What decision should your numbers support on Monday morning?

Business is growing, yet the team keeps chasing emergencies and the bank balance is not keeping up. Another chart will not explain that contradiction. Start by writing down your three recurring choices: accepting an order, hiring, following up unpaid invoices or adjusting an offer. Every number should inform one of these choices.

Bpifrance Création recommends linking indicators to objectives and comparing forecasts with actual results. Our proposed method turns that principle into a twenty-minute meeting: observe, explain, decide, then check the result the following week.

Choose five measures that do different jobs

This starting point suits a service business. Adapt the measures to your operation without changing their definition halfway through the month. Give each indicator a short reference sheet stating its formula, period, source and owner.

  • Demand: confirmed orders to deliver over the next four weeks, kept separate from unconfirmed quotations.
  • Contribution: sales excluding tax minus identified variable costs, using a consistent scope.
  • Cash: the balance expected in four weeks after probable receipts and committed payments.
  • Capacity: hours already promised divided by hours actually available, accounting for absences and internal work.
  • Quality: jobs requiring rework as a share of delivered jobs, shown alongside the hours consumed.

Write the action before colouring the cell

A threshold should start a specific discussion. For capacity, you might write: if our internal threshold is exceeded for two weeks, the manager reviews promised dates and prices an outsourcing option. The threshold depends on the business; 85% is not a universal rule.

Beside the result, keep an ‘explanation to verify’ column and an ‘action, owner, date’ column. A gap may reflect an unusual event, a pricing change or a data-entry mistake. This record prevents the team from inventing a different story about the same chart every week.

Fictional example: more sales, less room to manoeuvre

A fictional agency grows monthly sales excluding tax from €50,000 to €60,000. Variable costs rise from €25,000 to €36,000: contribution falls from €25,000 to €24,000 despite 20% revenue growth. Meanwhile, rework consumes another 30 hours.

The owner reviews the affected assignments before increasing sales activity. In this invented scenario, the team finds unbilled revisions outside the agreed scope. They test a clearer client approval process on two new assignments and track rework hours the following week.

What to do next week

The deliverable should fit on one page. Another person should be able to prepare it by following the documented rules, without an oral explanation from the spreadsheet’s creator.

  • Monday: choose a recurring decision and extract eight weeks of available data.
  • Tuesday: reconcile ten records with original invoices or job files and clarify ambiguous definitions.
  • Thursday: discuss one gap with the person who understands the actual work.
  • Friday: agree a measurable action, assign its owner and reserve twenty minutes for the next review.

Keep the limitations visible

A dashboard describes a situation; by itself it does not establish the cause. Holidays, seasonality and invoicing delays can make comparisons misleading. Cash also depends on collection timing, as Bpifrance explains in its management indicators. Agree financial definitions with your accountant and always identify missing data.