Your dashboard

Watch the lesson: Read your dashboard (2:17).

The screen Ledgr opens on. It answers four questions before you have clicked anything: how much cash is there, who owes you, what is due to SARS, and what changed since you last looked.

Plan.

The dashboard is on every plan, including Free. Individual cards follow the modules you are licensed for, and a card you are not licensed for is simply not drawn — a business on Starter gets cash, receivables and the expense donut but no Revenue tile, because reports is a Business module. Pricing is where to see what each tier adds.

The figures across the top

Four headline figures, and it is worth knowing where each one comes from because they are not all the same kind of number.

Tile	What it is	Where it comes from
Total cash	What the books say you hold across every bank and cash account.	The ledger, not the bank. The statement balance sits underneath it with the unreconciled difference named, so the two are never quietly merged.
Outstanding receivables	Invoiced and not yet paid.	Live invoices only. A voided or credited invoice leaves this figure the moment it is voided or credited.
Revenue	Trailing twelve months of sales, excluding VAT.	Excluding VAT deliberately: output VAT is SARS' money passing through your bank, and counting it makes you look 15% bigger than you are.
Cash runway	Weeks of cash left at the current net burn.	Total cash ÷ the last thirty days' net burn — what your income statement says you spent less what you earned. See below.

The cash runway ring

The ring is green above sixteen weeks, amber above eight and red at eight or fewer. The burn is net: the last thirty days' expenses (cost of sales and operating expenses) less the same thirty days' revenue, both from your books and both excluding VAT. It is the one tile on this screen that is a projection rather than a fact, so it behaves conservatively:

It only draws when there is both cash and a net burn. If you took in more than you spent over the thirty days there is no runway to show, and drawing a full green ring in that case would be meaningless rather than reassuring — the tile says income covered spending instead.
Past two years (104 weeks) it reads 99+, "over 2 years at current burn", rather than telling you that you have four years of cash. That far out the figure is noise.
It is a straight-line projection off the last thirty days, on the same basis as your income statement rather than your bank: a month with an annual insurance premium in it shortens the runway, and one with a large invoice raised but not yet paid lengthens it. The cash-flow forecast is the answer by due date — check both before acting on either.

The Cash runway insight uses exactly the same figures, so the card and the ring cannot disagree.

Revenue against expenses, and the expense breakdown

Twelve months of revenue against expenses, drawn as bars, an area or a line — the same data three ways, because different people read trend differently. Click a month to drill into it.

Beside it, the current period's expenses as a donut by category. This is the tile that answers "where did it go", and it is the fastest route into expenses for the month you are asking about.

Outstanding invoices — owed and owing

Outstanding Invoices is one card with two tabs. Owed to you is your debtors; You owe is your creditors from bills. The card shows the first five with Show all for the rest. Overdue invoices you are owed carry a Remind button: tap it, then Send email? to confirm, and the customer is sent the standard payment-reminder email straight away, outside your reminder schedule. The send is recorded on the customer's Communication History.

Both tabs on one card is deliberate. Debtors on their own is a flattering number; the question a business actually has at the start of the week is the difference between the two.

The SARS calendar

Your next statutory deadlines — up to six, soonest first, moved off weekends and public holidays — with a live countdown and a link straight into the SARS returns centre to prepare each one. The list is yours, not the whole statutory schedule:

VAT201 only if the company is a VAT vendor, on the period your VAT category sets;
EMP201 and EMP501 only if the company has employees;
provisional tax (IRP6) only if Provisional taxpayer is switched on under Settings → Tax & VAT;
the income tax return (ITR14) always, from your financial year end.

The SARS calendar is part of the SARS returns centre, which starts on Professional.

The countdown is not a filing status.

Ledgr prepares returns and hands you the file; it does not transmit anything to SARS. A deadline goes quiet when you note the return as filed, with your own eFiling reference. Read SARS returns before relying on it.

Bank accounts

Every tracked account with a sparkline of its recent movement and a consolidated total, plus how much of each is reconciled. An account drifting away from reconciled is the earliest signal that a statement has not been imported — see banking.

The cash-flow forecast, and a promised date

The forecast projects eight weeks from the cash your books say you hold: receivables arrive on their due dates, bills and recurring costs leave on theirs.

An invoice already past its due date is not counted as coming in. Money that has failed to arrive on its own date is the least likely money in your book to arrive next week, and counting it would tell you that you will hold cash you do not have. The amount is reported under the chart instead, so a known debtor does not simply vanish from the projection.

