If you can only build four dashboards in your first year as a field service COO, build these. Together they answer the four questions an operator gets asked at every board meeting — and none of them require a data team to maintain.
Why four, not forty
Most ops teams over-instrument. They build 40 dashboards in year one and nobody opens any of them by year two. The discipline of picking four — and only four — forces clarity about what actually drives the business.
1. Crew utilisation heatmap
X-axis: hour of week (Mon 8am through Sun 8pm). Y-axis: each crew. Cell colour: percentage of that hour booked. Target band: 70–85%. Anything above 85% sustained is a hiring signal; anything below 60% sustained is a capacity-rebalance signal.
Read this once a week and you will know — without asking anyone — whether your operation is healthy.
2. Job-margin distribution
A histogram of margin per job over the trailing 30 days. Most operators see a roughly normal distribution centred around 38–45%. The interesting metric is the left tail: jobs with margin below 15% (or worse, negative). Investigate those individually — they are usually scope creep, wrong-priced quotes, or warranty work bleeding silently.
Operator pattern
Most COOs who fix the left tail within their first 90 days see a 4-7 point lift in overall gross margin without changing their pricing once.
3. Customer LTV cohorts
Group customers by acquisition month. Compute trailing 12-month revenue per cohort. Plot as overlapping lines. You learn three things at a glance: whether retention is improving over time, whether your last marketing push brought in lower-quality customers, and which cohort to call up first when you are scoping a referral program.
4. Cash conversion cycle
The number of days between job close and bank deposit, smoothed over a trailing 7-day window. Below 9 days is healthy. Above 14 days, you are financing the operation with your own working capital — that is fine if you have the runway, dangerous if you do not. Crossing 20 days is the canary that should trigger an immediate review of your collection process.
The Friday cadence
All four reports get a 25-minute slot every Friday at 3pm. The COO walks through them with the founder. If a metric is in the red, the next 30 minutes is a working session, not a meeting. If everything is green, you go home early.
FieldServo Pro ships all four out of the box. If you are building your own, the schemas are straightforward — start with utilisation and margin, the other two can wait until you have six months of data to make them meaningful.