How to build financial dashboards leadership actually trusts
Josh Aharanoff and Dan Schonfeld break down why most dashboards fail before they’re built, and how finance teams can fix that by focusing on data integrity, structure, and storytelling.
Based on a To the Max webinar featuring Josh Aharanoff (Your CFO Guy / Mighty Digits) and Dan Schonfeld (CFO, ApprovalMax)
Every finance team has been there. You spend days pulling numbers, formatting slides, building a dashboard you’re confident in. Then someone in the room asks: “Where did this number come from?”
That one question can unravel an entire presentation. The number might be perfectly accurate, but if the person asking doesn’t trust where it came from, the dashboard stops being useful. It becomes decoration.
In a recent To the Max webinar, Josh Aharanoff, fractional CFO and founder of Mighty Digits, and Dan Schonfeld, CFO at ApprovalMax, explored why most financial dashboards fail before they’re even built. The conversation moved quickly past chart types and color palettes into what actually matters: where data comes from, how it’s structured, and why reporting breaks down long before anyone opens a visualization tool.
• One company paid $15,000/month for finance support and still couldn't trust their reports. Their accounting data, internal database, and vendor data all told different stories.
• Chasing receipts, reclassifying transactions, and reformatting exports eat the month. By the time a finance lead sits down to build a dashboard, the data is already stale and the deadline has already passed.
• Separate raw data, assumptions, and outputs. Josh's SIP framework (Source, Input, Presentation) turns monthly reporting from a rebuild into a refresh.
• Leadership cares about six metrics. Revenue, gross margin, opex, net income, cash flow, and cash balance.
• Review your variances before the board does. When you already know the story behind the numbers, the meeting becomes a decision, not a data review.
Your dashboard is only as good as the data feeding it
Josh opened with a provocation that set the tone for the entire session: most dashboard failures have nothing to do with the dashboard itself. Having built over 100 financial models for early-stage and fast-growing companies, he’s seen the same pattern repeat.
“We don’t have a lack of data,” Josh said. “We have a lack of curation and prioritization.”
The real culprits are upstream: data integrity issues, conflicting sources, and weak ingestion processes. He shared the story of a fast-growing company that had raised $20 million and was paying $15,000 a month for external finance support, but still couldn’t get value from their reporting. Their accounting data didn’t match their internal database, and their vendor data conflicted with both.
Dan reinforced this from his own experience running finance at ApprovalMax, where the team operates across eight global entities with multiple currencies and jurisdictions. Getting the chart of accounts right, enforcing consistent coding, and making sure data flows cleanly between systems. That’s where the real work happens. The dashboard is just the last mile.
The session drew finance professionals across QuickBooks Online, Xero, NetSuite, Sage, and various ERPs, underscoring that while the tools vary, the reporting challenges are strikingly similar.
Where all the time actually goes
One of the sharpest observations from the session was Josh’s take on why finance teams struggle with reporting. It’s rarely about skill.
“Most finance professionals know exactly how to build a great report,” he said. “They just never get the time to do it because they’re buried in manual data work.”
The hours that disappear into chasing receipts, classifying transactions, exporting and reformatting data, and fixing errors manually. Those small tasks compound into days lost every month. Josh pointed out that each task might only take minutes on its own, but added together across a month, they can consume hours, days, even weeks. By the time a finance lead sits down to build a dashboard, the data’s already stale and the deadline’s already passed.
Dan agreed, noting that this is exactly where upstream controls make a difference. When approval workflows are structured and automated, so that every bill is coded, approved, and reconciled before it reaches the ledger, the data arriving in your reporting layer is already clean. The cleanup step disappears, and finance can actually focus on analysis.
Structure once, refresh monthly
Josh walked through a practical framework he uses with clients called the SIP model: Source, Input, Presentation.
- Source: Raw data from your accounting system, CRM, and other tools.
- Input: Assumptions, drivers, and forecast logic that shape how the data is interpreted.
- Presentation: The dashboard, report, or output that stakeholders see. Always read-only, always downstream.
The beauty of this separation is that once you build it, monthly updates become a refresh, not a rebuild. You’re not reconstructing the spreadsheet from scratch every cycle. You’re updating the source, and the rest follows.
Dan added a practical note on how this works at ApprovalMax: by running all spend through structured approval workflows, every transaction arrives in their GL already coded by department, entity, and category. That means when finance pulls the data for dashboards, there’s no cleanup step. The structure was set at the point of approval.
Show what matters, and nothing else
Both speakers pushed back on the instinct to cram every metric into a single view. More data on a dashboard doesn’t help leadership make better decisions. It just makes the dashboard harder to read.
Josh outlined a core set of metrics that most leadership teams care about: revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, net income, cash flow, and cash balance. From there, the specifics depend on the business model. SaaS companies will layer in ARR, CAC, and Rule of 40. E-commerce teams will track average order value and conversion rates. But the principle stays the same: start tight, add only what drives decisions.
Josh outlined three dashboard archetypes: reporting dashboards (structured financial statements), pivot dashboards (filterable and flexible for deep dives), and KPI dashboards (focused visual summaries for executives and boards). Most leadership teams need the third, but most finance teams default to the first.
A dashboard without a narrative is just a screen full of numbers
The session’s strongest thread was about storytelling. Both Josh and Dan came back to it repeatedly: the dashboard is only as powerful as the story the finance team tells around it.
“Numbers alone don’t tell a story,” Josh said. “Accountants translate them into a narrative for investors and lenders. That human context is irreplaceable.”
Dan expanded on this from a board-reporting perspective. At ApprovalMax, his team uses software that sits on top of their GL to flag major variances, then reviews them internally before any board meeting. By the time numbers are presented, the story behind them is already understood. That preparation, knowing not just what changed, but why, is what turns a dashboard from a status update into a decision-making tool.
This matters for mid-market finance teams in particular. When you’re reporting to investors, boards, or cross-functional leaders who aren’t in the numbers every day, the narrative is what earns trust. And once leadership trusts your reporting, they start asking for your opinion on what to do next.
Where to start if your reporting feels broken
Josh closed the session with practical advice for anyone feeling overwhelmed by the state of their reporting:
- Start with data integrity. If your sources conflict, nothing downstream will work. Fix the foundation first.
- Audit where your time goes. Track how many hours you spend on manual data work versus actual analysis. The gap will tell you where to invest.
- Structure your workflow. Separate raw data from assumptions from outputs. Even a basic version of the SIP framework will save hours every month.
- Reduce noise. Show stakeholders fewer metrics, explained well, rather than more metrics explained poorly.
- Automate upstream. Tools like ApprovalMax ensure that data is coded and approved before it reaches your reporting layer, so the cleanup step disappears entirely.
Dan’s parting thought was equally grounded: don’t wait for the perfect system. Build what you can now, iterate monthly, and let the process improve alongside the business.
This article is based on a To the Max webinar featuring Josh Aharanoff (Your CFO Guy / Mighty Digits) and Dan Schonfeld (CFO, ApprovalMax). Watch the full recording here.
