Article
Finance KPIs a leadership team should see weekly
Finance is assumed to be the department where every number arrives late, and half of that is wrong. Cash, collections and billing habits all move week to week and all respond to somebody picking up a phone. Five rows belong in the weekly leadership meeting, seven belong in a monthly review, and confusing the two is what leaves a company surprised by its own bank balance.
By the Key Performance Indicators editorial teamPublished Updated 10 min read
01
What is finance accountable for week to week?
Knowing what cash exists, what is owed, and how fast both are moving. Profit is an opinion formed at the month end; cash is a fact available on Friday. A finance function that reports monthly and nothing else has handed the leadership team a rear-view mirror and asked it to drive.
In a company of twenty to two hundred people this rarely needs new software. It needs somebody to pull four or five numbers on the same day each week and read them out. The first three weeks usually surface a billing habit nobody knew about.
The weekly rows also give the rest of the leadership team something to act on. Receivables over 60 days is a sales conversation as often as a bookkeeping one, and invoices sent late are usually an operations handoff. Showing the numbers to everyone moves the fix to whoever can make it.
02
Which five finance numbers belong in the weekly meeting?
Cash in weeks of payroll, cash collected, invoices sent on time, receivables past 60 days and forecast variance. Every one of them can be pulled on a Friday morning, and four of the five will respond to effort inside the following week. That is what separates them from margin and profit.
Pull them all on the same weekday, every week. Cash numbers move with the payment run, so a Tuesday reading and a Friday reading are two different businesses. Pick the day, write it into the definition, and accept that a consistent slightly-wrong day beats an inconsistent perfect one.
Cash on hand in weeks of payroll
Bank balance plus available credit, divided by one week of payroll and fixed costs. Weeks rather than dollars, because weeks are what non-accountants in the room can reason about. Lagging, weekly, owned by the finance lead. Set the band off your own last thirteen weeks. Gamed by holding supplier payments until after the Friday snapshot.
02Cash collected this week
Money that actually cleared, not invoices raised. No formula. Leading, weekly, owned by the bookkeeper. Set the band off your own last thirteen weeks. Gamed by asking a friendly customer to pay early, which borrows from next week and makes two weeks of the row meaningless in a row.
Invoices sent within one day of delivery
Invoices raised inside one working day of the job being delivered, divided by all invoices raised. Leading, weekly, owned by the bookkeeper. Target is structural: 100 percent. Gamed by raising a draft invoice on time and sending it a week later, so measure the send date rather than the create date.
Receivables over 60 days
Invoice value outstanding more than 60 days past its due date. Lagging, weekly, owned by the bookkeeper. Band from your own last thirteen weeks, driven toward zero. Gamed by writing off old balances quietly, which cleans the row and destroys the record of which customers do not pay.
05Cash forecast variance
Absolute gap between the cash you forecast for this week and the cash you ended with, divided by the forecast. Lagging, weekly, owned by the finance lead. Take the band off your trailing 13 weeks. Gamed by updating the forecast on Thursday, so freeze it when it is published.
03
What belongs in the monthly finance review?
Anything that needs a closed month underneath it. Gross margin, contribution margin by line, days sales outstanding, the cash conversion cycle, days to close, revenue per employee and trailing profit all require the ledger to be settled. Reading them weekly means reading estimates and then arguing about the estimates.
Keep the review to one hour and one question per number: is this different from last month, and if so, what did we do. A written variance note against each row beforehand halves the hour.
Gross margin
Revenue minus the direct cost of delivering it, divided by revenue. Lagging, monthly, owned by the finance lead. Set the band at the median of your last thirteen weeks. Gamed by moving delivery salaries below the gross margin line into overhead, which lifts the percentage and changes nothing about what the work costs.
02Contribution margin by service line
Revenue for one line minus the costs that would disappear if you stopped selling it. Lagging, monthly, owned by the finance lead. Band from your own history per line. Gamed by allocating shared overhead selectively, so agree the rule once and change it only at a year end.
03Days sales outstanding
Receivables divided by revenue for the period, multiplied by the days in it. Lagging, monthly, owned by the controller. Band from your own last thirteen weeks. Gamed by picking a high-revenue month as the denominator, so calculate it the same way on a rolling basis.
