How to Build the Perfect Dashboard for Your Lift Business
- Jones Financial Accounts
- Oct 24
- 6 min read
Introduction - Dashboard for Your Lift Business
In the lift industry, small inefficiencies quickly become big costs. Engineers running overtime, delayed valuations, unbilled callouts, and rising parts prices all chip away at margin long before anyone notices.
For most lift companies, the biggest challenge isn’t lack of data, it’s that information is buried across multiple systems, from service logs to Sage or Xero.
That’s why the right business dashboard isn’t just a report, it’s your financial control room. It tells you, at a glance, what’s profitable, what’s late, and what’s about to cause cash flow pain.
At Jones Financial Accounts (JFA), we’ve built dashboards for lift and engineering businesses that need financial clarity without hiring a full finance department.
This guide explains what an ideal dashboard for a lift company looks like, the five core areas it must track, and how each one protects cash, improves margins, and boosts decision-making.
What You Need to Review
A dashboard should simplify, not complicate, the numbers that drive your business.
For lift companies, that means connecting operations with finance. The data already exists in your systems; the dashboard simply joins the dots so you can make faster, better decisions.
Below are the five essential sections every lift-sector dashboard should include, ranked by their influence on profitability, cash flow, and long-term control.
1️⃣ Project Profitability — Track Margin in Real Time
Every installation, refurbishment, or modernisation job carries unique costs and risks. Yet many lift firms only discover profit or loss months after completion, far too late to fix it.
What your dashboard should show:
Quoted vs. Actual Costs: Compare original budget to live spend on labour, materials, and subcontractors.
Gross Margin by Project: Visualise each job’s profit percentage against your company target (e.g., 25–30%).
Completion Percentage: Track how far through the job you are versus how much cost has been incurred.
Why it’s vital
If you install ten lifts and one runs 30% over budget, that single project can wipe out profit across the others.
With real-time margin tracking, you can see issues before they grow, like material wastage, labour inefficiency, or missed variations.
2️⃣ Maintenance Contracts — Protect Recurring Revenue
Maintenance is the heartbeat of a lift company. Those recurring contracts pay wages, cover overheads, and keep cash flowing between installations.
Yet most firms underestimate how much detail they should track.
What your dashboard should show:
Contract Count and Renewal Dates: Know how many are due each quarter.
Revenue Split: Compare maintenance vs. installation income to ensure steady workload.
Gross Profit per Contract: Measure which contracts deliver profit and which only cover costs.
Call-out Response Times and SLA Compliance: Key metrics for client retention.
Why it’s vital
Losing a large maintenance portfolio can collapse predictable income overnight. Conversely, increasing renewals by just 10% can cover an entire quarter’s fixed overheads.
Practical insight:
Your dashboard should flag contracts nearing renewal 90 days in advance, highlight any with declining gross margin, and display average call-out response times. This allows you to renegotiate pricing or resource allocation before clients raise complaints.
(For further reading, visit The KPIs That Help Construction Companies Drive Efficiency).
3️⃣ Labour Efficiency — Measure the True Cost of Time
In lift installation and service, your engineers are both the product and the cost. If labour efficiency slips, your gross margin vanishes, even when turnover looks healthy.
What your dashboard should show:
Engineer Utilisation Rate: Percentage of hours spent on chargeable work vs. non-billable admin or travel.
Average Labour Cost per Job: Calculated from total labour cost divided by revenue earned per engineer.
Overtime and Call-out Analysis: Highlight engineers consistently exceeding hours or working inefficiently.
Why it’s vital
A 5% drop in utilisation on a 10-engineer team can equate to £50,000–£70,000 in lost annual profit. Without tracking it weekly, inefficiency becomes invisible.
Link time-sheet or job-tracking apps to your dashboard. This allows live comparison of planned hours vs. actual.
Over time, you’ll spot patterns, for instance, certain engineers always taking longer on specific models, guiding training or scheduling changes that improve profitability.
4️⃣ Cash Flow and Debtors — Keep the Oxygen Flowing
In the lift trade, cash flow determines whether growth funds expansion or causes stress. With long installation timelines and retention clauses, it’s easy for money to get stuck mid-project.
What your dashboard should show:
Aged Debtors by Client and Project: Highlight anything over 45 days.
Retentions Outstanding and Due Dates: Keep visibility of withheld amounts.
13-Week Rolling Cash Forecast: Updated automatically as invoices are issued or paid.
Why it’s vital
You can’t manage what you can’t see. If your next six weeks of cash inflows rely on one delayed payment certificate, your business is at risk.
