The 6 KPI Dashboards Every Small Business Should Have in Power BI

A well-run business is a measurable business. Not in a bureaucratic, metrics-for-the-sake-of-metrics way — but in the sense that the owner can answer six questions at any moment: how is revenue trending, where are clients coming from, which projects are on track, what are we spending, how are customers engaged, and where are we growing. These six questions map to six dashboards.

Dashboard 1: Revenue & Cash Flow

Track monthly recurring revenue, one-time project revenue, outstanding invoices, and cash position by week. Visualise revenue by service line to see which offerings generate the most. Connect directly to QuickBooks, Xero, or Stripe. This is the most important dashboard for any business owner — it tells you whether the business is financially healthy at a glance.

Dashboard 2: Lead & Sales Pipeline

Track new leads by source (website, referral, social, cold), conversion rate from inquiry to proposal, proposal win rate, and average deal size. This dashboard answers the question: where do clients come from and what is working? It makes marketing spend decisions obvious and identifies where deals are being lost in the pipeline.

Dashboard 3: Project Health & Delivery

For service businesses, track active projects by status (on track, at risk, delayed), billable hours logged vs. estimated, and project profitability per client. This is the dashboard that prevents scope creep from destroying your margins — it makes overruns visible before they become write-offs.

Dashboard 4: Marketing Performance

Connect Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and your email platform. Track website traffic by source, top landing pages, email open rates, and content performance. Updated automatically. This dashboard tells you whether your marketing investment is generating traffic and which content drives the most conversions.

Dashboard 5: Client Retention & Satisfaction

Track client tenure, repeat project rate, Net Promoter Score (if you collect it), and communication frequency. Clients who go quiet are often clients who are about to leave. This dashboard surfaces warning signs before you lose the relationship — and identifies your highest-value, longest-tenured clients for referral or upsell conversations.

Dashboard 6: Operational Costs

Track software subscriptions, contractor costs, and overhead by category. Many businesses have significant tool spend that is not actively managed — subscriptions that auto-renew for tools no longer used, plans on tiers higher than needed. This dashboard makes cost optimisation a 10-minute quarterly review rather than an annual surprise.