices and days late	Who is late, by how much	Invoicing software	UK small firms were paid 8.0 days late in the quarter to December 2025 (Xero), 29.0 days from invoice
5. Pipeline	Quotes and deals open, by stage	CRM	Enough to cover next quarter's gap
6. Conversion rate	Quotes won divided by quotes sent	CRM	Your own trend; there is no credible UK benchmark for service firms
7. Average order or job value	Revenue divided by jobs	Invoicing or till	Rising, as prices and packages improve
8. Repeat rate	Customers who come back	Invoicing or CRM	Retail retention averaged 27.4% in the Bluecore 2025 benchmark Shopify cites; trades and services have no published figure
9. Return on ad spend	Revenue from ads divided by ad cost	Google Ads, Meta Ads	Needs conversion values set up first
10. Visits to enquiries	Website visits that became a form, call or booking	Analytics plus CRM	Unbounce's benchmark puts professional-services landing pages at a 6.1% median; whole sites run far lower

The response-time number sits outside the table because it comes from the inbox, and Zendesk's 2026 trends research, more than 11,000 people in 22 countries, found 88% of customers expect faster replies than a year ago. It is the eleventh number if you sell anything that gets enquiries.

Numbers 1 and 2: the bank

Starling Business has no monthly fee and connects to Xero, QuickBooks and FreeAgent, which is the route most dashboards take to the balance rather than a direct feed.
Tide is free on Lite with CSV export of transactions and PDF statements from the app, £12.49 a month on Smart with the Xero connector, £27.49 Pro and £69.99 Max.
Monzo Business is free on Lite; Pro at £9 a month adds automatic exports of transactions, invoices and statements and the accounting connections.
Open Banking feeds (GoCardless Bank Account Data, TrueLayer, Yapily) are what your accounting package uses underneath to read the balance; a small business buys them through that package rather than directly.

Runway is the bank balance divided by last month's outgoings. Nobody's dashboard tool computes it; a cell in a sheet does. The closing habit for this section is a single line in the Monday note: cash, months, trend.

Numbers 3, 4 and 7: invoicing

Xero is £18 a month excluding VAT on Ignite, with 90% off for six months for new customers while the offer lasts, and its Zapier connector fires on New Sales Invoice and New Payment, which is exactly the trigger a dashboard wants.
FreeAgent is £19 a month for a sole trader and £33 for a limited company, free if you hold an eligible NatWest, RBS, Ulster Bank or Mettle business account, with an API and a Zapier app that includes a Google Sheets pairing.
QuickBooks starts at about £10 a month for sole traders on its UK plans according to Expert Market's July 2026 price check; the live page would not render ours, so confirm before you buy. Its Zapier app has 29 triggers including New Invoice.
Invoice Ninja is free for up to five clients with unlimited invoices and Zapier, Make and n8n on every plan; Pro is $14 a month.
Zoho Invoice is free for UK businesses, two users, 500 invoices a year, with branding.
Wave is left out: its pricing page does not mention the UK and it does not file UK VAT.

Days late is the number that pays for the whole dashboard. Xero's data shows hospitality firms were paid 4.7 days late in the December 2025 quarter and manufacturing 10.9, so your sector sets the baseline, and the unpaid invoice guide covers what to do when the number moves.

Numbers 5, 6 and 8: the CRM

HubSpot's free CRM covers two users and 1,000 contacts with no time limit, connects to Gmail and Outlook, and has 95 Zapier operations including New Deal; paid Starter pricing on its page is ambiguous between $7 and $20 a seat, so read it twice.
Attio prices in pounds, free for up to three seats and 50,000 records, Plus at £27 a seat a month on annual billing, with an API, webhooks and a Zapier app.
Folk is $24 a member a month billed yearly with CSV export and Zapier and Make on every tier, and no permanent free plan.
Pipedrive starts at about $14 a seat a month on annual billing for Lite according to its own blog; its pricing page refused our request.

