Inside Autofid's Live Dashboard: How Garage Owners Get Real-Time Business Clarity

Running a garage or car dealership without real-time financial data is like driving at night with your headlights off. You can feel the road beneath you, but you cannot see what is coming. Most workshop owners rely on month-end spreadsheets, memory, and gut instinct to make critical decisions about pricing, staffing, and stock investment. By the time the numbers arrive, opportunities have been missed and problems have already compounded.

Autofid's Live Dashboard was built to solve this problem permanently. It gives workshop owners and dealer principals a single, glanceable screen that reflects the true state of their business at this exact moment — updated in real time as jobs are completed, vehicles are sold, expenses are recorded, and invoices are issued. There is no end-of-day batch update, no morning report to wait for, and no need to log into three different systems to piece together a picture.

This article breaks down every element of the Autofid dashboard in detail: what each metric means, how it is calculated, why it matters to your bottom line, and how to configure your account to ensure the numbers are always accurate.

The Period Selector: Comparing Performance Across Time

The first control on the Autofid dashboard is the period selector — a toggle that lets you instantly switch your entire dashboard view between three time horizons:

• This Month — the current calendar month from the 1st to today. Use this for day-to-day operational decisions.
• Last Month — the previous complete calendar month. Use this for monthly review meetings, accountant handoffs, and benchmark comparisons.
• This Year — the current calendar year from January 1st to today. Use this for strategic planning, annual budgeting, and investor presentations.

Every KPI card, every chart, and every metric on the dashboard responds instantly to this selector. You do not need to navigate to a separate reports section or run a query — the entire dashboard repaints to reflect the chosen period in under a second.

KPI Cards: Your Business at a Glance

The top section of the Autofid dashboard displays a grid of Key Performance Indicator (KPI) cards. Each card shows a single metric with its value for the selected period. Here is a complete breakdown of every card:

Total Revenue

This figure represents the sum of all completed sales invoices issued during the selected period — across both vehicle sales and service job invoices. It is your top-line income number: everything billed and confirmed. Importantly, this figure only includes completed revenue — jobs that are still in progress or vehicles that have only collected a deposit are not included here, because the money has not yet been fully earned and invoiced.

Monitoring Total Revenue month over month gives you the clearest indication of business growth. A rising revenue line alongside a stable or improving profit margin is the healthiest combination.

Active Jobs

The count of all job cards currently in a non-terminal status — meaning Booked, In Progress, or On Hold. This is your workshop's live workload indicator. If Active Jobs is consistently high relative to your technician headcount, you likely need to hire. If it is consistently low, you have capacity to fill and should consider marketing activity or pricing adjustments to attract more service work.

Active Jobs Value

The combined estimated revenue locked inside all currently open job cards. This is your near-term service revenue pipeline — work that has been booked and will generate income when completed. Comparing Active Jobs Value against your monthly revenue target tells you whether your pipeline is healthy enough to hit your numbers this month.

Completed Jobs

The number of job cards fully invoiced and closed during the selected period. This is your throughput metric — it tells you how much work your team actually delivered, independent of how many jobs were open at any given time. Low completion numbers with high active jobs usually indicates bottlenecks: parts delays, quality check failures, or technician capacity constraints.

Vehicles In Stock

A live count of every vehicle currently in your dealership inventory — across all non-sold statuses: Available, In Preparation, Reserved, and Deposit Collected. This number directly tells you how much capital is tied up in unsold vehicles. Every vehicle in stock is both an asset and a liability — it has value, but it is also costing you daily overhead, insurance, and opportunity cost.

Total Stock Value

The sum of purchase prices plus all recorded direct costs for every vehicle currently in stock. This is the balance-sheet value of your inventory — what you have invested in vehicles that have not yet generated a return. Monitoring this number helps you avoid over-stocking and ensures your working capital position remains healthy.

Cars Sold

The number of vehicles moved to Sold status during the selected period — meaning a sales invoice has been generated and the transaction is complete. This is your primary dealership sales velocity metric. Tracking it over time reveals seasonal patterns, the impact of advertising campaigns, and the effect of pricing changes on sales rate.

