Board and Funder Dashboards and Custom Finance Software

Board packs are rebuilt every month

In many smaller organizations the board pack is a monthly craft project. Someone exports the trial balance, pastes it into last month's workbook, repairs the formulas that broke, rebuilds the charts and emails a PDF. Funder reports repeat the exercise with different groupings. Each copy is a chance for a number to stop matching the ledger, and nobody can say for certain which version the board saw.

Packaged reporting tools help, but they are built around the vendor's idea of what a board needs, and they keep your data and history on their platform. When the subscription ends, the history often goes with it.

Engraving of a ship's bridge with an arc of brass gauges facing the sea, one needle in magenta. — Instruments for the people steering.

Four builds and one handover

Board and funder dashboards
Monthly and quarterly views a board, funder or lender can read in minutes, covering cash and runway, budget against actual, covenant headroom, grant spend against award and open control exceptions.
Data pipelines
Scheduled extraction from QuickBooks Online, Xero, NetSuite, Sage Intacct or Business Central into a database in your own cloud account, with every transformation documented and tested.
Custom internal tools
Small applications for the gaps your systems leave, such as a vendor onboarding form with callback logging for bank details, a grant cost allocation tool or a policy acknowledgment tracker.
Integrity Center hosting
Hosting and upkeep of your Integrity Center on your own domain, or integration of the page into your existing site.
Ownership and handover
Code in your repository, infrastructure in your accounts, a runbook, and training for whoever will maintain it.

Working software with documentation

Deliverable	What it is	When
Reporting specification	Every measure with its definition, its source accounts in the ledger and the audience it serves	Week 2
Data pipeline	Scheduled, monitored extraction from your accounting system into a database you own, with reconciliation checks to the trial balance	Week 6
Dashboards	Board, funder or lender views in the reporting tool you choose, each figure traceable to the ledger	Week 10
Custom tools	Any agreed internal applications, tested with the people who will use them	Weeks 8 to 12, if in scope
Code, runbook and training	Source code in your repository, a maintenance runbook and a handover session for your team or IT provider	Week 12

Build in stages, test with users

Weeks 1 to 2
Define the measures
We agree with the CFO and the board or funder contact what each audience needs, define every measure, and map it to accounts in your chart of accounts.
Weeks 3 to 6
Build the pipeline
We connect read-only to your accounting system, load twelve months of history, and add checks that stop a refresh whenever totals fail to tie to the trial balance.
Weeks 7 to 10
Build the views
We build the dashboards and any custom tools, test them with the people who will use them, and change whatever confuses them.
Weeks 11 to 12
Hand over
We move everything into your accounts if it is not already there, document it and train whoever will run it. Optional support continues by subscription.

Owners define what matters

Read-only API access or exports from your accounting system, and your chart of accounts
Current board, funder and lender reports, including the ones you would like to retire
A cloud account or IT provider where the database and dashboards will live, or agreement to set one up in your name
Grant agreements, loan covenants or budget files that define what must be reported
Time from the CFO or controller, and a short session with one board member or funder contact

Is this the right fit?

A good fit

Organizations that rebuild board or funder reports by hand each month
Nonprofits reporting spend against several grants with different budgets and periods
Companies with lender covenants that want headroom visible before the quarter closes
Organizations that want custom tools without being tied to a developer's platform

Not the right fit

Buyers who want a packaged product with vendor support; a commercial reporting tool may suit better, and we will say which
Large data warehouse builds or ERP implementations

Every figure reconciles before display

A board that finds one wrong number stops trusting the rest. Each pipeline we build reconciles to the trial balance at every refresh. Revenue on the dashboard equals revenue in the ledger for the same period and entity. Cash equals the reconciled bank balance. If a refresh does not tie, it stops, the previous version stays up with its date shown, and the owner is told why. Each measure carries a short definition a director can open, so "operating cash" means the same thing every month.

Funders want spend by award

Grant-funded organizations report the same spending several ways: by program, by award and by budget line, often across different fiscal years. We build the allocation into the pipeline so each award's spend, remaining balance and indirect cost recovery are visible without a separate spreadsheet. If you receive federal awards, the views can follow the categories in your award budgets and support the documentation described in our Uniform Guidance work.

Small tools fill real gaps

Not everything needs a dashboard. Some of the most useful builds are small. One is a vendor onboarding form that will not save a bank-detail change until the callback to a known number is logged. Another is a related-party register the board reviews each quarter, or a tracker showing who has acknowledged the current expense policy. Each tool closes a specific control gap, and each one is documented so your team can change it later. Before we build anything, we check whether a setting in the system you already pay for would do the same job. A switched-on approval rule beats a new application every time it is available.

Ownership is part of the design

We design for the day we leave. Infrastructure sits in your cloud account, the credentials are yours, and the code is in your repository with a runbook. We prefer common, well-documented components to clever ones, so another developer or your IT provider can maintain them. If you publish an Integrity Center, we can host it on your domain under the same arrangement. For the questions a good dashboard should help directors ask, see twelve questions boards should ask the CFO every quarter.

What people ask before hiring us

Who owns the code?

You do. The code lives in your repository and runs in your accounts. You can maintain it yourself, hire someone else to, or keep us on a support subscription. You pay no license fee to us for software we build for you.

Which reporting tool do you use?

The one that suits you. Where possible we build in a tool you already license, and otherwise in a widely used business intelligence tool your IT provider can support. If we recommend a product, we disclose any relationship with its vendor.

How do you make sure the numbers are right?

Every refresh reconciles to the trial balance before the dashboard updates. If totals do not tie, the refresh stops and the owner is told, so the board never sees a figure the ledger does not support. Each figure links back to its definition and its source accounts.

Is our financial data secure?

We use read-only credentials, work in access-logged environments and put the finished system in your own accounts. Client data is never used to train external AI models, and it is deleted from our environments 90 days after the engagement closes unless you ask otherwise in writing.

Also in Finance Technology

Continuous controls monitoring, AI governance and client-owned dashboards for finance teams without the staff to run enterprise tools, delivered as working controls rather than licenses.

Continuous Controls Monitoring
Automated tests on your ledger, bank and access data every week or month, each exception reviewed by a person and routed to a named owner, run as a subscription after a six-week setup.
AI Governance for Finance
An inventory of every AI tool and agent touching finance, a usable AI policy, and controls that treat agents as users, mapped to COSO's 2026 guidance, NIST AI RMF and ISO/IEC 42001.

Tell us what you are seeing

A first conversation is a scoping call: what worries you, what you need to show, and to whom. You leave it with a view on where to start, whether or not you hire us.

Start a conversation

Writehello@financeethics.com

Call(307) 365-5252

Office7124 Commons Dr, Cheyenne, WY 82009

HoursMonday to Friday, 9:00 to 17:00 Mountain Time

Dashboards that tie to the ledger

Board packs are rebuilt every month

Four builds and one handover