The Verifiable Dashboard

What changed

Your dashboard is rebuilt, and it is the surface the new navigation has been making room for. It now reads from a single summary of your finances in which every figure carries its own status: a number is either proven against your ledger or shown as honestly absent, with the reason for the absence stated in plain words. Nothing on the dashboard is an estimate dressed as a fact. Across the top sits your position, and below it a running balance with the month ahead drawn as a forecast, your aged receivables, a worklist of what needs attention, and a tax timeline of your VAT and corporation tax deadlines. Any figure can be opened to show the derivation behind it, the working that produced the number rather than just the number.

Why it matters

A dashboard is the first thing you see and the thing you make decisions from, so the question that matters is whether you can trust a number without going to check it. Most dashboards cannot answer that: a headline figure is a query result, and you have no way to tell a solid number from a hopeful one. This one answers it on every tile. A figure that can be proven against your ledger shows that it is proven. A figure that cannot, because a period is not open or a scheme is not set, says so, rather than showing a zero or a guess you would mistake for real.

The honest absence is the point. You are never quietly handed a number the system itself cannot stand behind, and when a figure does carry its mark you can act on it without opening the books to confirm it. That is a different promise from a prettier chart, and it is the one a set of accounts should make.

The tax timeline is derived, not typed. Your VAT and corporation tax deadlines are computed from your own filing data and HMRC’s published rules, and only the deadlines that apply to you appear: corporation tax if you are a company, VAT if you are registered. The dates are derived correctly, including the month-end cases the obvious calculation gets a day wrong.

How it is enforced

Every figure is proven or absent, never ambiguous. A figure reaches the dashboard only as one of three things: proven, an estimate clearly marked as one, or a stated absence carrying its reason. A figure that arrives malformed, claiming to be both at once or neither, is rejected before it can render, so a number that has lost its proof cannot slip onto the surface wearing the look of one that kept it.

A deadline appears only where you have declared the fact it rests on. The legal form your business takes is recorded as a declared fact at the data layer (migration 122), and the timeline reads it: corporation tax for a company, VAT for a registered business. Where the fact is not yet declared, the dashboard prompts you to complete it rather than sealing a deadline on a guess. A wrong date carrying a confident mark is worse than an honest gap, so the gap is what you get until the fact is in.

The corporation tax payment date follows HMRC’s end-of-month rule exactly. The payment date is nine months and one day after your year end, but HMRC dates a year end that falls on the last day of a month to the first day of the tenth month that follows, which a plain nine-months-and-one-day sum lands a day early for a year end on the last day of a thirty-day month or of February. The date is now derived by the end-of-month rule itself (migration 123), so it agrees with HMRC for every year end, not just the ones the shortcut happens to get right.

How it is proven

The dashboard summary is backed by eight executable anchors that open real database connections against the live schema, set a tenant context, and roll back, so they prove the assembled figures and the tenant isolation the way production runs them, not the way a mock would. They pin the proven and absent states of each figure, the rejection of a malformed one, isolation between tenants on the assembly path, and the deadline derivation for each legal form.

The corporation tax payment date is proven separately over a closed set of thirty-one dates: every month end across a leap and a non-leap year, plus ordinary, boundary and overflow days. The space is bounded, so the rule is exhausted rather than sampled, and there is no curated subset for an error to hide in (migration 123).

The whole release crossed the sixteen-phase deploy pipeline with 339 executable anchors green and zero violations, every migration registering itself against the live database on apply.

Operational impact

The dashboard now reads from one summary it can prove, with a verification signal that rides the top bar on every page, not only the dashboard, and turns the moment your ledger stops reconciling, so a loss of integrity surfaces wherever you are working rather than waiting to be found. The reporting surface gains the dashboard summary and a standalone ledger verification check, taking the public API to 213 endpoints. There is no change to your data and there are no breaking changes.

Deferred

Two things are honestly not finished. A company’s first year usually runs a little over twelve months, which under HMRC’s rules splits into two corporation tax accounting periods with two separate deadlines; today the timeline surfaces the nearest single deadline, and the first-year split is the next piece of this work. And your accounting reference date, the date your financial year ends, is not yet editable in the app, so a company whose year end is not yet confirmed sees a prompt to confirm it rather than a deadline sealed from a default. That prompt is the honest stand-in until the editable date and the split land. Until they do, no deadline is ever sealed on an unconfirmed date.