Most small businesses run on Excel and guesswork. I switched to a live Python dashboard 6 months ago — here's how to build one in an afternoon.

What We're Building

A dashboard that shows:

Today's revenue vs yesterday (and vs last week same day)

Pending orders/invoices

Low stock alerts

Top 5 customers this month

Simple profit/expense summary

Runs in terminal, updates every 30 seconds.

The Complete Code

import sqlite3 import time import os from datetime import datetime , timedelta

def clear_screen (): os . system ( " cls " if os . name == " nt " else " clear " )

def get_dashboard_data ( db_path = " business.db " ): conn = sqlite3 . connect ( db_path ) c = conn . cursor () today = datetime . now (). date () yesterday = today - timedelta ( days = 1 ) last_week_today = today - timedelta ( days = 7 ) month_start = today . replace ( day = 1 )

# Today's revenue c . execute ( " SELECT COALESCE(SUM(amount), 0) FROM orders WHERE date(order_date) = ? " , ( str ( today ),)) today_revenue = c .…