You run the place
The figures we always look at
a month too late
Owner, director, operator. A dashboard can tell you what happened. The useful work is elsewhere: saying what is about to happen, while there is still a decision to be made about it. Those screens exist, and they are read-only — they show, they correct nothing on your behalf.
The money, the right way round
How many hours it takes to cover the month
The number of hours below which the month does not pay for itself — and, next to it, the price the hour would have to sell at for it to.
What an hour of driving actually costs you
You sell by the hour. The wage is monthly, the car wears out by the kilometre, the rent falls quarterly — and the hours given are counted nowhere against them. Here, they are.
The hours of the week that earn
The week as a grid, hour by hour. Not the hours that sell: the ones that earn. That is not the same question.
What you still owe in hours
Your learners pay up front and use it up over months. As long as there are hours still to be given, part of the money already in the account is a commitment, not a profit.
The money that quietly disappears
Cash. A card leaves a line at the provider, a transfer one at the bank, a cheque a paying-in slip. Cash leaves nothing but the entry made at the desk — and until somebody matches it against a real deposit, an oversight and the other thing look exactly alike. The screen gives the amount taken in and never ticked off as banked, and singles out the lines too old to be a simple delay in ticking off.
Bank reconciliation. You drop in a statement, the screen suggests the matches and flags the debits that look like failed payments.
Which payments will fail. Before you send the batch off, not after the rejection and its charges.
The dates that are about to block something
A tracking sheet records expiry dates — the teaching authorisation, the vehicle inspection, the learner's identity papers, the papers in their file — and, more often than not, does nothing with them. Yet when they pass, something stops : the instructor can no longer teach, the vehicle can no longer be driven, the candidate is turned away at the desk after waiting months for a slot.
What calls for action is not the date: it is what is already booked after it. An authorisation expiring on 15 September with forty-seven lessons already booked beyond it is not a diary entry, it is a timetable to rebuild. That is the column the screen shows.
The establishment's approval is watched earlier than the rest — six months ahead, because a renewal does not come through in three weeks. And the date shown is not the filing deadline: the notice period for filing is set out beside it, because an expiry date on its own reads like a deadline, and it is not one.
Finally, the screen of lessons booked on a vehicle that will no longer be allowed on the road does the same job for the fleet. How long can a school car stay on the road?
Running the day
The pace your learners are learning at
Two learners twenty hours in are not in the same place. The one who spreads them over eight months starts again.
Your training capacity
The threshold for booking test slots does not come from your employment contracts. Where the figure comes from.
The lessons the weather makes hard
Rain in the forecast is a nuisance for a learner twenty hours into their driving — and a wasted lesson for the one taking the wheel for the third time. The screen does not treat them the same way.
What you should have said
Everything that did not go out this week, added up. On one page, instead of four screens.
Learners under eighteen
Who signs, who authorises accompanied driving, who to call if there is an accident — and which of them have no emergency contact at all. Otherwise these details sit among thirty other fields, and on the day it matters you hunt for them one by one.
What is left when a learner leaves
There are two ways to work out a leaving balance, and they do not give the same answer. Both are shown, along with what the calculation cannot know.
What none of these screens does
They cancel nothing, move nothing, send nothing. Shifting forty-seven lessons is an operating decision, not the automatic consequence of a date: the person may well have their medical next week. We show, you decide.
The two other roles: the front desk · the instructor · the whole picture.
Look at these screens with your own figures
The number of learners and instructors never enters into my fee. The supervision interface is at your disposal for the whole length of the engagement.