Executive dashboards: the indicators you should actually see every week

Why review indicators every week and not every month?

Because in a month, problems pile up that can still be fixed in a week. A customer who is a week late is collected with a phone call; one who is two months late is already a cash flow problem.

In Mexico this weighs especially heavily because companies finance each other. According to Banco de México's quarterly survey, in the second quarter of 2026, 60.9% of companies used vendor financing, versus 24.5% that used commercial bank credit. Among companies with up to 100 employees, the share with vendor financing was 59.5%. In other words: your customers owe you and you owe your vendors, and that chain breaks at the link nobody is watching.

The same survey reports that the most pressing problems for companies that quarter had to do with sales, competition and insecurity. Sales are not controlled with a monthly report.

What it costs you: finding out at month-end that margin dropped or that a large customer stopped paying, when there is no time left to react.

Which indicators should management see every week?

These eight cover cash, profitability, future sales and operations. Adjust the list to your line of business, but do not make it much longer.

How do you read cash and collections?

Start here, because a profitable company can still run out of cash. The Executive Summary in Odoo's accounting brings together the key financial position indicators, and the documentation defines them as follows:

• Average days to collect: how many days, on average, your customers take to fully pay their invoices.
• Average days to pay: how many days you take to fully pay your vendors.
• Short-term cash forecast: how much cash is expected to come in or go out next month.
• Current ratio: assets that could be converted to cash within a year divided by liabilities due within the next year; it measures your ability to pay your debts.

The weekly reading is simple: if your days to collect go up and your days to pay go down, you are financing your customers with your own money. The aged receivable report tells you whom to call first.

What should you look at in sales and margin?

Sales against target and gross margin, always together. Selling more at a lower margin can leave you worse off. Odoo defines gross margin as what your sales contribute minus the direct costs of achieving them (labor, materials), and net margin as what is left after also subtracting fixed expenses.

For margin to be reliable, the cost of what you sell has to be properly recorded in the system. If your inventory is not up to date, the dashboard's margin will not be either; we explain this in inventory and warehouse in Odoo for distributors.

What should management see in the sales pipeline?

What is coming, not just what has already been invoiced. The pipeline analysis in Odoo's CRM shows how many opportunities are in each stage and in which month they reached it, and in table view you can see the expected revenue by stage and by month.

Each week, three questions are enough: how many new leads came in and through which channel?, how many open opportunities have no next activity?, why did we lose the ones we lost? For those answers to exist, the team has to record follow-up in the CRM; how to achieve that when leads arrive through WhatsApp is in CRM with WhatsApp: make sure no lead gets lost.

Which operations indicators are worth including?

The ones that turn warehouse problems into money, especially in distribution and wholesale: inventory with no movement (idle money), stockouts of high-selling products (lost sales) and late deliveries (unhappy customers). Odoo includes standard operations dashboards; its documentation uses as an example a daily warehouse operations dashboard that shows, by day, the transfers still waiting to be assigned to someone responsible.

If you manufacture, add production plan compliance. If you are in services, billable hours against hours worked. Adjust, but do not go beyond one screen.

How is an executive dashboard built in Odoo?

With the Dashboards application in Odoo, which shows real-time data from your Odoo database. It is built on Odoo's spreadsheets, connected to the system, so every time you open or refresh the dashboard it brings the latest information. What it allows, according to the Odoo 20 documentation:

• Use standard dashboards that are already configured, depending on the applications you have installed.
• Filter the whole dashboard at once (by period, sales team or warehouse) with global filters.
• Click a number or a chart to see the records behind it.
• Share a snapshot of the dashboard with internal users without permissions or with external people.
• Create your own dashboards from a spreadsheet and control who can see them.

An important warning from Odoo itself: standard dashboards are reinstalled with every version upgrade, and changes made to the original are lost. That is why it recommends duplicating the dashboard and customizing the copy.

If you prefer to receive the numbers without logging in to the system, Odoo sends periodic summary emails ("digest") with the indicators you choose, daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly. Adding custom indicators to that email requires Odoo Studio, at additional cost on the subscription.

What rules does a good executive dashboard follow?

1. A single source of truth. The numbers come from the ERP, not from a file someone updates.
2. Written definitions. "Sale" is what was invoiced or what was collected; decide it once.
3. Every indicator has an owner. One person answers for it in the meeting.
4. Target and threshold. The number alone is not enough: you have to know when it is bad and what is done then.
5. Comparison. Against the target and against the same week of the prior period.
6. Few indicators. If it does not fit on one screen, nobody will read all of it.

What mistakes are common when building dashboards?

• Measuring what is easy rather than what is important. Website visits instead of overdue receivables.
• Dirty data. If invoices or costs are entered late, the dashboard lies. Fix the process first; the signs that you already need an ERP are in does your company already need an ERP?.
• A dashboard with no meeting. If nobody reviews it on a fixed date, it becomes decoration.
• Customizing the standard dashboard. You lose it in the next upgrade; work on a copy.

Glossary

Indicator (KPI)

A number that measures something important to the business and is compared against a target.

Aged receivables

A report that groups what your customers owe you by how long it has been overdue.

Gross margin

What is left of your sales after subtracting their direct costs.

Current ratio

Assets that can become cash within a year divided by debts due within a year.

Global filter

A filter that changes all the data on a dashboard at once, for example, the period.

Frequently asked questions

Sources: Banco de México, “Evolución del Financiamiento a las Empresas durante el Trimestre Abril–Junio de 2026”, August 20, 2026 · Odoo 20 documentation, “Reporting” (accounting) · Odoo 20 documentation, “Dashboards” · Odoo 20 documentation, “Spreadsheet” · Odoo 20 documentation, “Digest emails” · Odoo 20 documentation, “Pipeline Analysis”