Journal · Practice · 5 min
The five numbers a small business should look at every Monday
Not twenty charts. Five numbers, the same five every week, read in the same order. Here is the list we give every new customer, and why each one earns its place.
Most dashboards fail the same way. They start with five charts, somebody asks for one more, and a year later there are forty and nobody opens it. The Monday meeting goes back to someone reading numbers out of a spreadsheet.
The fix is not a better chart. It is fewer of them, the same ones every week, read in the same order. Here are the five we suggest to every new customer. You can change the details. Try not to change the count.
Money in, after refunds and fees
Not gross sales. Net revenue: what came in, minus refunds, minus what the payment processor kept. It is the number your bank balance will agree with, and it is the only revenue figure worth arguing about.
Read it against the same week last year if you have it, and against last week if you don’t. A single week tells you almost nothing. The line over eight weeks tells you most things.
How much work came in
Orders for a shop, covers for a café, booked hours for an agency. This is the volume number, and it is how you tell a good week apart from an expensive one. Revenue up with orders flat means bigger baskets. Revenue flat with orders up means discounts are doing the work.
How fast it went out
Time from paid to dispatched, from seated to served, from brief to first draft. Speed is the number customers feel before they ever see a price. It is also the first number to drift when a team is stretched, which makes it the best early sign that you need another pair of hands.
How much came back
Returns, refunds, complaints, remakes. Pick the one that costs you most. A rising return rate is often a product or a description problem, not a customer problem, and it hides inside a healthy revenue line for months.
The thing that is about to go wrong
This is the early-warning number, and it is different for everyone. For a shop it is days of stock cover on the ten best sellers. For a subscription box it is failed payments. For an agency it is invoices past 30 days. It is the number you would want a phone call about, so in Halvard it is the one we suggest you set an alert on first.
How to read them
Same order, every week, five minutes. Green means leave it alone. Red twice in a row means one person owns it until it is green again. Everything else on the dashboard is there for when someone asks why — which is the right time to go looking, and not before.
Quick answers
The two questions this piece gets most.
Should the five numbers be the same for every business?
The shape is the same, the details change. A café reads covers where a shop reads orders. Keep one money number, one volume number, one speed number, one quality number and one early-warning number.
What if a number goes red two weeks running?
That is what the Monday meeting is for. Pick one owner and one change to try, and look at the same number next Monday.
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