When a customer gives you a date, tell Ledgr and the forecast counts it.

Open Outstanding Invoices, find the overdue invoice and choose Promise date. The invoice then appears in that week's inflow instead of in the overdue amount, and the row says what was promised.

Ledgr never guesses a date from how a customer has paid before. Only a date somebody has actually been given is used — this is a figure you may decide whether to make payroll on.

If the promised date passes and the money has not arrived, the invoice goes back into the overdue amount on its own and the row says not received. Nothing you have to remember to undo.

Insights

Five things Ledgr noticed, ranked with the most serious first. They are computed from your own books on fixed rules — there is no model, nothing is sent anywhere, and the same figures always produce the same insight:

Insight	When it appears
Revenue trend	Month-on-month change worth noticing — a rise is flagged for information, a fall as a warning.
Largest overdue customer	Your worst aged-debtors line. Critical past R50 000 or 60 days.
Cash runway	Under eight weeks is a warning; under four is critical.
Tax deadline	Within fourteen days is a warning; three days or fewer is critical.
Category spend spike	A category more than half again its own three-month average.

Insights are worked out from the same figures as your reports, so a role without access to Reports does not see them. Each carries a button into the screen that acts on it. Dismissing one hides it on this device for the rest of the month, and it comes back next month if the condition still holds — because a problem you dismissed in March is not solved in April.

The setup checklist

New businesses get a five-step checklist above the tiles: capture the company's registration and VAT details, import a bank statement, send an invoice, capture payroll year-to-date figures, and bring across data from your old system.

Four of the five are detected from your books rather than ticked. Send an invoice and the invoice step completes itself; import a statement and the bank step does. Only "bring your data across" needs a tick, because a business with nothing to migrate looks identical to one that has not started.

Completing is per business; hiding is per person.

A captured VAT number is a fact about the business, so it completes for everyone. Hiding the list is a preference, so dismissing it does not remove it from your colleague's screen — and it stays dismissed after you navigate away.

Choosing your cards

Customise dashboard, under the greeting at the top of the dashboard, lists every card you can see with a switch to show or hide it and Move up / Move down buttons to change the order. Changes apply and save as you make them, so there is only a Done button; Reset to default puts every card back. The layout is yours — colleagues keep their own. A card your plan or role cannot show is not listed. The setup checklist is listed there too, so a checklist you hid can be brought back while it still has steps left.

Recent activity

The last few things that happened across the business — a payment received, an invoice sent, an expense captured, a statement imported, a pay run posted. It is the fastest way to answer "did that go through?" without opening the module it went through.

Set your business up once

Work down the checklist and the dashboard fills itself in.

Open Ledgr Getting started guide

Common problems

What you see	What to do
The setup checklist keeps coming back	It should not — hiding it is remembered per person, and four of its five steps are detected from your books rather than trusted from a tick, so the list empties itself as you work. Only the "bring your data across" step needs the tick, because a business with nothing to migrate is indistinguishable from one that has not started.
"Total Cash" is zero or looks wrong	It is cash per the ledger — what your books say you hold, the same figure as the balance sheet — not the bank's balance. The bank statement balance is shown beneath it with the unreconciled difference. A bank account with only a typed opening figure and nothing posted behind it adds nothing: import a statement and reconcile it — see Banking.
Revenue on the dashboard differs from the income statement	The tile is labelled trailing 12 months and the statements default to the financial year to date. Two different questions, both labelled. Use Reports for anything you are reconciling.
Receivables differ from the aged debtors report	They should agree to the cent, and both should equal the debtors control account. If they do not, the aged report's own control difference is the figure to read — it is the one place a posting problem surfaces.
The cash runway ring is missing or grey	It needs cash in the books and a net burn over the last thirty days. The tile says which is missing — no bank account, no cash posted yet, no spend recorded, or income covered spending, in which case there is no runway to show.
A KPI reads zero on a busy company	Check which entity is selected in the header. Every figure on this screen is for the active company unless it says otherwise.
The SARS calendar shows a deadline you do not file	The calendar follows your settings: VAT201 appears for a VAT vendor, EMP201 and EMP501 once the company has employees, and provisional tax when Provisional taxpayer is on under Settings → Tax & VAT. Correct the setting and the deadline goes. A period you have noted as filed on the returns centre drops off too.
Figures are older than expected	Every screen reads from the copy on your device first and refreshes behind it, so a figure can be a moment behind and will repaint itself. A copy older than ten minutes is captioned as such rather than presented as live — see Working offline.