Conversion rate is quotes won over quotes sent in a period, and the dashboard is wrong if lost quotes are never marked lost. Repeat rate needs a definition you stick to: customers with a second paid job in twelve months divided by customers with a first. For a business that would rather build than buy, the CRM you can build in an afternoon exposes both numbers by design.

Number 10: website analytics

Google Analytics 4 is free, exports to BigQuery and feeds Looker Studio, and most small firms use a tenth of it.
Plausible is $9 a month for 10,000 pageviews, EU-hosted and open source, with the stats API on the Business plan only.
Fathom starts at $15 a month for 100,000 pageviews with an API and email reports on every plan, and no free tier.
Umami has a free Hobby cloud tier for one site and 100,000 events a month, and is free to self-host.
Microsoft Clarity is free with no traffic limit and adds heatmaps and session recordings.
Cloudflare Web Analytics is free and cookie-free without moving your DNS.
OpenPanel is open-source product analytics from a small team, from $2.50 a month for 5,000 events with an API on every plan and self-hosting free.
Statable is a Dutch, privacy-first GA4 alternative at $9 a month for 10,000 pageviews that imports your GA4 history and connects Search Console.
AnalyzeUser traces visits through to Stripe payments, $19 a month for one site, which makes number 10 and number 9 the same page for a business that takes cards through Stripe.
Muro emails a plain-English summary every morning for $12 a month, with no API, which is the whole point for an owner who will never open a dashboard.
PoeticMetric has a free tier for one site and 100,000 pageviews, open source and self-hostable.

Visits to enquiries is visits divided into forms, calls and bookings, and the second half of that fraction lives in the CRM, not the analytics tool. That join is the one most dashboards never make.

Number 9: ads

Google Ads downloads any report as CSV, Sheets or PDF on a schedule and has a native Looker Studio connector; return on ad spend is conversion value divided by cost, which only exists if conversion tracking carries values. The Google Ads add-on for Sheets is US-only and English-only, so UK readers should use the report download or the connector instead.
Meta Ads schedules recurring emailed reports per ad account, has an Excel add-in, and exposes spend and results through the Marketing API; purchase return depends on the Pixel or Conversions API being set up.

One number, one source, once a week: spend, revenue attributed, the ratio. If the ratio cannot be computed, the fix is tracking, not a dashboard.

The inbox: response time

Help Scout has a free plan for five users with one inbox and 30 days of reports, then Standard at $25 a user a month, with response and happiness reports and an API on paid plans.
Crisp is free for two agents and $45 a month on Mini.
Front starts at $25 a seat a month on annual billing and is built for bigger teams.
Gmail has no response-time report; a Workspace account can compute one with a script, and Google's pricing page currently shows a promotion starting 17 November 2026 rather than today's price, so check it on the day.

Median first-reply time is the number. Average hides the one that took four days.

Putting it on one page

Google Sheets is free and is where most ten-number dashboards should live, one row per week.
Looker Studio connects Sheets, GA4 and Google Ads at no charge according to every third-party guide we read, though Google's own page does not state a price.
Databox is free for one user, three sources and one dashboard, then $71 a month on Analyst; its pricing page quotes two different sets of figures, so confirm at checkout.
Geckoboard starts at $79 a month billed annually for two dashboards on a screen, with 90 sources including HubSpot and Sheets but not Xero.
Rows is a spreadsheet with connectors, free for 500 API calls a month and $6 a user on the annual Plus plan.
Metabase is free and open source if you can run a database, $100 a month on cloud.
Grafana and Equals are built for infrastructure and enterprise finance teams; Equals starts at $24,000 a year.

The glue

Zapier is free for 100 tasks a month and $19.99 a month on annual Professional billing for 750; Make's free plan gives 1,000 credits a month. Ten numbers once a week is well inside both free tiers, which is the argument for a weekly dashboard over a live one.

