Read the home dashboard

The dashboard exists to answer one question: is the practice healthy right now

Open Monument and the dashboard is the first thing you see, and it's built around a single question, is the practice healthy right now. It isn't a report you generate and then look at once, it's a screen of live widgets, each one watching a different slice of the business continuously.

Meridian Studio runs several commissions at once, Olive Street Apartments among them. By the end of this tutorial you'll be able to read the firm's cash, capacity, and risk in one glance, and know exactly which part of the screen to click through to the work behind any number that catches your eye.

Nothing here is a snapshot, and the screen has a built-in order

Every widget reads the same live data the rest of Monument writes to, an invoice getting paid or an hour getting logged shows up immediately, with no refresh button anywhere because there's no report sitting in between. And the screen isn't a random grid, it has three bands that each do a different job: stat cards along the top give you headline numbers to read, not click; charts in the middle give those numbers shape, trends, breakdowns, heatmaps; and project lists at the bottom are the actual doorways, click a row in Recent Projects, Upcoming Deadlines, or Over Budget and you land on that project's page.

Four readings that carry most of the weight

Outstanding versus Overdue invoices. These are two separate cards on purpose, because the gap between them is the actual signal. Outstanding is everything billed but not yet paid, money you're owed. Overdue is the part of that which has actually passed its due date, money you're owed and should already be chasing. A healthy firm keeps outstanding well above overdue; the moment overdue starts creeping up, that's a cash problem surfacing early enough to still do something about it.

Uninvoiced time. Billable hours your team already logged that haven't turned into an invoice yet, which is really revenue sitting on the table rather than in the bank. A large or growing number here is usually telling you a milestone is ready to bill, or that a project's invoicing has quietly fallen behind.

Team utilization. A heatmap of each resource's logged hours across the trailing four weeks. It shows recent time-entry activity; it does not show allocated or available capacity.

Over Budget. The risk list, commissions whose costs are running past what was planned. These are the jobs worth opening first on a Monday morning, while there's still room to act on them, and because it's a list rather than a single number, you can go straight from a row into the project itself.

The full set: sixteen widgets across three bands

The first numbers row contains Active Projects, Outstanding Invoices, Overdue Invoices and Uninvoiced Time. My Billable Ratio starts the operational snapshot row below, your own billable share of logged time. If My Billable Ratio says Link your account instead of a number, your login isn't tied to a team-member record yet, link it and the figure appears.

The charts give those numbers shape: Team Utilization as a resources-by-week heatmap, Revenue by Project as a bar chart of the top five earners, Revenue Trend as a six-month line, Project Status as a donut of the portfolio, Revenue vs Expenses, Revenue Breakdown, and a Time Entries heatmap showing when the studio actually logs its hours.

The lists are the doorways: Recent Projects, Upcoming Deadlines (milestones falling due in the next two weeks), and Over Budget. Every row opens straight to that project's page, and Recent Projects, Upcoming Deadlines and Over Budget each carry a View All link through to the complete projects list.

The move that makes opening this screen worth it

You're scanning Meridian Studio's command centre and the Over Budget list isn't empty. The right move isn't hunting through menus for the projects section, it's going straight through the list that's already in front of you.

1. 1

   Scan the stat cards across the top: Active Projects, Outstanding Invoices, Overdue Invoices, Uninvoiced Time.

   
2. 2

   Drop to the Over Budget list. Each row is a commission whose costs have passed plan, and clicking a row lands you on that project's page.

3. 3

   Click View All to open the full projects list and take stock beyond just the worst offenders, Olive Street Apartments included, then act from there.

The same move works from every other list on the screen. A milestone sitting in Upcoming Deadlines opens the project that owes it, a row in Recent Projects takes you straight back to whatever you were working on yesterday. Think of the lists as the navigation layer, the stat cards and charts tell you whether to move at all, and the lists are how you actually get there.

Troubleshooting

• The stat cards don't click. Outstanding, Overdue, Uninvoiced Time, and the rest are readings, not links. When a card raises a question worth chasing, the way in is a list row below it, the relevant page directly (invoices, timesheets), or a report built specifically to answer it.
• A number looking wrong is a question, not a verdict. The underlying detail almost always explains it, one unusually large overdue invoice, one person over-allocated for a week. Go look before deciding something's actually broken.
• Outstanding is not the same problem as Overdue. Outstanding includes everything unpaid, most of which genuinely isn't due yet. Chase against the Overdue figure specifically, chasing against Outstanding means harassing clients who are paying exactly on schedule.
• Uninvoiced time is unbilled, not lost. A high figure is usually just a prompt to raise an invoice, not a sign something's gone wrong. Check whether a milestone's ready to bill before assuming there's a problem.
• Upcoming Deadlines only looks two weeks ahead. An empty list means nothing's due soon, not that nothing's due at all, the full milestone picture for a project still lives on that project's own page.
• The dashboard tells you that something's happening, not why. When you need the why behind a trend, which projects, which periods, grouped however you actually need it, that's a report's job, not a widget's.

Where this fits next

The dashboard flags that something's worth looking at. To find out why, and slice the firm's data by project, status, or period while keeping that exact view for next time, build a report in Build a custom report. From a specific reading, go where it points: chase the money in Payments and status, rebalance the team in balancing capacity in the swimlanes, and understand where a project widget's numbers actually come from in the financial model overview.