The Dash blog
Sharper forecasts, clearer conversations.
Practical thinking on forecasting, performance and advisory, from the team building Dash.
The capacity ceiling: why advisory growth stalls, and what actually breaks it
Most practices are not short of advisory demand. They are short of the hours to deliver it.
From assistant to agent: what agentic AI really changes about forecasting
For accounting practices weighing up what to adopt, what to resist, and what to charge for.
The close that finishes on the fourth working day
Nobody has a slow close. They have a close that waits. For a bank feed, for one supplier invoice, for an email nobody has answered since Thursday.
Know the number, and know why it moved
A forecast that only tells you the number leaves the hardest question unanswered. When your model is built on drivers, every figure connects to the thing that moves it.
Quarterly updates changed the advisory calendar. Most practices have not noticed yet.
Making Tax Digital for income tax turned an annual client conversation into four. The compliance work is priced at the floor. The conversation around it is not.
From Xero to a live forecast in five minutes
Connecting your accounting data should not need a consultant, a mapping workshop or a fresh spreadsheet. Here is what the first five minutes actually looks like.
How wrong is your forecast? Put a number on it.
Every forecast is wrong. The useful question is by how much, in which direction, and whether that is getting better. Most teams have never measured it.
Thirteen weeks on one page
When cash is tight, a monthly forecast is the wrong resolution. The trouble almost always happens inside a month, in a week you did not look at.
Scenario planning without the spreadsheet sprawl
Every serious plan needs a downside and an upside. The problem is never the thinking. It is the ten near identical spreadsheets you end up maintaining.
Leases are on the balance sheet now. Check the covenants before the bank does.
The FRS 102 periodic review changes how lessees report. Gearing moves, EBITDA moves, and covenant headroom moves with them. That conversation is better had early.
How practices scale advisory without scaling headcount
Advisory is the work clients value most and the work that scales worst. The bottleneck is rarely talent. It is the time each forecast takes to build and keep alive.
Forty seven metrics, and nobody is looking
Dashboards grow by accretion. Somebody asks for a chart once, it stays forever, and eventually the page is so full that the two numbers that matter are impossible to find.
Reading a cash flow forecast: four questions that matter
A cash flow forecast is only useful if you know what to look for. These four questions turn a wall of numbers into a decision.
Variance analysis that actually tells you something
Most variance reports say what missed. Good ones say why, and what to do next. The difference is where the analysis lives.