Module 5 · Build #3 — The Know-Your-Numbers Dashboard

What you're building & gathering your data

This is the tool we pitched in the Reporting pillar of the Automate Your Business with AI course: one honest page of your real numbers, built from files your business already produces. Most owners fly blind between accountant meetings — this is the page you’ll actually look at.

Watch — hand-picked

The clearest walkthroughs of this step, from creators we rate. Each one’s credited — go give them a follow.

5:21

One page you actually look at

Your accountant hands you a picture of the business four times a year, maybe once. In between, most owners are running on gut feel. Not because the numbers aren’t there — your invoicing, your bank, your booking system all produce them — but because nobody has the time to pull them together and read them.

That’s the whole tool. One page: money in this month versus last, your busiest services, new versus returning clients, and a simple six-month trend. Refreshed whenever you feel like it, sitting in a folder on your computer. Nothing to log into, nothing to pay for.

By the end of this build you’ll have that page open in your browser — and Claude reading it for you every month in plain English.

The 10-minute scavenger hunt

Before you build anything, you gather your raw material: one to three exports from systems you already use. You’re looking for CSV files — a CSV is the spreadsheet-export format every business system can produce, the plain version of a spreadsheet that any tool can read.

1. From your invoicing or accounting system — export your transactions or invoices as a CSV. Look for a button that says “Export,” “Download,” or “Reports → Export to CSV.”
2. From your online banking — download a statement as CSV. Most banks offer a “Download” option on the transactions page, with CSV as one of the formats.
3. From your booking, scheduling, or point-of-sale system — if you use one, export its bookings or sales too. If you don’t, skip this one.
4. Create a new folder called numbers-dashboard inside your my-toolsfolder, put a folder called data inside it, and drop every file you found into data/.

One file is enough to start. The files don’t need to be clean, complete, or cover the same dates — Claude works with whatever is really there and, in the next lesson, tells you exactly what it can and can’t answer.

Create realistic sample data for a small [YOUR TYPE OF BUSINESS — for example: "dog-grooming salon" or "physiotherapy clinic"] in the data/ folder — a few CSV files like the ones a real business would export from its invoicing and booking systems, covering the last six months. I'll swap in my real files later.