Month-end shouldn't take a full day.
Margin problems shouldn't be a surprise.
Intelligence™ connects every module in Slabr™ and surfaces the numbers that actually run your business — job profitability, production throughput, quote pipeline, material cost trends and cash-flow forecasting. Connected reporting from the job record. Pulse is designed to reduce spreadsheet exports and manual pivot tables. Stop waiting until Friday to find out Monday was a disaster.
Product preview
Pulse preview using sample operating data.
Revenue MTD, margin avg, jobs at risk, cash collected — pulled from across the modules, updated as data lands.
Owner dashboard
Connected business signals — margin, cash, capacity, risk
Hotspots in the last hour
- Margin alertJ-1803 sample furniture — actual labour 8h over quoted
- Capacity riskAssembly stage at 4/5 capacity for Wed
- Cash inflowR 142,000 paid by card (sample furniture · Q-2046)
- Job closedJ-1791 sample kitchen install signed off · 36.8% margin
The reporting problem in most fabrication shops
Every Intelligence™ module explained
Intelligence™ is not a separate BI tool you integrate. It reads directly from the Slabr™ data that your team generates every day.
The metrics that actually run a fabrication business
Not generic SaaS vanity metrics. These are the numbers your factory manager, sales lead and accountant all argue about in the same meeting.
- ✓Revenue invoiced vs target
- ✓Gross margin by job
- ✓Aged debtors breakdown
- ✓Cash collected vs invoiced
- ✓Material cost as % of revenue
- ✓Quote pipeline value
- ✓Quote conversion rate
- ✓Average quote-to-close time
- ✓Revenue by client segment
- ✓Quotes issued vs jobs won
- ✓Average lead time by job type
- ✓Jobs completed on time
- ✓Bottleneck stage identification
- ✓Rework and issue rate
- ✓Jobs in each stage right now
- ✓Material cost trends by category
- ✓Supplier price comparisons
- ✓On-order vs received variance
- ✓Stock-out risk score
- ✓PO value outstanding
Connected to your operational data, not yesterday's export
Intelligence™ reads from the operational data in Slabr™. As your team scans a job complete or a payment is reconciled, the Pulse dashboard updates as the data lands — not on a nightly batch and not from a stale export.
Built for your accountant, your banker and your Monday morning
Every report in Intelligence™ can be exported to PDF with your logo and branding, or to CSV for your accountant's spreadsheet. Saved views let you configure a report once and re-run it every month in two clicks.
Schedule any saved view to be auto-emailed on a fixed day of the month. Your accountant gets the management pack on the 1st. Your factory manager gets the production summary every Monday morning. Zero manual effort.
Reports respect your permissions
Intelligence™ never bypasses source-module permissions. A salesperson who can't see cost prices in Production™ won't see them in an Intelligence™ report. Role-based access applies consistently across every view and export.
No separate BI tool to maintain
Intelligence™ is built into Slabr™ — not a third-party integration with its own pricing, connectors and sync delays. No Metabase, no Power BI, no Looker. One platform, one subscription, one support team.
Margin calculated on invoiced revenue
Margin always uses invoiced revenue, never cash received. Payments are tracked separately as a cash-collection signal. This means your profitability view is accurate whether a client pays on day one or day ninety. Pair with variance reporting, lead-time tracking and wastage trends for the full picture.
Intelligence™ is designed so month-end stops being a Friday afternoon spent pulling reports from three different systems and reconciling them manually. The job, payment and production data is already in Slabr — saved views generate the management pack without manual re-entry.
Five reporting mistakes fabrication shops keep making
These are the patterns we see in workshops that have data but no clarity. Fix them and your monthly review goes from a guessing game to a decision meeting.
Tracking revenue without per-job margin
Total revenue can rise while profit collapses. Without per-job margin you can't tell which clients, materials or job types are quietly losing money — you only see it in the bank balance three months late.
Learn: gross margin →No labour-hour variance per stage
If you don't compare estimated hours per stage to actual hours logged, you can't price a similar job better next time. Labour creep at the polishing or finishing stage is the most common margin killer.
Learn: variance →Material waste trends ignored
A 4% wastage rate that drifts to 9% over six months is a quiet 5-point margin hit. Without a wastage trend by material category you only notice when a slab order doesn't cover the job and you're re-ordering at full price.
Learn: wastage % →Quoted vs actual not compared at line level
Comparing total quote to total job cost hides where the leak is. You need line-level comparison — material vs material, labour vs labour, edge profile vs edge profile — to know whether to re-price the line or fix the workflow.
Learn: job cost →Reports built but not reviewed weekly
A dashboard nobody opens is just decoration. Without a fixed weekly close-out review — Monday morning, same metrics, same people — variance signals stack up unactioned and the data stops driving decisions.
