The weekly numbers that keep a small business out of trouble

Monthly management accounts arrive two or three weeks after the month ends. By the time you read them, the problem they describe is six weeks old and has already had children. That's the whole argument for a weekly number review: not better accounting, just faster.

You need one page, the same eight or nine lines every week, produced on the same day, read before anything else. Twenty minutes. If it takes longer than that, the page is too big.

Cash in the bank, and cash in the bank next Friday

Start with the balance. Not the profit, not the revenue, the actual number in the actual account this morning, minus anything already committed that hasn't cleared.

Then the forward view. A thirteen-week cash forecast sounds like a finance-department exercise, and the first one takes an afternoon. After that it's a ten-minute update. Columns are weeks. Rows are money coming in (by customer, if you have few enough to name them) and money going out: payroll, rent, tax, suppliers, loan payments, the quarterly insurance bill you forget every year.

The value isn't the accuracy. It's that you see the tight week eight weeks out, while you can still do something about it. Profitable businesses fail because a payroll run and a tax payment land in the same seven days and the biggest customer pays on day sixty.

Update it every week. Roll the window forward. Compare what you predicted for this week against what happened, and notice which direction you're consistently wrong in. Most owners are optimistic about collections and forgetful about outgoings.

Cash collected, not revenue booked

Revenue is an opinion until the money lands. Track collections separately: what actually came in this week.

If you invoice on terms, put your receivables ageing on the page too. Current, 30 days, 60, 90-plus. The only line that matters is the one past 60. Read out the names. A customer who is ninety days late is not a cash flow problem, they're a decision you keep postponing.

The discipline that changes this isn't a better system, it's someone whose job it is to phone. Not email. Phone, on a named day, every week. Invoices that get chased get paid first, because the person in accounts payable is working from a pile and they process the pile in order of who is standing over them.

Sales activity, in three lines

Revenue is the outcome. By the time it moves, the cause is weeks in the past. So track the causes.

• Leads or enquiries this week. Whatever a new opportunity looks like in your business.
• Quotes or proposals sent. The number and the total value.
• Quotes won. Number, value, and the win rate over the last few weeks rather than this one.

Three lines, and they tell you where the pipeline is bleeding. Fewer leads is a marketing problem. Plenty of leads and few quotes is a response-speed problem, usually because someone is too busy delivering to reply within a day. Plenty of quotes and no wins is a pricing or a qualification problem, and those two look identical from the outside until you ring the people who said no.

Do that, by the way. Call three lost quotes a month and ask what they chose instead. You'll learn more than from any report.

Backlog, in weeks

How much sold work is waiting to be delivered, expressed as weeks of capacity? This is the single most useful number in any business that does jobs, projects or installations.

Two weeks of backlog means you sell hard right now, whatever else is on fire. Ten weeks means you can raise prices and stop discounting. Twenty means you have a delivery problem dressed up as a sales success, and customers are quietly going elsewhere because you can't start until spring.

If you run a product or retail business, the equivalent is stock cover: weeks of sales sitting on the shelf, and which lines are out of stock right now. Out-of-stock on your best sellers is lost margin you'll never see in any report, because it doesn't appear as a loss. It just doesn't appear.

Gross margin, on the work you just finished

Not the company margin. The margin on the last few jobs delivered, one line each.

This is where small businesses quietly lose their money. The average holds up while a handful of jobs are badly underwater, subsidised by the good ones. You can't see that in a monthly P&L. You can see it immediately if every completed job gets a single line: quoted value, actual cost, margin.

The moment you do this you'll find a pattern. A customer type, a job size, a particular installer, a product line. One of them is where the losses live. Usually it's the work you said yes to when you were quiet, at a price you'd never accept now, for a client who calls at seven on a Sunday.

Labour as a share of revenue

For most service businesses, people are the largest cost and the slowest to adjust. Track payroll, including your own drawings, as a percentage of the revenue delivered that week, and watch the trend line over six or eight weeks rather than the weekly bounce.

The number itself varies wildly by industry, so don't chase a benchmark you read somewhere. Establish your own normal over a couple of months, then treat any drift as a question. Rising share with flat revenue means you've added capacity ahead of demand, which is sometimes the right call and always a call you should have made deliberately.

Add overtime hours as a separate line. Persistent overtime is a hiring decision you haven't made, and it's usually costing more than the hire would.

One people number and one customer number

Pick one of each and keep it for a year.

For people: unplanned absence, open positions, or how many weeks since you last had a proper one-to-one with each direct report. Something that would tell you the team is straining before someone resigns.

For customers: repeat rate, cancellations, or complaints logged. Whatever shows you that service is slipping while the revenue still looks fine. Service quality always drops before revenue does.

Building the page so it survives contact with a busy week

The format matters more than the metrics. Same day, same order, same definitions. Print it if that's what makes you read it.

Three things kill the weekly review. The first is the number nobody owns, so nobody updates it and the page rots. Put a name against every line. The second is changing definitions, which makes the history worthless. Write down what "lead" means and don't quietly amend it when the figures look bad. The third is doing it alone. Read the page with whoever runs delivery and whoever runs sales, for twenty minutes, standing up.

And add one sentence at the bottom every week: the single thing you're going to do differently because of what the page says. If you can't write that sentence, you're collecting numbers rather than running anything.

Most owners already sense the tight week, the customer who's gone cold, the job that lost money. The page doesn't give you the instinct. It just stops you talking yourself out of it.