Profit Margin (MTD and YTD)

Autofid calculates profit margin across all sold vehicles and completed service jobs simultaneously, giving you a blended net margin figure. The calculation is:

Profit Margin (%) =
  (Total Net Profit ÷ Total Revenue) × 100

Where Net Profit =
  Revenue
  − Cost of Goods (purchase price + direct costs)
  − Realised Overhead (daily running costs locked in at sale)
  − Labour Costs
  − Parts Costs

Autofid shows you both Month-to-Date (MTD) and Year-to-Date (YTD) margin simultaneously. MTD margin shows your current month's operational efficiency. YTD margin smooths out monthly fluctuations to give you a more stable picture of long-term business health.

VAT Due (MTD and YTD)

Your net VAT liability — the difference between output VAT collected on sales and input VAT reclaimable on expenses — shown for both the current month and the year to date. This is not a projection; it is a live calculation based on all transactions actually recorded in Autofid during the period.

Seeing this number clearly at all times prevents the common cash flow crisis that occurs when VAT return day arrives and the liability is larger than expected. If your VAT Due figure is growing faster than your revenue, it typically signals that your input VAT reclaim is not keeping pace — often because expenses are not being recorded in Autofid consistently.

Total Profit

The absolute net profit number for the period in your account's currency — not a percentage, but the actual monetary value. This is your bottom line. When Total Revenue goes up but Total Profit does not follow proportionally, it is a signal to investigate whether costs are rising, margins are being compressed, or overhead allocation is out of alignment.

Total Customers

The cumulative count of active customer accounts in your Autofid CRM. This number represents the full addressable market for your retention marketing activity — every person who has a relationship with your business and could be re-engaged for future work.

Revenue Charts: Monthly and Annual Trend Analysis

Below the KPI cards, Autofid renders an interactive Revenue Breakdown Chart that plots your income over time. The chart visualises three data streams simultaneously:

• Vehicle Sales Revenue — monthly income from completed dealership transactions
• Service Job Revenue — invoiced repair and maintenance work per month
• Business Expense Outflow — categorised expenditure per month

The comparison between revenue streams and expense outflow on a single chart instantly reveals whether any given month was a net positive period. Hovering over any data point shows the exact breakdown for that month — letting you pinpoint precisely when a dip occurred and whether it was revenue-side or cost-side driven.

Understanding the Revenue Period Breakdown

Autofid also provides a supplementary Revenue Period Breakdown panel that splits revenue by source category for the selected period. This tells you the exact contribution of vehicle sales versus workshop service revenue to your total income — critical information for businesses that operate both a dealership and a service workshop.

If your dealership is generating 80% of revenue but your workshop is operating at 90% capacity, this breakdown immediately highlights the imbalance — giving you the data to decide whether to hire another technician, expand your service bay, or invest more marketing budget in the service side of the business.

How to Get the Most Out of Your Dashboard

The Autofid dashboard is only as accurate as the data flowing into it. Follow this setup checklist to ensure your metrics are reliable from day one:

"The Autofid dashboard is not a static report you pull at month end. It is a live operating view that updates the moment any transaction, job status change, or vehicle sale is recorded. Treat it like your workshop's control panel — not its rearview mirror."

Dashboard Access and Role-Based Visibility

Not every team member needs to see every metric. Autofid's role-based permission system controls which KPI cards are visible to which users. A service advisor might see Active Jobs and Completed Jobs but not Profit Margin or VAT Due. A sales executive might see Cars Sold and Vehicles In Stock without access to business expense data.

This segmentation serves two purposes: it keeps sensitive financial information appropriately restricted, and it presents each team member with only the metrics relevant to their daily work — reducing cognitive load and helping people focus on the numbers they can actually influence.

As the business owner or administrator, you always see the full dashboard. For each role in your team, you configure exactly which permissions — and therefore which data — they can access through the Users management panel.