Five numbers an owner should see every Monday

You do not need a dashboard with forty charts. You need to know, by nine on Monday morning, whether the business is healthy or about to have a bad month. Five numbers on a single page will do that. Look at the same five, the same way, every week.

Why five

A report with thirty figures gets skimmed and then ignored. A page with five gets read. The point is not to measure everything. It is to notice quickly when something has moved, and to ask why. Anything beyond five can sit in a separate file you open when a number looks odd.

What follows is a starting set that suits many service and trade businesses. Yours may differ, and you should swap numbers freely. The test for any number is simple: if it changed, would you do something different this week?

1. Cash in the bank

The real balance, not the profit on paper. Many healthy businesses have run short of cash because money came in later than it went out. Put next to it what you know is due out in the next two weeks, such as payroll, rent and supplier payments. The gap between the two is your breathing room.

2. Money owed to you, and how much of it is late

Total unpaid invoices, and the portion past its due date. Your accounting software shows this in a minute. Late invoices are the quietest problem in a small company, because chasing them is uncomfortable and always feels like something for tomorrow. Seeing the figure every Monday makes it hard to postpone.

3. New enquiries last week

How many people asked for a quote or a call. Count them from wherever they arrive: the website form, the phone, email, a message. Do not worry about precision at first. A rough count that you trust beats a perfect one that nobody collects. A drop here is the earliest warning you will get, since it shows up weeks before it shows up in revenue.

Look for the number that moved, then ask why.

4. Quotes out and waiting

How many quotes are with customers and haven't been answered, and what they add up to. Add how old the oldest one is. A quote that has sat for three weeks is either lost or forgotten, and you should find out which. This number also helps you see what work is likely to arrive next month.

5. Work booked for the next four weeks

Hours, jobs or dollars, whichever your business counts in. If you are fully booked, you can raise prices or hire. If next month looks thin, you have a few weeks to do something about it rather than a few days. This one tells you what to worry about.

Swapping in your own

Not every business fits that list. A shop with walk-in customers might care about the day's sales and stock on the shelf. A company with a crew might track jobs running late. Someone selling subscriptions would want cancellations. Choose numbers that fit how you make money and where trouble tends to start. If a late job has hurt you before, put "jobs behind schedule" on the page.

Getting the numbers without a second job

The page only works if producing it is easy. If it takes someone two hours every Sunday, it will stop by March. Most of these figures already live in tools you own: the accounting package, the booking system, the inbox. A small amount of setup can pull them together automatically into one page that arrives in your email early Monday. Until then, a simple spreadsheet filled in by the same person at the same time every week is perfectly respectable.

Whoever fills it in should write one line beside each number: up, down or flat compared with last week. Without the comparison, a number is just a number.

What to do when one moves

Decide this in advance. If cash falls below a line you pick, you hold off on spending. If late invoices pass a certain figure, someone makes calls that day. If enquiries drop two weeks in a row, you look at where they used to come from. Agreeing on the response ahead of time spares you from reinventing it when you are worried.

Where to start

1. Choose five numbers. Use the list above or replace any that do not fit.
2. Find where each one lives today and who can read it.
3. Make a single page, the same layout each week, with last week's value beside this week's.
4. Set a fixed time on Monday to read it, even if it takes five minutes.
5. After a month, drop any number that never changed your decisions.

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