Learn: closeout snapshot →Questions fabrication owners ask about reporting
What metrics should a fabrication shop track weekly?
Five numbers, every Monday. Revenue invoiced this week vs target, gross margin on jobs closed in the past seven days, jobs at risk (estimated margin below threshold or behind schedule), aged debtor balance over 30 days, and a stock-out risk count for fast-moving materials. These five cover sales velocity, profitability, delivery risk, cash collection and supply continuity. Anything else is supporting detail. The goal is a 15-minute Monday standup where the team sees the same numbers and decides what changes this week — not a 40-page pack nobody reads.
What's a healthy gross margin target?
For stone, surface and joinery fabrication, 30 to 40 percent gross margin on the average job is a common healthy range — but the right target depends on your overhead base, location and mix of work. Custom one-off work typically carries higher margin than repeat developer jobs. The more important number is consistency: a workshop hitting a steady 32 percent every month is healthier than one swinging between 18 and 45. Track margin distribution, not just the average, and investigate any job that lands more than five points below your target.
How often should I review variance per material?
Monthly at minimum, weekly during active price volatility. Variance per material — the gap between your standard cost rate and what you actually paid in the period — is the leading indicator of margin drift. If your standard rate for a slab is $480/m² and your weighted average paid was $510/m² last month, every quote built on the old rate has lost six points of margin. Most workshops review variance quarterly and discover the problem after a full quarter of underpriced quotes are already in production.
Can I export to my accountant?
Yes. Every report in Intelligence™ exports to PDF (branded with your logo and colours) for management packs, or to CSV for accountant import into Xero, QuickBooks, MYOB, Sage or any spreadsheet workflow. Saved views can be scheduled to email a recipient automatically — your accountant can have the management pack land in their inbox at 8am on the first of every month with no manual effort. Custom column selection means you only send the fields they actually need, not every database field in the system.
Which dashboards matter most for pricing decisions?
Three. First, Insight job profitability filtered by material category — shows which materials are pricing well and which need a rate update. Second, the variance report — shows the gap between standard and actual cost, the canary for margin erosion. Third, quote conversion by price band — shows whether you're winning at the right price or buying work cheap. Owners who price from gut feel without these three end up either too cheap (winning work that loses money) or too expensive (losing work they could have profitably won). Data-driven pricing is a margin multiplier.
How do I track WIP across active jobs?
WIP — work in progress — is the value of jobs started but not yet invoiced. Intelligence™ tracks WIP automatically: each job carries its quoted value, current production stage and percentage complete based on stage progression. The WIP dashboard shows total WIP value, ageing buckets (how long each job has been in progress), and stage distribution. Healthy workshops maintain WIP at roughly 1.0 to 1.5 times monthly revenue. WIP that ballooned above two months of revenue is a sign of stalled jobs, capacity problems or invoicing delays — all of which silently strangle cash flow.
The accounting & operations literature behind these metrics
The reporting principles described on this page — standard costing, variance analysis, WIP accounting, job-order costing and overhead allocation — are drawn from established managerial-accounting and construction-finance literature. References below for further reading.
- AccountingCoach — Standard Costing explanation ↗Foundational reference on standard cost vs actual cost, variance categories and when to investigate.https://www.accountingcoach.com/standard-costing/explanation
- Procore — Construction Work-In-Progress (WIP) Library ↗Construction-industry WIP reporting practice, percentage-of-completion and over/under billing.https://www.procore.com/library/construction-wip
- Deltek — Construction Accounting WIP Guide ↗WIP schedule mechanics for project-based businesses; how WIP signals project health.https://www.deltek.com/en/construction/accounting/work-in-progress
- Saylor Academy — Managerial Accounting: Approaches to Allocating Overhead ↗Open courseware on overhead allocation methods relevant to job-shop and fabrication costing.https://saylordotorg.github.io/text_managerial-accounting/s07-02-approaches-to-allocating-overh.html
- LibreTexts / OpenStax — Job Order Costing ↗Open textbook chapter on job-order cost systems, the costing model that fits custom fabrication.https://biz.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Accounting/Managerial_Accounting_(OpenStax)/04:_Job_Order_Costing/4.08:_Prepare_Journal_Entries_for_a_Job_Order_Cost_System
- Pressbooks (UC Press) — Standard Costs and Variances ↗University-press chapter on standard costs, variance computation and managerial interpretation.https://ucincinnatipress.pressbooks.pub/principlesaccounting/chapter/standard-costs-and-variances/
Intelligence™ is included in every Slabr™ plan
No extra BI subscription. No connectors to maintain. Just live data from your own operation — surfaced the moment you need it. 5-day support, USD pricing, no lock-in contracts.