From twelve spreadsheets to one management dashboard

Management received numbers a week late, from reports built by one person in Excel. Margin per product group was an estimate, dead stock was spotted too late and the branch managers each had their own truth.

The sources were scattered: finance in AFAS, purchasing in Exact Online, sales in a POS system without a reporting module and pricing agreements in an Access database.

We started with KPI definitions: what is margin, when is stock dead, which revenue counts for which branch. Then we built a warehouse-light in PostgreSQL with daily pipelines from AFAS (GetConnector), Exact Online and a POS export, with data quality checks that flag deviations.

On top of the warehouse we built Power BI dashboards for management, the controller and branch managers, with roles and permissions. Two review rounds with the users determined which numbers belong on the first screen.

Ten weeks from kickoff to full rollout, with a four-week parallel period alongside the old Excel reports to validate the numbers.

One dashboard with revenue, margin, stock rotation, dead stock, receivables and open orders per branch and product group, updated every morning at 07:00. Alerts on deviations. The controller spends the freed day on analysis instead of copy-paste.

Within one quarter the dashboard identified €180,000 of dead stock that was subsequently reduced.