Executive dashboards
Executive dashboard examples
In short
What an executive dashboard is
An executive dashboard is a one-screen summary of how a business is performing, written for people who decide rather than people who analyse. Some teams call it a leadership or management dashboard. It carries about four headline numbers and one chart saying where the exception is, so it can be read in ten seconds and questioned in the next thirty. That is why the examples below are separate boards, one per function or audience, rather than one screen holding everything.
The examples
Six executive dashboard examples
Real Mammoth templates on sample data. Every figure is illustrative. Each board carries exactly four headline numbers.
Example 01· Template: Financial KPI Scorecard
CFO dashboard
How is the business doing, in four numbers?
Revenue, gross margin, operating margin and operating income, with operating income followed over time rather than stated once. The finance row of an executive view: enough to know whether to ask a second question, and deliberately not enough to answer it.
What is on it
- Operating income over time
- Gross margin
- Margin across units
- Revenue by region
- Where operating cost concentrates
Your data needsDashboard
- a revenue or money column
- a category (~8 values)
Sample data: illustrative figures, not business results. Example 02· Template: Sales KPI Scorecard
Sales scorecard
Is the book getting healthier, or just busier?
Deal size, cycle length and forecast confidence, with reps set above and below the line. What an executive needs from sales is not the pipeline total. It is whether the shape of the book is improving, which a distribution and a cycle length say and a single number cannot.
What is on it
- Who is above and below the line
- Distribution of deal size
- Confidence across the funnel
- Cycle length by region
- Booked against weighted, by source
Your data needsDashboard
- a revenue or money column
- a category (~3 values)
Sample data: illustrative figures, not business results. Example 03· Template: HR Scorecard
HR scorecard
Is the organisation holding together?
Tenure, engagement, performance and salary cost on one screen, with absence and training resolved to where they concentrate. The row an executive team is most often flying blind on, because people data rarely gets a dashboard at all.
What is on it
- Salary cost of who we hired
- Engagement
- Performance across departments
- Tenure spread by level
- Where absence concentrates
- Where training hours go
Your data needsDashboard
- a revenue or money column
- a category (~7 values)
Sample data: illustrative figures, not business results. Example 04· Template: Project Portfolio
Project portfolio dashboard
Which programmes are running over, and by how much?
Every programme on one page with budget set against actual cost and the variance stated, plus planned effort against actual. Portfolio altitude rather than task altitude: it answers which programme needs attention, not what anyone is doing this week.
What is on it
- Budget by portfolio
- Over and under budget
- Planned against actual effort
- Budget against spend
- Effort spread by workstream
Your data needsDashboard
- a revenue or money column
- a category (~4 values)
Sample data: illustrative figures, not business results. Example 05· Template: SaaS Metrics
SaaS executive dashboard
Is recurring revenue growing, and for the right reasons?
MRR, net new MRR, new MRR and net MRR retention on one strip, then growth by plan tier and region, with expansion set against churn. The executive row for a subscription business, where the headline is MRR and the question underneath is whether expansion is outrunning what leaves.
What is on it· 2 pages · How we grow / What growth costs
- MRR over time
- Net new MRR by month
- New MRR by tier and region
- Expansion against churn, by tier
- Net MRR retention by tier and region
Your data needsDashboard
- a revenue or money column
- a category (~3 values)
Sample data: illustrative figures, not business results. Example 06· Template: Portfolio KPI Rollup
Investor portfolio dashboard
Across the portfolio, who is growing and who is running short of cash?
Every company's monthly numbers in one view: ARR, revenue growth and gross margin as the headline, ARR and cash over time, and the shortest runways sorted first. The executive view one level up, for an investor or a holding company reading many businesses at once.
What is on it· 2 pages · The portfolio / Where to look
- Portfolio ARR over time
- Cash across the portfolio
- Revenue by sector and stage
- Monthly growth by sector and stage
- Shortest runways
Your data needsDashboard
- a revenue or money column
- a category (~7 values)
Sample data: illustrative figures, not business results.
