Data & Reporting · Charities & Foundations
A small community foundation in south London was spending two full days every quarter pulling grant data into a trustee report by hand. Their primary funder had just started asking for monthly data — a cadence the old process couldn't sustain. We built a live dashboard connected directly to their Google Sheet: always current, always ready, with the funder's monthly report one click away.
The Problem
All 40+ active grants lived in an 18-tab Google Sheet, inconsistently updated across two staff members and a part-timer. Every quarter, the Finance Manager spent two full days pulling the numbers — disbursed to date, status breakdowns, spend by category — into a Word document for the trustee board, then a separate spreadsheet for their primary funder.
Three trustees had independently asked whether they could just see the data live. The funder's new requirement for monthly data made the answer urgent. The existing process couldn't run monthly without consuming most of one person's working week.
Before
The Solution
We built a password-protected live dashboard — a single shareable link that connects directly to their Google Sheet through a lightweight n8n integration. Every time a trustee or the funder opens it, they see data that is never more than 60 seconds stale. No login accounts to manage, no spreadsheet to share, nothing to export manually.
The period filter — This month, This quarter, Year to date, All time — was the direct answer to the monthly funder request: switch the filter, every number and chart on the page rescopes instantly. One click on Export PDF generates a print-ready report matching exactly what's on screen, branded and dated, ready to forward.
The dashboard never talks to Google directly. n8n sits between them — polling the Sheet on every page load, responding in under a second. The same integration pattern scales to any data source the client already uses, with no new Google Cloud credentials to manage.
This month / This quarter / Year to date / All time. Switching the filter rescopes every KPI, every chart, and every table simultaneously — including the PDF. The direct answer to a funder asking for monthly data when the old process ran quarterly.
Generates a print-ready, branded report in the browser — KPI row, status breakdown, category spend, full grant-activity table, confidentiality footer, page numbers. Client-side, so no server to hit and no wait.
In practice
How we solved it
A dashboard that reads a Google Sheet on every page load would be slow and expensive. Instead, the Next.js server fetches from the n8n webhook and caches the response for 60 seconds — fast enough for any trustee session, fresh enough for the Finance Manager watching a data entry update propagate. If the webhook is ever unreachable, a bundled copy of the last known dataset loads instead, so the demo never breaks mid-session.
The biggest risk in a reporting tool is the screen showing one figure and the exported document showing another. Every computed metric — disbursed YTD, grants by status, spend by category — lives in a single metrics module. Both the React dashboard and the react-pdf export call the same function with the same data. The numbers cannot diverge.
react-pdf runs entirely in the browser. No export endpoint, no lambda, no timeout risk. The client clicks Export PDF, the browser assembles the document from the current in-memory data, and the file downloads immediately. The only limit is browser memory — well within range for 40–60 grants.
The brief called for a single shareable link protected by one password — not a full auth system with accounts and password resets. A lightweight middleware layer checks a cookie on every request, redirects to a login page if absent, and sets it on a correct submission. Simple, auditable, and exactly as much security as the client needed for an internal reporting tool.
The Outcome
Before
After
If your team is still assembling reports by hand every month, we can change that. Book a free audit and we'll show you exactly what's possible.
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