THEY ASKED FOR A REAR-VIEW MIRROR. THEY GOT A WINDSCREEN
Heather Flack, Business leader, Flair Accounting
What started as a request for a financial reporting tool became a live window into the business, and a way of seeing what was coming, as well as what already happened.
When a client asked me to build them an executive commercial dashboard earlier this year, I thought I knew exactly what I was signing up for. They wanted to see their numbers: sales by month, margins by product, costs against budget. A reporting tool that would show them, neatly and quickly, what had already happened.
I have spent almost three decades in accounting. I know what a report looks like. What I did not expect was that the thing we built would start talking back. I was asked for a rear-view mirror, looking backwards. What we ended up with was a powerful windscreen, looking forwards.
The Questions Your Reports Were Never Built To Ask
Most business owners I speak to already have reports. Their accounting system produces them every month, and someone explains them at month-end. The trouble is that those reports answer the questions somebody thought to ask when the system was set up, often years ago, by a person who has since moved on. Everything else stays buried in the data, unseen, until it surfaces as a loss. A write-off. A disputed invoice. A contract that slips.
That matters more now than ever. Margins are thin and there is little room for surprises. Gartner has estimated that poor data quality costs organisations an average of US$12.9 million a year. For a local SME the rand figure is smaller, but the share of profit it quietly eats can be far larger.
What The Windscreen Showed Us
The client, a mid-sized manufacturing business, wanted to understand its performance. Instead of building on top of the reports their system already produced, we went to the source: every individual transaction. Every customer, address, invoice, every purchase, every stock movement. Then we gave ourselves permission to ask any question we liked.
It matters what this is not. It is not a Microsoft Power BI (business intelligence) report refreshed from a monthly export, or a spreadsheet someone rebuilds at month-end. What it is, is a live web-based dashboard, integrated directly with the client’s accounting system, that can be pivoted to any variable, for any date, across as many years as you have data for. When a transaction is captured, the dashboard knows. Think about that for a moment.
Within weeks, the answers went well beyond performance.
Gaps in process. Customer invoices were going out without purchase order numbers. Trivial on one invoice; at scale, a recipe for disputes, slow payments and audit queries. A customer was mistakenly invoiced at below cost – a warning came up on the dashboard immediately.
Stock at risk. We could see which batches were nearing the end of their shelf life, live, while there was still time to act, not after they became write-offs. Commercial teams could see stock levels, live, whilst sitting in front of a customer.
Commercial teams could filter sales by any customer, region or product for their entire lifetime, at a click of a button with a downloadable csv to take into the next meeting.
Supplier history. We could trace exactly what the business had paid any one supplier for any one raw material item, over every year. No monthly report had ever offered that negotiating position.
None of this was in the brief. All of it was already in the data. It is 100% accurate, from source, instantaneous, and doesn’t take any human being’s time to generate it. Now the guy who was generating all these reports before, he hasn’t been retrenched – he has been elevated to perform the very human function of improving real efficiencies in the very processes that are being highlighted as falling off the table. Now that is real impact for the business, on the bottom line.
Why Core Data Changes The Game
A report is a summary. Someone decided what to add up, how to group it and what to leave out. If an invoice is coded to the wrong account, the report faithfully repeats the mistake every month.
Core transaction data works differently. Build from each individual record and you can allocate correctly regardless of how something was coded, or who keyed it in on a busy Friday afternoon. You can also change the question whenever you like. How many orders shipped without approval last quarter? Which customers always pay late in December? Which product line quietly loses money once returns are counted? The answers are already sitting there.
That was my biggest lesson. The value was never the dashboard itself. It was the freedom to choose what to measure, live, whenever the question arises. Data enabling decisions, instantly.
What This Means For Your Business
You don’t need to be a large corporate to benefit. Many of the family businesses, manufacturers and distributors I work with across KwaZulu-Natal have run the same accounting system for years. That history is an asset. Most of it simply has never been looked at, because the knowledge of where the risks sit lives in the owner’s head rather than on a screen.
If you want to start looking through the windscreen, here is where I would begin: List the questions you can’t answer today. Not the ones your reports already cover, but the ones that keep you up at night.
Find where your transaction data lives. Your accounting or ERP system almost certainly holds far more than its standard reports show. Ask whether you can connect to it directly and live, rather than relying on exports that are out of date the moment they’re pulled.
Start with one risk, not twenty KPIs. Expiring stock, late-paying customers or creeping supplier prices are all good first targets. Expect surprises, and welcome them. The first findings are usually about process, not performance. That is where the quickest wins are.
Eyes On The Road
Few businesses get into trouble because of what is in the rearview mirror. They get into trouble because of what they didn’t see coming. The encouraging part is that the warning signs are usually already sitting in their own data, invoice by invoice, waiting for someone to look.
This project changed how I think about our work at Flair Accounting. Our job is no longer just to tell clients where they have been. It is to give them a live, connected view of their business, so they can see the road ahead clearly enough to steer.
The question for every business owner reading this is simple: what is your data trying to tell you, and is anyone listening?
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