What to Bring to Your First Dashboard Conversation

You don’t need a plan, a sketch or any technical knowledge to start talking about a custom dashboard. What helps most is the raw material of how you work now. Here’s a short checklist.

Four Useful Things to Bring

1. Your tool list. Every tool you’d open to answer the questions you care about: booking, payments, invoicing, email, the lot. Next to each one, a few words on what it holds. “Bookings and client notes.” “Invoices and who’s paid.” Names are all that’s needed.

2. Your questions, in your own words. The things you ask yourself every day or every week, written the way you’d say them. “Has everyone who’s booked for Friday paid their deposit?” Then, for each one, the path you take to answer it now: open this, filter that, add it up in your head. That path shows where the time goes and which tools have to talk to each other.

3. Your workarounds. The spreadsheet you update by hand, the notebook by the till, the sticky note on the screen, the screenshot you keep. These are the most useful things you can bring, because each one shows something your tools don’t give you yet. A photo is fine. Cover names and amounts first.

4. Where you’ll use it. On your phone between jobs, on a laptop on Monday mornings or both. The same information can need a very different screen depending on where you’ll be standing when you read it.

Leave Passwords Out of the Brief

And what to leave at home: passwords. Nobody needs your logins to talk about what you need. If connecting your tools comes up later, access should be set up with you directly, never sent in an email or a message.

You don’t have to sort or trim any of this before you bring it. Choosing what goes into a first version is a separate step, and it’s easier when everything is on the table.

Next Step

Start a single page with four headings: tools, questions, workarounds and where. Add to it over a normal week, whenever you catch yourself looking something up.