Putting your business numbers on a TV screen

A number nobody looks at changes nothing. A number on the wall of the stock room, the kitchen or the back office changes behaviour within a week, because the people who can act on it see it without asking. Televisions are cheap and most new ones run Android TV, so the question for a business is no longer whether it can afford a dashboard screen but what to put on it.

What a TV is for, and what it is not

A phone dashboard is for the owner, who taps, filters and drills down. A TV is read from across the room by people who cannot touch it. Google's guidance for TV app developers describes the difference in one line: layouts must be designed so that "viewers can enjoy from 10 feet away and comfortably navigate with just a directional pad and a select button". That rules out small text, dense tables and anything that needs a keyboard.

The same guidance notes that TV apps "run locally on TV devices" and are built with the same structure as phone apps but must not reuse phone layouts. Google requires a TV app to declare that a touchscreen is not required and to carry a TV launcher entry and banner, and TV apps are reviewed against TV quality criteria before they appear on Google Play on a television. In short, a TV dashboard is a different product from a phone app, even when it reads the same data.

Four screens that earn their place

Pick a small number of views and rotate them. For most counter businesses:

1. Overview: today's revenue, gross profit, number of orders and revenue by hour against the same day last week. One glance tells a supervisor whether the day is normal.
2. Sales by location and hour: for a business with branches, the fastest way to see which shop is quiet and which is queuing.
3. Low stock: items that have fallen below their alert quantity, by location. Shown in the stock room, this replaces the daily "do we have any" walk.
4. Live feed: a ticker of sales as they close across every till. In a kitchen or a bar, it doubles as a check that the tills are online and syncing.

Kit Business TV is built around exactly these views, with a presentation mode that rotates through them automatically and keeps the last snapshot on screen if the internet drops.

What to leave off the wall

A dashboard is seen by staff, suppliers and sometimes customers. Margins, payroll and individual staff performance belong on the owner's phone, not on a screen in the corridor. The clean way to handle this is to give the TV its own login with a limited role, so the screen can only ever show what that role is allowed to see. Kit Business TV uses the same roles and permissions as the web app, and pairs with a one-time code from a phone so no keyboard is needed on the television.

Placement and the practical bits

• Where people already look: above the pass in a kitchen, beside the stock-room door, behind the back office desk. Not behind the counter where customers read it.
• Brightness and glare: a cheap TV in direct sunlight is unreadable; put it on an internal wall.
• Power and network: the TV needs Wi-Fi and a socket. If the router is on a UPS for the till, put the TV on the same circuit or accept that it will go dark during cuts.
• Screen burn: rotate views and let the TV sleep after closing time.

Measuring whether it worked

Decide in advance what the screen is meant to change. In a kitchen, order-to-serve time. In a stock room, the number of lines that reach zero before reorder. In a branch network, the gap between the best and worst hour at each shop. Review after a month. If nothing moved, the screen is showing the wrong number, or it is in the wrong room.

A television costs less than one week of a stockout. The information it shows already exists in the system; the only new ingredient is that everyone can see it at once.

Sources

1. https://developer.android.com/training/tv/start
2. https://developer.android.com/training/tv/start/start
3. https://developer.android.com/training/tv/publishing/distribute