Ledgr/Documentation/Your dashboard
Your dashboard
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.
The dashboard is on every plan, including Free. Individual cards follow the modules you are licensed for — a Starter tenant sees cash and receivables but not the expense donut, because expenses is a Starter module and reports is not. Nothing is hidden; a card you cannot open says which plan opens it. See pricing.
The KPI row
Four figures across the top, 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 rate of spend. | Cash ÷ the last thirty days' net burn. See below. |
The cash runway ring
The ring is green, amber or red by how many weeks of cash the current burn rate leaves you. 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 positive burn rate. A profitable month has no runway to show, and drawing a full green ring in that case would be meaningless rather than reassuring — you get a note explaining why instead.
- It caps at 99+ weeks rather than telling you that you have four years of cash. Past two years the figure is noise.
- It is a straight-line projection off the last thirty days. A month with an annual insurance premium in it will shorten the runway, and that is correct — but check the expense breakdown before acting on it.
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
One card, two tabs. Owed to you is your debtors; you owe is your creditors from bills. Overdue rows are highlighted and carry a Remind button that sends the reminder there and then, using the template from Invoicing → Settings → Email templates.
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
The next statutory deadlines with a live countdown — VAT201, EMP201, EMP501, provisional tax and the annual return — each with a link straight into the SARS returns centre to prepare it.
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.
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. |
Each carries a button into the screen that acts on it. Dismissing one hides it for the session; it returns 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.
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, which it did not before.
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.