Owner Finance
The 8 numbers every owner should look at on the 1st of the month.
Revenue and bank balance both lie. Here’s the dashboard that doesn’t.
Why most owners fly blind
Revenue and bank balance hide the real story.
Revenue without gross profit % hides a bleeding job mix. You can grow top-line and lose money job after job. The P&L tells you. The deposit notification doesn’t.
Bank balance without AR aging hides a collections cliff. You feel rich on the 5th and broke on the 25th because the receivables you booked in March are still sitting unpaid.
The eight numbers
What to track, where to pull it.
- 01
Revenue
From your accounting (QuickBooks, Xero). Gross sales for the month.
- 02
Gross profit %
(Revenue minus COGS) divided by revenue. Tells you if your jobs themselves are profitable.
- 03
Net profit %
(Revenue minus all costs) divided by revenue. The number that pays you.
- 04
Owner’s pay
Tracked separately from net. Distributions plus salary. You should know this to the dollar.
- 05
Cash on hand
Operating bank balance on the 1st. Pair it with AR aging or it lies to you.
- 06
Receivables aging
Percent of AR over 30 days, from your accounting. Above 20% is a collections problem.
- 07
Marketing % of revenue
Total marketing spend divided by revenue. Compare against your stage benchmark.
- 08
CAC and average job value
From your CRM and accounting. Together they tell you if growth is profitable.
How to build it
30 minutes a month. Google Sheets. First of the month.
Open a sheet. One row per month, one column per number. Link to your books where you can, type the rest. Eight cells. That’s the whole tool.
The point isn’t the spreadsheet. It’s the 30 minutes you spend looking at it. Owners who do this on the 1st of every month catch problems 60 to 90 days earlier than the ones who wait for tax time.
The bottom line
If you don’t look at the numbers, the numbers won’t look out for you.
30 minutes a month is the cheapest insurance policy in the business.