Define what counts as a sale
A sale might mean a signed contract, a paid order or an order delivered without cancellation. These milestones happen at different times and can produce different totals. Select one definition and use it throughout the reporting period. If your team needs more than one milestone, track them separately rather than combining them into a single count.
MetricBoard uses completed sales and sales target as unit counts. It does not treat the target field as dollars. If your goal is revenue, use the revenue tracker and a clearly named custom revenue-target snapshot, then calculate the corresponding attainment separately.
Build a target from capacity and demand
Start with historical results from comparable periods, then examine what is changing. Available selling days, staffing, inventory, lead volume and fulfilment capacity all affect the number you can reasonably pursue. A target based solely on the previous month plus an arbitrary increase can overlook a holiday closure or a major stock constraint.
A top-down target aligns the team with a business requirement, but may exceed operational capacity. A bottom-up target reflects pipeline and resources, but can preserve comfortable assumptions. Compare both approaches. When they disagree, identify the extra capacity, demand or conversion improvement needed to close the gap.
Calculate attainment and remaining work
Attainment equals completed sales divided by target sales, multiplied by 100. In an illustrative month with 72 completed sales against a target of 90, attainment is 80% and 18 further sales are needed. These figures describe position against a plan; they do not say whether the plan itself was sensible.
MetricBoard sums sales and targets across the filtered rows. If a monthly target is 90 and you enter daily data, allocate the 90 units across those days. Do not repeat 90 on every daily row. Repeated full-period targets inflate the denominator and make healthy performance appear weak.
Distinguish progress from pace
Being halfway to a target halfway through a month does not automatically mean you are on track. Orders may cluster around billing dates, campaigns or customer purchasing cycles. A simple linear pace calculation assumes every day contributes equally, which may be unsuitable for your business.
If you use a pace estimate outside the tool, compare elapsed selling days rather than calendar days when appropriate. Label it as an assumption-based forecast and show the actual attainment alongside it. MetricBoard intentionally reports actual totals and target attainment rather than generating a forecast from an unverified daily pattern.
Pair the goal with a quality measure
A unit target can encourage discounting, low-quality deals or sales that later cancel. Revenue can improve while contribution falls. Review the sales count next to profit and customer outcomes so that the headline goal does not reward behaviour that harms the business.
Useful companion measures include average order value, cancellation rate, repeat purchase rate and contribution per order. Choose only those you can define and maintain reliably. A custom KPI is useful for a reviewed snapshot of one of these measures, but it is not a live integration and will not update itself when new sales are entered.
Run a constructive review
At each review, separate three questions: what happened, why it happened and what will change next. First reconcile the count and target. Then look for evidence about demand, capacity or conversion. Finally assign a specific action, an owner and a date to revisit it. A dashboard provides the starting point, not the entire diagnosis.
Keep an external record when targets are revised. Replacing a row updates the dashboard but does not retain target history. Export before a revision if you need to compare the original plan with the current one. This makes a missed target a learning opportunity rather than a reason to quietly redefine success.