Reporting That Runs Impact Plumbing's Monthly Meeting

Impact Plumbing runs commercial plumbing packages with around sixty staff, and the data to run it well already existed. It sat in Dynamics, in Xero, and in the purchasing and site systems we'd built with them over several years. Getting a straight answer out of it was the hard part.

The monthly management meeting worked because James, the director, knew which questions to ask. That's a fragile way to run a company. The meeting only covers what one person thought of that morning, answers come back as opinions instead of numbers, and anything nobody raises goes unexamined for another month.

Underneath that sat a harder problem. Different parts of the business measured themselves differently. Estimating had its view of a job, project managers had theirs, and finance had the ledger. Reconciling them was manual, so it happened rarely, and by the time anyone did it the job was usually finished.

What Impact needed wasn't more charts. It was one set of numbers everyone in the room agreed on, in front of them at the moment they had to make a call.

Nine report suites now cover the business: company finance, project operations, project financials, tender and estimating, purchasing, day works, timesheets, price list history and staff ratings. They read live from the systems of record, so what's on screen is what's true right now, not what was true at last night's refresh.

The meeting itself is the product. We designed it page by page with James, and gave every page an owner. Estimating overview belongs to the estimator, who walks the top flagged tenders and where they'd sit in the schedule. Forecast against actuals belongs to the project manager. Labour forecast and worker ratings belong to operations. James chairs, and the software drives the story from top to bottom.

Notes are captured against the number that prompted them. Start a meeting in the report viewer and whatever gets discussed is recorded against the page on screen, with a screenshot if the point needs one. Nobody reconstructs the pack afterwards from memory. It builds itself while people talk.

The same data runs the operational side. Labour forecasting assigns crews to projects on a drag-and-drop board that runs up to twenty months out, and exports to Excel for the estimators. End-of-day reports show what actually happened on each site, with photo evidence, attendance against what was scheduled, and anything still outstanding. Inspection and test plans track completion by project and level.

All of it opens inside Dynamics, where the team already spends its day. That's deliberate. Tools that live somewhere else and ask for a second login get quietly abandoned, whatever's in them.

The monthly meeting now follows the reports instead of the other way round. Everyone arrives knowing which page they're speaking to, and the decisions land against the figure that prompted them.

Estimating, operations and finance argue from the same numbers. When the estimator's view of a tender and the project manager's forecast disagree, that's now a visible difference on a page rather than a discovery someone makes at the end of a job.

Management can see a month before it closes. Forecast against actuals, labour committed against labour available, day works raised and not yet charged, purchasing by project and supplier. All of it is current when someone opens it, because nothing is cached between the systems and the screen.

The reports get used, which is the part that usually fails. They open where the team already works, so using them isn't a decision anyone has to make.

The next step is scheduled delivery, so the weekly and monthly packs arrive without anyone opening anything.