dash-b · Use cases · Business

The numbers you actually run on, from the systems you already have.

Not a reporting project. Point a board at the database, the spreadsheet and the payment account you are already using, and have the four numbers that matter on a screen by the end of the afternoon.

Ready to open

Eight businesses, eight boards

Restaurants, workshops, practices, your own product — each card opens a real design shaped for that trade, ready to wear your name.

Type it, and see the board build

Say what the business runs on

Pick one of these, or type the numbers you would quote from memory — and watch the board build itself. The shapes are the real widgets; the numbers are missing because they are not yours yet.

One screen that answers “how are we doing”

The four numbers you would quote from memory if somebody asked, kept current from the systems that already hold them, and readable from across a room.

Stop guessing how the month is going.The four numbers you run on, from the systems that already hold them.

Where the data is

You do not have to move anything to see it

Most reporting projects die in the six months before anybody sees a number, because the data had to be moved somewhere first. Nothing moves here. A tile reads the database where it lives, or the spreadsheet as it is, and draws the answer.

If the database is not reachable from the internet — which, if you are sensible, it is not — drop one PHP file beside it and the board reads through that instead. Nothing is opened up.

Sharing the right amount

The accountant gets one board; the shop floor gets another

Publish the summary at a link and send it. Publish nothing and keep the board behind the VPN, where it will only answer requests coming from your own network — not because somebody typed a password, but because of the address the request came from.

Two different boards from the same data is normal here. A board is a setup, and setups nest, merge and get shared one at a time.

The screen in the corridor

A number nobody has to ask for gets acted on

Put the board on any screen with a browser and leave it. It refreshes itself, it does not log itself out, and it is legible from across the room because you chose the type size yourself rather than accepting somebody's default.

A team that can see the number moves before the monthly report tells them it moved.

Not only looking

The three jobs that happen every morning become three tiles

Marking the invoice, reordering the thing that ran out, sending the reminder — a tile can do each of them, with the form already filled in from the row you were looking at. The work stops being a tour of four systems.

Reading and writing are deliberately different doors: a board only writes where you connected something that can write, and it always asks first.

The exit, described before you need it

You can leave with the thing you built

Export a board as a standalone page and it runs on your own server, or on a laptop with no internet. Take the designer itself and run it in-house if that is what your rules require.

This is worth saying plainly because it is the question every business asks last and should ask first: what happens if we stop paying? You keep what you made.