Custom KPIs

What a custom KPI is

When the 100 built-in KPIs don’t cover something your business watches, you can define your own. A custom KPI is a ratio: a numerator over a denominator, each built from pieces Pocket-CFO already knows how to calculate. It appears on your dashboard beside the built-in ones and is recalculated with them.

Building one

Open Create safe custom ratio on the dashboard, give it a Name and Description, then build the numerator and denominator from any of these operands:

Category

A total from your mapped accounts — revenue, payroll, cash, and so on.

Metric

A figure Pocket-CFO already calculates, such as net income or burn.

External input

A figure you supply that doesn’t live in your ledger — see below.

Constant

A whole number.

Nested formula

A smaller formula of its own, for anything that needs more than one step.

Each operand can be read for a period — the current month, the prior month, the prior year, or a trailing twelve-month average — and combined with add, subtract, multiply, divide, percentage, margin, or gain. Formulas can nest up to three levels deep with up to ten parts. Select Save custom ratio.

External inputs

Some figures don’t come from your books — headcount, units shipped, square footage. Add them in the dashboard’s monthly grid, or import a CSV with the columns month,input_key,value. Rows that can’t be read are reported one by one rather than silently skipped.

Safe by design

A custom KPI is a structured formula, not code: you choose from known operands and operators, and Pocket-CFO evaluates it with the same deterministic engine as every other figure. New custom KPIs are marked for review, so a formula has a second look before anyone relies on it.

Recurring revenue

If your business earns recurring revenue, select Configure MRR to tell Pocket-CFO how to recognise it. Your dashboard then tracks monthly recurring revenue — new, expansion, churned, and net change — alongside everything else.