Key takeaways
- A weekly pack should fit on one page and take under half an hour to read and discuss.
- Cash, receivables, sales booked, gross margin and the one or two operational drivers that lead revenue are enough.
- Numbers that arrive late are not useful, so pick a day and a time and hold the pack to it.
- Every number on the page should have a target and an owner, or it should come off the page.
Most owners look at their numbers once a month, when the bookkeeper closes the books, or once a year, when the CPA prepares the year end. By then the decisions have already been made by default. A short weekly pack changes that. It gives you a steady view of the business while there is still time to act.
We build weekly packs for BC companies in trades, professional services, clinics, distribution and software. The industries differ, but the shape of the pack is almost always the same. Here is what goes on the page and why.
Cash and the next four weeks
The first line is the bank balance this morning, net of uncleared items, with the available room on the operating line shown separately. Beside it, the forecast closing balance for each of the next four weeks taken from your 13-week cash flow. If you only read one line all week, read this one.
Below it, the two numbers that drive cash most directly. Total accounts receivable and the portion that is past due, with the three largest overdue customers named. Total accounts payable and anything that is overdue to a supplier who could stop shipping or stop working.
Sales booked and work delivered
Revenue on the income statement is a lagging number. What you want weekly is the leading version. For a trades or construction company that is quotes sent, quotes won and jobs scheduled. For a professional firm it is proposals out, engagements signed and hours billed against hours worked. For a clinic it is appointments booked, appointments completed and the no-show count. For e-commerce it is orders, average order value and return rate.
Show this week, last week and the same week last year if you have it. Seasonality in BC is real, and a week that looks soft in January may be perfectly normal.
Gross margin on what shipped
Revenue tells you how busy you are. Gross margin tells you whether the busyness is worth anything. Each week, show gross margin in dollars and as a percentage of revenue for the work completed or the goods shipped, and compare it to the margin you priced. If the two drift apart, something in estimating, purchasing or labour productivity has changed and you want to know this week, not at year end.
If your accounting system cannot produce weekly margin yet, start with a rough version built from job sheets or sales reports. A rough number on time beats a perfect number six weeks late.
Two operational drivers
Every business has one or two operational numbers that lead the financial ones. Billable utilisation in a consultancy. Technician hours sold versus hours paid in a service company. Occupancy or chair utilisation in a clinic. Inventory days or fill rate in distribution. Pick the two that matter most to your model and put them on the page with a target.
Resist adding more. A pack with thirty numbers gets skimmed. A pack with ten gets read, discussed and acted on.
If you are unsure which drivers to pick, look at the last two or three bad months and ask what you would have wanted to know four weeks earlier. The answer is usually an operational number that moved first: quotes slowing down, a crew running under hours, a provider's schedule opening up. Those are the numbers that belong on the page, because they give you time to respond while revenue is still intact. Review the choice once a quarter, because the drivers change as the company grows.
How to produce it without a finance team
Set a fixed deadline, for example Monday at nine, and ask whoever does your bookkeeping to pull the receivable and payable aging and the bank balances before then. Sales and operations numbers come from your CRM, scheduling tool or job management software, and in most cases a saved report or a short export covers it. One person assembles the page. The owner reads it and writes three lines underneath: what surprised me, what I will do about it, what I need from the team.
After a few months the pack becomes the agenda for a short Monday meeting. That is when the numbers start changing behaviour, which is the whole point.
What to leave off
- Anything you cannot get reliably every week, because a blank cell teaches people to ignore the page
- Vanity numbers such as website visits unless they are a proven leading indicator for your sales
- Detailed expense lines, which belong in the monthly review
- Numbers without a target or an owner