Module 5 · Build #3 — The Know-Your-Numbers Dashboard
The monthly ritual & making it yours
The tool is only worth building if you actually use it — so here’s the 15-minute month-end ritual that keeps it alive, plus how to make the page track exactly what your business cares about.
The month-end ritual
Once a month, block 15 minutes. Same five moves every time:
- 1
Export fresh files
The same exports you gathered in the first lesson. - 2
Drop them into data/
Straight into yourdata/folder. - 3
Run the refresh
Tell Claude “refresh the dashboard with the new files,” or run the refresh script it built you. - 4
Say “monthly brief”
Claude reads the fresh numbers and writes up the plain-English read. - 5
Read the brief
Fifteen minutes, done — you know exactly where the business stands.
Make it track what you care about
The starting page is deliberately generic. Bend it to your business by asking for the numbers that actually keep you up at night. A few examples — adjust and paste:
Track a metric that matters to you
Track [A METRIC MY BUSINESS CARES ABOUT — for example: "average invoice value" or "no-show rate"] on the dashboard.
Add a goal line to the trend chart
Add a goal line at $[MY MONTHLY REVENUE TARGET — for example: 40000] to the 6-month trend chart, so I can see each month against the target.
Break a number down further
Break revenue out by [SERVICE, LOCATION, OR STAFF MEMBER — for example: "service category"] so I can see where it's really coming from.
Keep it honest as your business changes
Systems change and export formats change with them. When a file starts coming out differently, you don’t rebuild anything — you hand Claude the new file and ask it to adapt:
When an export format changes
I've got a new export in a different format — here's the file. Take a look and adapt the dashboard to read it, keeping every existing number working.
And keep spot-checking. Every few months, verify a couple of numbers against the source the way you did on build day. An honest page you trust beats a fancy one you don’t.
Back it up — privately
After any real change, save a snapshot and push a backup to GitHub, the same as your earlier builds. One difference matters here:
Snapshot and back up privately
Save a snapshot of this project, then push it to a new private GitHub repository — private, because these are my real business numbers.
This project holds your actual revenue. When you back it up to GitHub, the repository must be private — never public. If Claude ever asks whether to make the repo public or private, the answer is always private.
If a partner or your accountant ever needs to see this from their own screen, Module 2 showed you how to put a project online with Vercel — but think hard first: this page is your real revenue, so keep the repository private and password-protect it, or simply export a PDF and email that instead.
You have a data pipeline: real exports go in, an honest page comes out, and Claude reads it back to you every month. For years, businesses have paid consultants good money to build exactly this page — a clean read on where the money’s coming from. Now it’s a folder on your computer that costs nothing to run. That’s three real tools built. One module to go!