Practical insight
Set automatic alerts on overdue invoices and colour-code debtor buckets (green under 30 days, amber 30–60, red 60+). Combine this with a simple “cash available vs. committed spend” indicator so directors can make fast funding decisions.
(Learn more in Cash Flow Disruption from Stage Payments & Retentions).
5️⃣ Service Delivery and Customer Retention — Turn Reliability Into Revenue
While finance tracks margins, operations builds reputation. A dashboard that ignores service data only tells half the story.
Client satisfaction directly drives renewals and referrals, key to sustained growth in the lift sector.
What your dashboard should show:
Response Times: Average hours from call-out request to engineer on site.
First-Time Fix Rate: Percentage of jobs completed without return visits.
Customer Satisfaction or Complaint Count: Simple feedback scores or number of repeat issues per site.
Contract Renewal Rate: Year-on-year retention percentage.
Why it’s vital:
Lift maintenance contracts often renew automatically, but poor service leads to quiet cancellations when the term ends. High first-time fix rates and prompt call-outs not only retain clients but also reduce wasted engineer time and travel costs.
CFO insight:
Correlate service KPIs with financial metrics. For example, contracts with lower response times often show higher gross margin and faster payment. By blending financial and operational data, you create a full picture of profitability, not just turnover.
2. Why It Matters for Businesses
For lift companies, dashboards aren’t “nice to have” they’re the foundation of financial control. When managed correctly, they transform fragmented data into foresight.
Without it:
You’ll miss cost overruns until it’s too late to recover.
Cash flow shocks appear without warning.
Engineers remain busy but not profitable.
Maintenance renewals drift away quietly.
With it:
You can make informed, real-time decisions on pricing, staffing, and projects.
You’ll spot early warning signs, like declining margins or rising overtime, before they damage profits.
Your business becomes easier to run, easier to forecast, and more attractive to clients (and lenders).
Strategy to Get It Right
1️⃣ Start with clear questions. Instead of asking “What data can we show?”, ask “What decisions do we need to make weekly?”
2️⃣ Keep it simple. Limit your dashboard to no more than 10 core KPIs: the five areas above plus essentials like turnover and overheads.
3️⃣ Make it visual and comparative. Green means healthy, amber needs attention, red requires action. Include month-on-month and year-on-year trends.
In Operations:
Integrate job and service systems. Most lift companies already use field service apps, link these directly with finance software to avoid double entry.
Automate time tracking. Engineers shouldn’t fill extra spreadsheets. Data must flow from the tools they already use.
Include project notes. Give visibility to both financial and operational commentary so managers can interpret variances quickly.
In Finance:
Update weekly. The dashboard loses power if it’s only reviewed once a month.
Automate from accounting data. Tools like Power BI, Fathom, or Spotlight Reporting can sync directly from Xero or Sage.
Forecast forward. Link your cash flow forecast to live invoicing and debtors, so it updates automatically as payments clear.
Across Departments:
Use a weekly 20-minute dashboard review with department heads. Each manager reports on their key KPI, margin, response time, or cash.
Document actions directly from the dashboard, turning numbers into next steps.
The best dashboards aren’t complex, they’re consistent. When you measure the same metrics weekly, you build habits that drive performance across every level of the business.
Common Mistakes
1️⃣ Tracking vanity metrics.Hours logged or total calls answered might look good but mean nothing without context. Focus on profit-driving metrics like first-time fix rate or job margin.
2️⃣ No link between finance and operations.If your engineers and accountants don’t share the same data, accuracy collapses. Integrate systems, don’t duplicate them.
3️⃣ Overcomplicating dashboards.A cluttered dashboard slows decisions. Directors only need to see the top five commercial indicators, not 50.
4️⃣ Failing to act on trends.A dashboard is useless if it doesn’t trigger action. If gross margin falls by 5% for two weeks, there should be a documented response.
5️⃣ Ignoring cash visibility.Profit isn’t the same as cash. Without a live forecast linked to invoices and debtor data, profitable companies can still run out of money.
Consequences:
Financial: Margin leakage, unplanned borrowing, and reduced working capital.
Operational: Engineers under-utilised or jobs delayed due to poor scheduling.
Reputational: Slow response times or inconsistent reporting damage client trust.
Key Takeaways
The right dashboard gives lift companies live control over profit, cash, and service performance.
Focus on five essentials: job profit, maintenance revenue, labour efficiency, cash flow, and service delivery.
Keep metrics visual, automated, and reviewed weekly, not monthly.
A well-built dashboard doesn’t just report data; it drives smarter, faster decisions.
Wrapping up today's insights, tomorrow we simplify another accounting challenge.
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