The metrics
The numbers an executive scorecard carries
Four per board, one board per function or audience, and the choosing is the work. These are the seven that survive most selections, with what each needs before it can be trusted in a room where it will be questioned.
| Metric | What it answers | What your data needs |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue against plan | Are we where we said we would be? | Actuals and budget matched on period and account. A plan agreed in a spreadsheet and never loaded beside the actuals is why this number usually arrives by email instead. |
| Operating income | What does the business earn once the cost of running it is in? | One chart of accounts across every entity, and a definition of operating cost that was agreed before the board read it rather than during the meeting. |
| Win rate and average deal size | Is the book getting healthier, or only larger? | Closed-won and closed-lost on one definition of closed, with deal value and close date. Shown as a distribution: an average deal size describes no deal anyone is working. |
| Attrition, rolling twelve months | Are we losing people faster than we were? | Leavers and average headcount over the same rolling window, with regretted and unregretted marked separately. A single monthly figure on a small team swings on one resignation. |
| Budget against actual cost, per programme | Which programmes are overspending, and by how much? | Committed and spent per programme, never netted to a portfolio total. One programme 20% under and one 20% over sum to nothing, which is how an overrun stays invisible until it is large. |
| Cash runway | How many months can the business run at the current burn? | Cash on hand and net burn from the same month-end, with burn averaged over three months. One large payment in a single month swings runway by a quarter. |
| Net revenue retention | Do existing customers spend more or less over time? | Recurring revenue per customer at both ends of the window, with expansion, contraction and churn kept apart. New customers left in the figure make retention look better than it is. |
Other formats
When the answer is not a dashboard
An executive audience reads more documents than dashboards, and these are the same numbers reshaped rather than rebuilt. The summary and the board pack come from the same 288-row P&L as the CFO dashboard above; the programme review comes from the same 486-row portfolio as the project portfolio dashboard. The startup board report and deck are a venture board's version, built on the same 162 rows of monthly SaaS metrics as the SaaS executive dashboard.
Sample data: illustrative figures, not business results. Executive Summary
Can the quarter be read rather than presented?
The quarter in one read: what the numbers did, where, and against plan.
Finance · Document
Sample data: illustrative figures, not business results. Board Pack
What goes in front of the board?
The quarter for a board audience: revenue, margin, plan and what is next.
Finance · Presentation
Sample data: illustrative figures, not business results. Programme Review Deck
And what does the steering committee get?
Every programme for a steering audience: progress, effort, cost and risk.
Project · Presentation
Sample data: illustrative figures, not business results. Startup Board Report
What does a startup's board read before the meeting?
The period for a board: growth, retention, efficiency and burn.
Executive · Document
Sample data: illustrative figures, not business results. Startup Board Deck
And what goes on the screen in the room?
The venture board meeting: growth, retention, efficiency and burn.
Executive · Presentation
From example to live dashboard
Pretty is easy. Current and true is the hard part.
Any of these can be drawn in a slide. What makes one worth keeping is the five steps underneath it, and they are the same five whichever example you start from.
- 01
Connect the source
The dashboard reads the system, not an export somebody saved to their desktop. 100+ tested connectors, plus anything with a REST API.
- 02
Prepare it once
Cleaning, joining and reshaping are recorded as steps you can read, change and re-run, not a formula buried three sheets deep.
- 03
Check it before anyone sees it
Data checks run with the refresh and flag the rows that fail, so a broken upstream file shows up as an alert rather than as a wrong number in a meeting.
- 04
Put it on a schedule
Refresh on a schedule and the dashboard stays current on its own. Starter refreshes weekly, Team daily, and Pro every three hours.
- 05
Publish it and send the link
Public, password-protected or sign-in only. Every sharing mode is available on every plan, including the free one.
Sharing
Everyone can see it.
Nobody pays to look.
Most dashboard tools charge for every person who opens one, which is why so many dashboards end up as a screenshot pasted into a message. Mammoth charges for the people who build. Viewers are unlimited and free on every plan, including the free one.
You pay for
The people who build
Anyone connecting a source, preparing data or publishing a dashboard counts as a platform user.
You never pay for
The people who look
Viewers are unlimited and free on every plan, including the free one. A board, a client list or a whole company: the number does not change the bill.
Plans differ in how many builders and published dashboards a workspace gets. Drafts, viewers and every sharing mode are unlimited and free on all four. Full pricing.
Executive dashboard questions
What should be on an executive dashboard?
What is a CEO dashboard?
How do I build an executive dashboard?
- Ask each function head for the four numbers they would defend in the room, and stop at four.
- Connect each function's own system: the ledger, the CRM, the HR system and the project tracker.
- Prepare each into its own dataset, and agree the definitions before the first meeting rather than during it.
- Build one board per function, each with its four numbers on top and one chart pointing at the exception.
- Schedule the refresh and share the link, so the numbers on screen are the ones the business is running on this week.
Should it be one dashboard or several?
What is the difference between an executive dashboard and a board pack?
Where does the data come from?
Can the board see it without a licence?
Last reviewed against the template catalogue.
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