Case Study
Replacing the weekly status report with a dashboard that keeps itself current
About the client
A founder-led web design studio with a team of 12, growing fast enough that the founder could no longer hold the whole picture in his head. The week he asked three people the same question and got three different answers.
The challenge
To find out how anything was going, the founder asked three different people and waited half a day for the answers to come back. The weekly report was assembled by hand in 5 hours and was already out of date by the time it landed.
The expensive part was never the hours spent building the report. It was the decisions that sat waiting for it: a hiring decision that waited five days for numbers that already existed.
The approach
Delivery status already lived in ClickUp, but the weekly question was never only about delivery. It spanned what was shipping, what had been invoiced and who had capacity next week, and the last two never touched ClickUp. A ClickUp dashboard can only show what is inside ClickUp, so I built the view one level up: an n8n workflow pulls from ClickUp, the invoicing spreadsheet and the time tracker on a schedule and writes all three into one Google Sheet. That sheet is the dashboard. Nothing is entered twice, and each tool keeps doing the job it is good at. Numbers that get retyped are numbers that get stale and disputed.
The hard part was not technical, it was deciding what to leave out. I cut anything nobody would act on that week so the dashboard would not become one more thing to maintain, and kept visible only what calls for a decision. Everything else stays reachable, but it no longer competes for attention.
How the dashboard stays current
Each source keeps its own job: ClickUp for delivery, the invoicing sheet for money, the tracker for capacity. n8n reads from all three on a schedule and the Google Sheets dashboard surfaces only what needs a decision.
Outcomes
- The weekly report went from 5 hours of assembly to updating itself.
- Status became available at any moment, without interrupting anyone.
- 4 decisions a week that used to wait for the report now happen the same day.
- He stopped opening the week by asking three people for a status update.