Where to find it | Sidebar → Overview → Summary. It's also where Signal opens by default. |
Who can see it | Everyone who can sign in |
Can you change data here? | No — but you can flag a wrong number |
How fresh is it? | Finance figures update as the month is posted; most data is a few minutes behind |
What it's for
Summary answers "how is the business doing?" without anyone having to pull exports from three systems. It shows revenue, gross profit, VABO, outsource costs, client and seat counts, headcount, revenue per employee and retention — for whichever month or months you've selected — and lets you slice it all by division or department.
Because it's the one page every access level can open, it doubles as the company's shared scoreboard.
What you'll see
The tiles, across the top:
Tile | What it means |
MRR | Monthly revenue from retainer contracts. One-time project revenue and VABO are excluded. |
Total Revenue | Total company revenue. See "Two revenue numbers" below — this one has a story. |
Gross Profit | Revenue minus third-party outsourcing cost. |
VABO | Performance-based revenue, tracked separately from everything else. |
Outsource Costs | What we pay third parties. |
Total Seats | Unique person-and-role assignments on clients with financial activity. |
Active Clients | Clients with financial activity in the selected month. |
RPE | Revenue per employee. |
Retention Rate | Share of clients retained, with a year-to-date figure underneath. |
Full-Time Employees | Active full-time headcount. |
Assigned Leads | People holding a lead seat on an active client. |
The trend chart — any one metric plotted over time.
The breakdown — a bar chart, a pie chart and a table comparing every division or department side by side, with a retention badge each.
Click almost any tile to drill into the rows behind it. Each row has a small flag icon for reporting a wrong number.
How to use it
Monthly business review. Land on the current month. Read MRR, Total Revenue, Gross Profit and Retention, then check year-to-date retention underneath the retention tile. That's the meeting in four numbers.
Compare divisions. Set Group By to Division and read the breakdown table — revenue, seats, clients, employees and a retention badge per group. Faster than filtering one at a time.
Churn triage. Click the Retention Rate tile. Churned clients are listed first with their revenue, so you can see immediately whether what we lost was material.
Outsourcing control. Click Outsource Costs to see exactly which clients carry third-party cost, and how that compares to what they bring in.
Efficiency over time. Select several months, switch the trend chart to RPE, and read it against the headcount tile. Is revenue growing faster than the team?
Reconcile revenue. Compare the Total Revenue tile against its "In Contract" second line. The gap is the revenue that sits outside contracted retainers and projects.
Two revenue numbers, and why both are right
This is the most-asked question about this page, so here it is plainly.
Total Revenue uses our accounting system for closed months, because our finance planning system misses revenue that posts every month and was understating RPE. This was a deliberate Finance decision in June 2026.
It applies only on this page, only when no division or department filter is active, and only for months that are closed with complete financials.
Everything else — the open month, any filtered view, and every other page in Signal — uses the finance planning figures.
The tile always tells you which basis it's on in its subtitle, and always shows the finance "In Contract" figure on a second line so you can reconcile.
During the accounting close, a just-closed month sometimes has only reversal entries, which net to zero or below. Signal treats that as incomplete, falls back to the finance figure, and shows an information icon reading "NetSuite excluded as financials are incomplete." It flips to the real figure automatically once it posts.
Good to know
Selecting several months changes what the tiles mean. Dollar tiles switch to per-month averages and say so in their subtitles. VABO is the exception — it shows an accumulated total.
The VABO tile disappears when you filter. VABO can't be cleanly attributed to one division or department, so it only appears in the unfiltered company view. Clear the filter and it comes back.
The trend chart doesn't match the Total Revenue tile for closed months. The chart is entirely finance-planning-based; the tile switches to accounting for closed months. They're different series on purpose — the chart matches the "In Contract" line.
Known label issue: in the Breakdown table, the column headed "Gross Profit" currently shows each group's total revenue, not gross profit — and the pie chart titled "Gross Profit Distribution" does the same. Only the horizontal bar chart plots real gross profit. The Excel export is correct, with revenue and gross profit as separate columns. Use the bar chart or the export if you need per-group gross profit.
Retention is point-in-time. A client counts as retained for a month if they churned after that month ended. A client who leaves in August still shows as retained for July — that's measuring contractual status per month, not eventual outcome.
Numbers can settle a few seconds after load. The chart uses server-side aggregates until the full month history finishes loading, then switches to the exact figures behind the tiles.
Standard-access users see a smaller page — tiles and the trend chart only, without filters, drill-downs, the breakdown or export. Two people describing "the Summary page" may genuinely be describing different screens.
Common questions
Why doesn't Total Revenue match our finance planning system? For closed months it deliberately uses accounting-system revenue instead, because the planning system misses monthly revenue pickup. The planning figure is still on the tile's second line, labelled "In Contract."
Why doesn't it match accounting for the current month? Accounting revenue posts at month end, so the open month has no complete figure yet. Signal falls back to contracted revenue plus VABO until the month closes.
Where did the VABO tile go? You have a division or department filter on. VABO is only shown unfiltered. Clear the filter.
Why is Full-Time Employees different from Assigned Leads? Different populations. Full-Time Employees is everyone on the active full-time roster. Assigned Leads counts only people holding a lead seat on a client with financial activity this month. Neither is wrong.
A client just churned — why does an earlier month still show them retained? Because they were retained in that month. Retention is measured per month against the churn date, so only the churn month onward reflects the loss.
Why did every dollar figure change when I selected more months? Multi-month selections switch dollar tiles to per-month averages. The subtitles say so — for example "Avg Monthly MGP (3 mo)". VABO is the exception and accumulates.
I found a wrong number. What now? Click the tile to open its drill-down, find the row, and click the flag icon. It goes into the Corrections queue for review. If you don't have drill-downs, pass it to your team lead.
I only see Summary and Employees in the sidebar. That's standard access. See Who can see what.
Related
Employees — the per-person version of these numbers
Divisional P&Ls — the full P&L behind divisional gross profit
Data Map — which system feeds this page
Corrections — reporting a wrong number
Glossary — MRR, MGP, VABO, RPE, seats