The numbers are only as clean as the list

Hunter verifies email addresses at half a credit each, free for 50 credits a month and £28 a month on yearly Starter billing in its UK pricing.
ApexVerify checks emails and phone numbers pay-as-you-go, $5 per 1,000 email checks, with 100 free checks to start and add-ons for Google Sheets and Excel.
Companies House has a developer API for live company status and officers, which is the fastest way to find out a late payer has gone into liquidation before you spend another week chasing.

A CRM full of bounced emails inflates the pipeline and deflates the conversion rate at the same time. Clean it before you trust either number.

How an AI agent builds the Monday page

The tools above each hold one or two of the numbers. The agent's job is the join.

Pulls the ten numbers on a schedule. Bank export, invoicing API, CRM, analytics and ads, every Monday at 7am, with Jobbit's automations running the job without a prompt.
Computes the ones nobody's tool does. Runway, days late by customer, quotes won over sent, repeat rate on your definition, return on ad spend.
Writes the page in plain English. Ten lines, each with the number, last week's, the trend and one sentence on why it moved.
Flags the one that needs a decision. The invoice that crossed 30 days, the ad set below break-even, the quote that has sat for a fortnight.
Chases without being asked. The overdue invoice reminder goes out the morning the number turns red, with the statutory interest line when it applies.

ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Manus and Meta's Muse will all compute a ratio if you paste the figures. What they do not do is fetch the figures every week, keep the sheet, or hand the chase to a human from the network when a customer needs a phone call. That is what Jobbit is for.

Your first month

Week 1: define the ten. Write each number's exact formula and source on one page. Decide the repeat-rate definition now.
Week 2: connect three sources. Bank export, invoicing and the CRM, into one sheet with one row per week.
Week 3: add analytics and ads, and set conversion values in Google Ads if they are missing.
Week 4: hand the Monday run to the agent and read the page instead of the tools.

Frequently asked questions

What should a small business dashboard include?

Ten numbers: cash in the bank, runway in months, cash due in, overdue invoices and days late, the pipeline, conversion rate, average order value, repeat rate, return on ad spend and website visits that became enquiries, plus median response time if you take enquiries. Each comes from a system you already use: the bank, invoicing software, a CRM, analytics, ads and the inbox.

What is a good number of days late for invoices?

Xero's Small Business Insights for the quarter to December 2025 found UK small businesses paid 29.0 days after invoicing on average, 8.0 days late, with hospitality closest to on time at 4.7 days late and manufacturing at 10.9. Your own trend matters more than the average: a rising days-late figure is the earliest warning a dashboard gives.

What is the best free dashboard tool for a small business?

Google Sheets with one row per week, fed by the free tiers of HubSpot CRM, Google Analytics 4, Zapier's 100 tasks a month and your bank's export. Databox has a free plan for one dashboard and three sources, Umami and PoeticMetric have free analytics tiers, and Looker Studio connects Google's tools at no charge.

How much cash should a small business keep in reserve?

Three to six months of operating costs is the common rule of thumb; it is not a statistic. The ONS found 16% of trading businesses had no reserves in June 2025, and iwoca's April 2026 survey of 1,005 SME owners found 28% had two months or less. Runway is cash divided by monthly outgoings, and it belongs on the first line of the page.

Is Google Analytics 4 enough for a small business?

For visits, sources and pages, yes, and it is free. The number a dashboard needs is visits that became enquiries, which means joining GA4 to the CRM or using a tool that traces visits to payments, such as AnalyzeUser for Stripe businesses. Privacy-first alternatives such as Plausible, Fathom, Umami and Statable cost $9 to $15 a month and skip the cookie banner.

Can an AI agent build a business dashboard?

It can pull the ten numbers from the bank export, invoicing software, CRM, analytics and ads on a weekly schedule, compute runway, days late, conversion and repeat rate, and write a plain-English Monday page with the one decision that needs making. A Jobbit agent does that with 100 free credits a day and no card, and hands the chase to a person from the network when a customer needs a call.

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