The 8 numbers you should be able to say without opening anything

There's a moment that catches a lot of owners out. Somebody asks a simple question about the business (what's your average job worth, what percentage of quotes convert, how much does the business have to cover before it earns a dollar) and the honest answer is a shrug and a promise to look it up.

That's not incompetence. It's the predictable result of running a business where nobody has ever decided which figures matter. Deciding is 1 of the jobs in the money block described in the guide to working on the business rather than in it, and it costs an afternoon once rather than an hour a week forever.

Why a short list beats a dashboard

Accounting software will happily give you 60 charts. That's the problem, not the solution.

A long list of figures produces no decisions. You scroll, nothing stands out, and the exercise becomes something you did rather than something that changed what you do. Owners who track everything track nothing, because there's no threshold at which anything is meant to happen.

A short list works differently. 8 numbers, each with a rough figure you carry in your head, means an unusual reading announces itself. You don't need a report to tell you the average job value dropped, because you already knew what it was.

"Knowing" here doesn't mean to the dollar. It means being able to say the number within about 10% and to say confidently whether it's moving up or down. That's enough to notice a problem, and noticing is the entire job.

The 3 numbers about work coming in

Revenue for the month, against the same month last year. Compare like against like, because most small businesses have a seasonal shape and a month-on-month comparison mostly measures the calendar. Year-on-year for the same month strips that out.

Quotes issued, and how many were accepted. Owners track wins and rarely track the denominator. The acceptance rate is where you find out whether a quiet month was a demand problem or a conversion problem, and those have completely different fixes. If it fell, the usual suspects are how long the quote took to go out, what it looked like, and whether anybody followed it up.

Where the last 10 customers came from. Not a marketing report. Just the last 10, named, with the source next to each. This is the fastest way to see concentration risk. If 7 of 10 came through 1 referrer, the business has a single point of failure it has never discussed, and that's a common cause of the ceiling covered in what usually causes a revenue plateau.

The 3 numbers about what you keep

Gross margin, by job type. The single most valuable figure on the list. Revenue minus the cost of delivering it, as a percentage, calculated separately for each service line rather than blended across the business. The blended number tells you almost nothing; the gap between 2 lines tells you what to chase, what to reprice and occasionally what to stop selling. Gross margin explained for business owners covers the calculation and what belongs in the cost of delivery.

Average job value. Total revenue divided by number of jobs, for the month. It moves quietly and it explains a lot. A business can be busier than last year, take more calls, work more Saturdays and go backwards, purely because the average job shrank while the job count grew.

Monthly fixed overheads. The total the business pays out in a month with no work in it: rent, insurance, finance, subscriptions, administrative wages. This is the number that converts into a target, because overheads divided by your gross margin tells you the revenue the business must produce each month simply to break even. Most owners have never calculated it, and every owner who does remembers the figure afterwards.

The 2 numbers about cash and your own time

Cash on hand, and what's owed to you over 60 days. 2 halves of the same question. The balance alone is a snapshot with no context; the aged debtors figure tells you whether the balance is about to improve or whether you've been quietly funding somebody else's business. Profit and cash answer different questions, and why profitable businesses still run out of cash explains how far apart those answers can get.

Your own hours last week, and how many were delivery. The only non-financial number on the list, and the one owners resist. It's here because every other figure on this page is constrained by it. A business where the owner spent 58 hours on the tools has no capacity to fix its pricing, its documentation or its lead sources, whatever the plan says.

Count it honestly for a fortnight before you decide it isn't a problem. Most owners are out by a wide margin in the same direction.

How often to look, and what to do about it

Not everything wants the same cadence.

• Weekly: cash on hand, debtors over 60 days, quotes issued and accepted, your own hours.
• Monthly: revenue against the same month last year, gross margin by job type, average job value.
• Quarterly: fixed overheads, the break-even revenue they imply, and the last 10 customers by source.

Then attach a rule to each one, because a number with no threshold is trivia. Margin drops 3 points on a service line, that line gets repriced. Debtors over 60 days pass a set figure, collections become the week's first job. Acceptance rate falls 2 months running, you look at quote turnaround before you look at the price.

The rule is what turns a figure into a decision. Without it, owners watch a number decline for 3 quarters and describe it accurately the whole way down.

The line between your numbers and your accountant's

There's a boundary worth drawing here, because "know your numbers" gets used loosely and the 2 halves are genuinely different jobs.

Your registered tax agent handles tax, and your accountant handles how the business is reported, classified and lodged. That work is regulated, it happens largely after a period closes, and it isn't something a coach touches.

The list on this page is the other half: operational figures you use to make decisions during the period, while there's still time for the decision to matter. What you charge, what's left after delivery, whether the cash arrives, where the work comes from, and where your week goes.

The 2 halves work best when they talk to each other. Ask your accountant to set up your chart of accounts so the reports you pull match the way you actually think about the work, and the monthly numbers stop being an argument about categories.

Building the habit

Start with 3, not 8. Pick cash on hand, gross margin by job type, and your own delivery hours, because between them they cover the money, the work and the constraint.

Write the current figure for each on a single page, by hand. Then update the same page weekly for a quarter before adding anything else. A list you maintain beats a system you abandon, every time.

Once the weekly reading exists, add the forward view, because the numbers on this page all look backwards. How to build a 13-week cash flow forecast is the sheet that turns them into an early warning rather than a post-mortem.

And keep the list on 1 page. The moment it needs scrolling, it has stopped being something you know and gone back to being something you look up.