Six numbers make a shop dashboard. The rest is decoration.

Dashboards fail by addition. Every metric earns its place with a story, nobody ever removes one, and eighteen months later the "dashboard" is a scrolling museum that takes twenty minutes to read — so nobody reads it. We wrote about the deeper disease in The hidden cost of dashboards in retail; this is the constructive half: what a shop dashboard should actually contain.

The six

1. Sales vs the same period last year. Not vs last week — seasonality lies. One number, one direction arrow.

2. Contribution margin, not just revenue. What the sales actually left behind after the costs that rode along with them. A revenue line alone will lie to you.

3. Stock cover in weeks. Cash frozen on shelves, expressed as time. Drifting up: you are over-buying. Drifting down: check your A items before they gap.

4. Sell-through on new lines. Of what you bought this season, what share has sold? It is the earliest warning your buying gives you, and the input your markdown discipline runs on.

5. Regulars going quiet. How many of your known customers are overdue against their own rhythm — the fade signal — this week versus normal.

6. Revenue per labour hour. The rota-versus-demand number. Not to maximise; to notice when it moves.

The rule that keeps it working

A weekly dashboard's job is to answer one question: *has anything moved enough that I should go and look?* Six numbers, each with its normal range, each going amber only when it leaves that range. Anything that has been green for a year can graduate to a monthly view. Anything you have not acted on in six months was never a KPI — it was wallpaper.

This philosophy is baked into how Kauzio presents your business: not forty charts, but the handful of numbers that have earned attention *this week*, each carrying the reason it is raised. A dashboard is not a display of everything you know. It is a shortlist of what deserves you next.