Most owners have too many reports and not enough answers.
Your accounting software has a dashboard. Your booking system has one. Your bank app has one. Add it all up and you’ve got a dozen screens of numbers and still no idea if this week went well.
You don’t need more data. You need five numbers on one page, checked at the same time every week.
The five numbers
These work for almost any service, trade, clinic or retail business. Change the names to fit yours, but keep the idea.
- Cash in the bank. What you actually have today.
- Money owed to you. Invoices sent but not paid.
- Sales booked this week. New work that’s been agreed, not just quoted.
- Gross margin. What’s left from sales after the direct cost of doing the work.
- Work delivered. Jobs done, patients seen, orders shipped. Whatever your business makes.
Why these five
Cash in the bank keeps you alive. Profit on paper doesn’t pay wages. Cash does. Watch it weekly and you’ll see a tight month coming long before it hits.
Money owed to you is cash you’ve earned but don’t have. If this number keeps growing, you’re a free bank for your customers. Check which invoices are oldest and chase those first.
Sales booked tells you about next month. If it drops two or three weeks in a row, you’ve got time to fix it. If you only notice when the work dries up, you don’t.
Gross margin tells you if the work is worth doing. Busy and broke is a real thing. If sales go up and margin goes down, you’re working harder for less. Usually that means prices are stale or jobs are running over.
Work delivered tells you if the team kept up. Booked work that doesn’t get done turns into unhappy customers. Delivered work turns into invoices.
Together they tell one story. Sales booked feeds work delivered. Work delivered turns into money owed. Money owed turns into cash. Gross margin tells you if the whole loop is worth running.
How to set it up
Keep it simple. A spreadsheet is fine. One row per week, one column per number. Add a target for each so you’re not just staring at figures.
Pick targets that come from your business, not from a blog. Look at the last few months and ask what a good week looks like. That’s your target. Change it later if it’s wrong.
Then add one column for notes. Something like: margin dipped because two jobs ran over. Over time, those notes become the most useful part of the sheet.
Pull the numbers the same way each week. Same day, same source. If cash in the bank is Friday close one week and Monday morning the next, the trend means nothing.
Five numbers you check every week beat fifty you look at when something’s already gone wrong.
How to run the Monday review
Fifteen minutes. Before the week gets busy.
Look at each number against its target. Green if it’s on track, red if it isn’t. For anything red, ask one question: what’s the one thing we’ll do about it this week? Write that down. Next Monday, check if you did it.
That’s the whole meeting. No slides. If you have a manager or office lead, do it together. It’s the fastest way to get them thinking about the business the way you do.
Don’t try to fix everything at once. One action per red number is plenty. The point is the habit. After a couple of months you’ll know your business by feel, and the numbers will tell you when the feel is wrong.
Do this this week
- Open a blank spreadsheet. Make five columns, one for each number above.
- Fill in the last four weeks as best you can. Rough is fine.
- Set a target for each number based on what a good week looked like.
- Put fifteen minutes in your calendar every Monday morning. Make it recurring.
- On Monday, fill in last week, mark anything red, and pick one action for each red number.
Playbook No. 06 has the scorecard sheet ready to go, with targets and the Monday routine built in. The episode walks through each number in more detail.
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Kevin’s been writing code for thirty years. Now he helps owners use AI to get time and money back, and hosts BizPlaybooks.
