The Money Dashboard

A useful dashboard shows cash in the bank, sales against last week, costs you can control and money owed to you, on one screen. For a café group that means sales by site, labour cost as a percentage of sales, waste, overdue invoices and a short cash forecast. The demo adds a 13-week cash view, so a dip shows up weeks before it happens, and three plain-English actions for the week. Keep it to the numbers you would act on. If a figure never changes a decision, leave it off.

Pull each system's figures into one spreadsheet or dashboard on a schedule. The free route is Google Sheets or Excel, with a weekly export from your till, accounts and rota pasted into tabs and a summary tab on top. Google's free Looker Studio can turn that into a live dashboard. For automatic updates, Zapier or Make can fetch the data each morning, and Claude can read the result and write a short summary of what changed. Most businesses need four or five numbers, not forty.

Most modern UK systems can feed a dashboard, either through an API or a scheduled export. The demo pulls from a till system, Xero, Google reviews and a rota app. Common till systems include Square, SumUp, Lightspeed, Epos Now and Zettle. On the accounts side, Xero, FreeAgent and Sage all provide ways to get data out. Rota apps such as Deputy, Rotaready and Planday handle labour hours. If a system only exports spreadsheets, that still works; it just needs a regular export.

It can start at nothing: Google Sheets and Looker Studio are free, and a weekly manual export takes about half an hour. Automating the data pull usually adds Zapier or Make, which have free plans for light use and paid tiers depending on volume. Adding Claude to write the weekly summary and draft invoice chasers usually means Claude Pro at around £20 a month. A custom dashboard like the demo depends on how many systems it connects. Build the spreadsheet version first to find which numbers you actually check.

AI can draft the chasers, and you should still send them. In the demo each overdue invoice comes with a polite reminder ready to approve, with the tone set by how late it is and the invoice and payment link attached from Xero. Xero, FreeAgent and Sage also have built-in automatic reminders, which are the cheapest place to start. Claude adds value by writing personal notes for good customers and firmer ones for repeat late payers. Keep a human check on anything beyond a first reminder, as relationships matter more than the template.

No. A dashboard gives you a day-to-day view of how the business is doing. Your accountant still handles tax, VAT returns, year-end accounts and advice. The two work well together: a clear weekly view means you spot problems early and have better questions when you speak to your accountant. Treat AI-written summaries as a prompt to look closer, not as financial advice, and check the figures against your accounts before making decisions such as paying bills, taking on staff or borrowing money.

It can be, with read-only access and sensible limits. A dashboard only needs to read figures, so it should never have permission to create payments or change records. Use your accounting software's official connection methods rather than sharing logins, and turn off access for anything you stop using. Payroll and customer details are personal data under UK GDPR, so bring in totals rather than individual records where possible. Check your AI tool's data settings before sharing any financial information with it.