The challenge

As Finance Director of Toppesfield, Mark Salmon faced a common but critical problem: he had no single source of truth for key business metrics. Information was scattered across departments, making it impossible to monitor performance in real-time.

Like many FDs, Mark was heavily dependent on manual Excel reports collated from various departments. This meant he could only see problems at historical monthly reporting points—when it was often too late to take corrective action.

Forecasting monthly turnover was particularly challenging. With multiple clients, various product types, and constantly changing variables like tonnes laid, material costs, labour expenses, and working days, getting an accurate picture of the month-end position was nearly impossible until the month actually ended.

The solution

We collaborated with the Toppesfield team to build a comprehensive balanced scorecard that became the single source of truth for monitoring business performance 24/7.

We worked with Mark to:

• Identify the critical KPIs across all business functions that needed real-time visibility
• Map where data resided across different systems and departments
• Design intuitive dashboards providing the right information at the right time
• Create automated data flows to eliminate manual reporting dependencies

We built interactive, visual dashboards showing:

Work winning metrics:

• Sales conversion rates
• Secured pipeline values
• Programme forecasts

Operational performance:

• Delivery success rates and NCR (Non-Conformance Report) management
• Utilisation levels of both plant and staff
• Safety trends and incident tracking

People management:

• Staff sickness levels
• Welfare information and trends

Financial performance:

• Real-time profitability reports by project and material type
• Debt reports with actionable insights

We created a game-changing forecasting dashboard

We built a sophisticated forecasting dashboard that automatically collates data from multiple sources, such as tonnes laid, material type, labour costs, working days, and expected margins. We used this to provide a constantly updating forecast of month-end turnover.

Unlike traditional month-end reporting, this dashboard becomes more accurate minute by minute as work is completed, giving Mark unprecedented visibility into financial performance throughout the month, rather than after it’s over.

The impact

Mark now has complete business visibility from a single platform, enabling him to see and react to challenges on a daily basis rather than discovering them weeks later. The Vizora platform has also become the foundation for his monthly reporting requirements, eliminating the huge dependency on manual Excel reports that burden so many Finance Directors.