Numbers You Can Trust
From the board-meeting spreadsheet to numbers you can trust any day of the week
“The dashboard took days. Getting the numbers right took the work. That's what made it worth looking at.”
What wasn't working
Every month, one of the most highly paid salespeople in the business spent at least four hours building the board pack by hand. They pulled figures from the CRM and the payments system into a spreadsheet, then turned them into something leadership could read.
That's over 48 hours a year of senior sales time spent copying numbers instead of selling. And the result was out of date as soon as it was shared, so between meetings nobody knew where the business stood.
For a contractor, this is the weekly report that's stale by the time anyone reads it, or the main contractor asking for a cross-site status update while the answer sits in three spreadsheets and someone's head.
How we tackled it
We connected Pipedrive and Stripe directly to Plecto, then built the business rules that turned raw data into numbers leadership could trust.
The raw numbers didn't mean much on their own. Contracts were billed in several currencies, recurring charges were mixed with one-off setup and decommissioning fees, and contracts ran on 12-month rolling terms. We agreed the rules with the business, then built them in so they ran the same way every time.
A live dashboard also shows exactly what people put in, so we worked with the sales team to agree one way of entering deals and made sure they could do it properly.
What changed
Business rules built in
All currencies were converted to GBP. Setup and decommissioning fees were taken out and tracked separately, so monthly recurring revenue showed only what actually recurred. Twelve-month rolling contracts were handled consistently. The same rules, applied every time, with nobody re-doing them by hand.
Live forecasting
Leadership could see the forecast whenever they wanted, built from the same data the team was working in, not from a snapshot.
Leaderboards and sales dashboards
Current performance and last quarter's results sat side by side, so trends were visible without anyone building a report.
Clean data at the source
The team learned to enter deals the same way every time. The dashboard was only trustworthy because the input was.
A weekly email for people who prefer one
The key numbers went out automatically once a week, so people who'd rather not log into a dashboard still got the same view.
The difference
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| Building the board pack | 4+ hours a month of senior sales time | Builds itself |
| When leadership saw the numbers | Once a month | Any time, live |
| Revenue figure | Mixed currencies, one-off fees mixed in | GBP recurring revenue, one-off fees shown separately |
| Data quality | Depended on who entered it | One agreed method across the team |
| Staying informed | Wait for the next meeting | Dashboard, or a weekly email |
Why it matters
The value didn't come from the dashboard. It came from agreeing what the numbers meant, building those rules in once, and getting the team to enter data the same way every time. A highly paid salesperson got four hours a month back, and leadership stopped finding things out too late.
For a contractor, the same applies to job margin, capacity and risk across every live project. Maintenance contract income needs separating from one-off project work, and variations need counting properly. The live view is the easy bit. Agreeing the rules and getting the office to record job data consistently is what turns it into something you can run the business from.
Want the same for how your jobs run?
No pitch, no prep. Describe how jobs run now and I'll help you pinpoint the bottlenecks.