Build Any KPI You Want, on Your Own Live QuickBooks Data

Every finance team has "the one metric" the board keeps asking for that no off-the-shelf tool has a tile for. The KPI builder reaches any P&L line, any GL account, any unit-sales figure — combined into whatever formula the question actually needs.

The 12 working capital KPIs we ship built-in cover a real, common set of questions. They don't cover all of them. A per-unit freight cost. A discount rate as a percent of gross revenue. A trade spend ratio your specific investor asks about every quarter that isn't a standard ratio anywhere. Those need a formula nobody could have pre-built for you, because it's specific to how your business actually gets asked about.

How the formula actually works, mechanically

A KPI is a numerator and a denominator, each built from one or more signed terms, combined with one of four operators — add, subtract, multiply, or divide. Each term can pull from three different places:

• Any P&L line, at any level — a top-line section, a budget-building-block line, or a specific GL account. Whatever your own Setup already defines, not a fixed list.
• Any calculated subtotal your P&L already computes — Net Revenue, Gross Margin, EBITDA, or whatever you've named your own totals. These come straight from your configured P&L structure, so a company that renamed "Total OPEX" to "Total Expenses" sees "Total Expenses" in the picker, not a stale default.
• Unit sales — total units sold, or a specific item, pulled from the same item-sales data the Item Sales report already uses.

A numerator isn't limited to one term, either — "Gross Revenue minus COGS" is two signed terms summed together before anything else happens to it, which is what makes something like a margin-on-margin ratio possible without a workaround.

A real example

Say the question is: "what's our freight cost as a percentage of Net Revenue, trailing three months?" That's a numerator pulling straight from the GL account booking freight spend, a denominator pulling from the company's own computed Net Revenue line, divided, over a T3M window:

See the answer before you save it

The builder shows a live preview while you build. Pick the lines and the operator and it computes the formula on your own data straight away: the value as it will display, every input, the formula written out in words, and the monthly trend. If a line can't be found or a denominator is zero, you get a plain message instead of a blank card, so you find out before the KPI reaches a board package.

You don't have to start from a blank form either. Starter KPIs such as gross margin %, EBITDA %, marketing as a share of net revenue, and net revenue, COGS or gross margin per unit are one click away. DrillFi offers only the ones your books can support, built from your own line names, and you can change anything before you save.

The number format follows the formula. Dollars over dollars shows as a percentage, dollars over units shows as dollars per unit, and you can override it if you want something else.

Every KPI next to its budget and last year

A single number rarely settles anything. Where your budget or last year's figures exist for the same months, each KPI card shows them underneath: Marketing 11.3% of net revenue, budget 10.0%, last year 9.4%. The same line appears in the monthly package. Unit sales and some detailed GL accounts carry no budget, so those KPIs show whichever comparisons can be computed honestly, and none at all when neither can.

Time windows that actually mean what they say

Every custom KPI runs over Month-to-Date, Last Month, Trailing 3 Months, Trailing 12 Months, or Year-to-Date — and every one of those is scoped to whatever "As Of" period the rest of the app is showing, the same as the built-in working capital tiles. A T12M ratio checked in April looks at the trailing twelve months ending in April, including the tail of the prior fiscal year if fewer than twelve months have closed yet — not a truncated, silently-wrong window that only becomes "real" once a full year has passed.

Grouped the same way the built-ins are

Custom KPIs organize into named categories — Efficiency, Profitability, whatever grouping actually matches how your board reads a deck — the same titled-section pattern the working capital tiles use for Liquidity, Collections & Payables, Inventory, and Cash. Your own metrics sit alongside the built-in ones on the same KPI tab, not in a separate, disconnected part of the app.

Four ways to see the same number

The same KPI doesn't have to look the same way twice. Each one can render as any of four formats, picked per KPI, not locked in at creation:

• Tile — the headline number by itself. Good for a dashboard someone glances at once a day.
• Calculation — the number plus every term that built it, laid out like a mini income statement. Good for the number someone's going to be asked to defend.
• Bar graph — the same metric, one bar per month, for spotting a trend at a glance instead of reading a table of numbers.
• Line graph — a continuous trend line instead of discrete bars — better for a metric where the trajectory matters more than any single month's value.

Same underlying formula, same live data, four different lenses on it — pick whichever one actually answers the question being asked.