Dashboards & management reporting
Your numbers are in five systems. The answer is in none of them.
Xero knows what you invoiced. It does not know which jobs made money, how much capacity you have sold, or what next quarter looks like - that lives in job management, the CRM, payroll and whatever else the business actually runs on. We connect those and present the result as one panel that answers how the business is going, then our accountants read it with you.
What gets connected, and what each part is hiding.
Xero
Revenue, margin, payables, cash. The financial truth, and almost nothing about how the work actually happens.
Job or project management
Utilisation, write-offs, which jobs made money and which quietly did not. Usually the biggest gap between the P&L and reality.
CRM and pipeline
What is coming, weighted, and how that lines up against the capacity you already have.
Payroll and rostering
Hours against output. The cost side of every margin question.
Point of sale, inventory, bookings
Whatever the business actually sells through, at the grain a monthly P&L flattens out.
The gap between the first box and the rest is where most owners lose money without seeing it. A P&L tells you the month was down. It does not tell you which three jobs did it.
We will tell you to buy it when buying is right.
If your question is answerable from your accounting file alone, Xero's own reporting or a tool like Fathom will answer it for a subscription, and we will say so. Xero acquired Syft in 2024 and is building that analytics layer in natively - single-source reporting on your own accounting data is becoming something you already pay for, and rebuilding it would be selling you a worse copy of a product you own.
What no vendor sells is the connective work between your systems, because it only exists inside your business. That is the part worth building, and what we build is yours - the code, the database, the logic. Handed over, not licensed back, with no per-seat fee that grows every time you hire.
A dashboard nobody reads is an expensive way not to know.
This sits inside an accounting group rather than a development shop, which is the whole point. Building the panel is one job; sitting with it monthly and turning it into decisions is another, and it is the one that changes the number. If you want that half too, it is a virtual CFO engagement.
Common questions.
→What is management reporting software, and do I need it?
It is anything that takes accounting data and turns it into a view a business owner can act on - trends, ratios, forecasts, a monthly pack. If everything you need is already in Xero, then Xero's own reporting or a tool like Fathom will do it for a subscription and you should buy that rather than build anything. The case for building starts when the answer needs data that is NOT in your accounting file: jobs, utilisation, stock, pipeline. That is where off-the-shelf reporting stops, because it can only report on what it can see.
→Can you connect Xero to our other systems?
That is the substance of the work. Xero has a good API and most common business systems have one, so the numbers can arrive on their own instead of being exported into a spreadsheet by someone on the last Friday of the month. Where a system genuinely has no usable API we say so before you spend anything, because the honest answer sometimes is that a particular integration is not worth what it costs.
→Should we just use Fathom, Syft or Xero's own reporting?
Often yes, and we will say so. Xero acquired Syft in 2024 and is folding that analytics layer in natively, so single-source reporting on your accounting data is becoming something you already pay for. Building a custom version of that would be selling you a worse copy of a product you own. We implement those tools where they fit and build only the connective work between systems, which is the part no vendor sells because it only exists inside your business.
→Do we own what you build?
Yes - the code, the database and the logic. Handed over, not licensed back. No per-seat fee that grows as you hire, and nobody holding your data at renewal. Where we have implemented a third-party tool you own that relationship directly too; we are not reselling it to you with a margin on top.
→What does it cost?
Less than the reputation of custom software suggests, because the reputation was earned in a different decade and the tooling has changed what a small experienced team can ship. The comparison worth making is not against a fixed price, it is against the per-seat subscriptions the dashboard usually replaces - across LINK's own nine businesses that came to about $40,000 a year. We scope it before you commit and tell you when buying is cheaper than building.
→Who interprets the numbers once it is built?
That is the half software cannot sell you, and it is the reason this sits inside an accounting group rather than a dev shop. A dashboard that nobody reads is a more expensive version of not knowing. If you want the panel read with you monthly and turned into decisions, that is a virtual CFO engagement and LINK Advisors does it - the two halves are designed to work together.