Ajera Dashboards and KPIs: The Reports Principals Should Actually Be Watching
Ajera can produce an enormous amount of information. That’s both its strength and the reason so many principals quietly ignore it. When a system can report on everything, it’s easy to end up watching nothing, or worse, watching a cluttered dashboard that buries the few numbers that actually matter.
The firms that get the most from Deltek Ajera project accounting aren’t the ones tracking the most metrics. They’re the ones who’ve identified the handful of KPIs that genuinely drive decisions, and built dashboards that surface those numbers clearly.
As fall planning gets underway, it’s a good moment to step back and ask a simple question: of everything Ajera can show you, what should a principal actually be watching?
The problem with most firm dashboards
Most dashboards fail in one of two ways. Either they’re empty, because no one configured them beyond the defaults, or they’re overcrowded, packed with every available metric until the signal is lost in the noise.
A useful dashboard is opinionated. It reflects a deliberate decision about what matters most for your firm and leaves the rest available for when it’s needed, rather than competing for attention every day. The goal is a screen a principal can read in two minutes and come away knowing whether the firm is on track.
The KPIs that actually drive decisions
A small set of metrics does most of the work in a project-based A/E firm. These are the numbers worth putting in front of leadership regularly.
Utilization
Utilization, the share of available time spent on billable work, is the heartbeat of a professional services firm. Watched at the firm, team, and individual level, it reveals whether you’re carrying cost you can’t bill, or running so hot that burnout and write-offs are coming.
Fee burn and budget-vs-actual
Tracking how quickly active projects are consuming their fees, against the work completed, is the clearest early-warning signal for margin erosion. A dashboard that surfaces projects burning fee faster than planned lets principals intervene while it still matters.
Work-in-progress and unbilled time
WIP and unbilled time represent work you’ve done but not yet turned into cash. When these climb unnoticed, cash flow suffers and the risk of eventual write-offs grows. Keeping them visible keeps billing disciplined.
Accounts receivable aging
Revenue isn’t real until it’s collected. AR aging shows whether billed work is actually converting to cash, and surfaces collection risks before they become losses.
Net revenue per employee
This is a clean, high-level measure of firm productivity and health. Tracked over time, it tells a principal whether the firm is becoming more or less efficient as it grows.
Building dashboards people will actually use
Identifying the right KPIs is only half the work. The other half is presenting them so they get used.
A few principles make the difference between a dashboard that informs and one that gets ignored:
- Match the view to the role. A principal, a PM, and an accountant need different dashboards. One screen cannot serve all three.
- Lead with exceptions. Surface what’s off-track first. Principals don’t need to see the projects that are fine.
- Keep it to a glance. If the dashboard takes more than a couple of minutes to interpret, it won’t be checked regularly.
- Trust the underlying data. A dashboard built on inconsistent coding or stale timesheets is worse than none, because it looks authoritative while being wrong.
The data discipline behind every good dashboard
This last point deserves emphasis, because it’s where most dashboard efforts quietly fail. A dashboard is only a window onto the underlying data. If timesheets are late, coding is inconsistent, or the close is unreliable, the dashboard will faithfully display unreliable information.
This is why dashboard projects so often start with the unglamorous work of tightening time entry, standardizing coding, and establishing a dependable close. The reporting layer can only be as good as the data beneath it.
From reports to decisions
The point of a dashboard is not to be looked at. It’s to change what principals do. The right KPIs, surfaced clearly and reviewed regularly, turn Ajera from a record of what happened into a tool for deciding what happens next.
At Summit Business Advisors, we help A/E firms cut through the noise and build Ajera dashboards around the KPIs that actually drive decisions, backed by the data discipline that makes them trustworthy. If you want to make your Deltek Ajera project accounting genuinely useful at the leadership level, whether through an Ajera consultant for project accounting optimization or a certified Deltek Ajera consultant for project profitability, we can help you watch the numbers that matter and ignore the ones that don’t.