I am looking for some design thoughts. I have an app that has been in use for years. I now would like to add status notices to the main page to give the user a snapshot of the business right on the main page. Things like orders that have been received and not processed, invoices that need sent, etc. There are about 4 areas that I would like to present to them.

My first thought was to just put some controls or labels right on the _screen. A few update-able labels and maybe a read-only grid or two. I would just update it when the app was first run and maybe call the _screen refresh at the end of some processing routines. I did a few mock-ups and it seems to work OK.

Then I thought maybe I should recreate the app as a top level form but that seemed like a lot of work for little return and I went back to the _screen idea.

Has anyone ever done anything like this? Are there some hidden gotchas that you can think of? Any other suggestions for presenting the information?

Thanks,
Bill