04Cash conversion cycle
Days of inventory plus days sales outstanding minus days payable outstanding. Lagging, monthly, owned by the finance lead. Band from your own trailing 13 weeks. Gamed by stretching suppliers, which shortens the cycle on paper and buys a reputation problem and worse terms.
Working days to close the month
Working days from month end to signed-off accounts. Lagging, monthly, owned by the controller. Derive the band from your trailing 13 weeks. Gamed by closing on estimates and posting corrections later, so pair it with a count of prior-period adjustments.
Revenue per employee
Trailing twelve month revenue divided by full-time equivalent headcount. Lagging, monthly, owned by the finance lead. Set the band off your own trailing four quarters rather than an industry figure, since the ratio depends entirely on how much you outsource. Gamed by moving staff to contractors, which flatters the ratio and costs the same money.
Net profit, trailing three months
Profit after everything, averaged over three closed months. Lagging, monthly, owned by the finance lead. Band from your own trailing four quarters, since thirteen weeks is too short a base for this one. Gamed by deferring discretionary spend, which produces a good month, a bad one after it, and no information from either.
04
Where do finance targets come from?
Three places, and it is worth knowing which one you are using. A few rows have a structural target, like invoices sent on time at 100 percent. A few come out of arithmetic, like the weeks of cash your board has decided is the floor. Everything else comes from your own last thirteen weeks.
Published industry figures are the weakest source here and the most tempting, because finance is where benchmarks are easiest to find. Gross margin varies with how you classify delivery costs, revenue per employee with how much you outsource, days sales outstanding with the customers you serve. Two companies in one industry can differ by half on any of them and both be run well.
The cash floor is the one target worth setting by decision rather than by history. Pick the number of weeks of payroll below which the leadership team will act, write it down before you are near it, and say what the action is. Deciding in advance is worth more than the row.
05
Which finance numbers should you drop from the weekly read?
Anything the close has to settle first. Revenue recognized, profit, EBITDA and any margin figure read weekly is an estimate presented as a fact, and the meeting turns into a discussion of what will change once accruals land. Keep them monthly, where the ledger can support them.
Cumulative totals go too. Revenue year to date always rises, so it says nothing about the week you are in, and it is the number most likely to keep a meeting calm while cash quietly deteriorates underneath it.
The line to hold is whether a number could send somebody to do something before Friday. Cash collected passes. Receivables past 60 days passes, because it is a list of phone calls. Gross margin does not, and demanding it weekly costs a day and gets restated anyway.
Lagging indicator
Confirms what already happened. Worth a few slots as proof, never worth the whole board.
02Examples by department
Ten finance measurables and sixty more across the other departments, each with an owner role.
03Leading vs lagging
How to sort your own rows by when they move, with examples for each department.
06
What does the cash row look like written out?
Cash in weeks of payroll is the row to write out first, because it is the number a leadership team will be asked about at the worst possible moment. Five fields: name, owner, definition, band, source. The definition needs to say what counts as cash, which is where most versions of this row differ.
Name: cash on hand in weeks of payroll. Owner: finance lead. Definition: cleared bank balance across all operating accounts plus undrawn credit facility, divided by average weekly payroll and fixed costs over the last thirteen weeks, read every Friday at 9am. Band: 8 to 12 weeks, a floor this leadership team chose rather than a published figure, with anything under 8 raised as an issue that day. Source: the bank feed and the payroll report, both pulled by the finance lead.
Companies running EOS® put that row at the top of the weekly Scorecard and give it ten seconds unless it is outside the band. The value is not the framework, it is that one person owns the row, the definition is written down, and a bad reading has a rule attached to it before anybody needs the rule.
Scorecard
Why only two or three finance rows reach it, and where the other ones live instead.
02Building a Scorecard
Assembling a weekly list that a leadership team will actually read, with a picker to start from.
03Metric owner
Why the bookkeeper owns collections rows and the finance lead owns the forecast ones.
Start with a real question
Waiting on the month end to find out how the month went?
Send us the finance numbers your leadership team currently sees and how often it sees them. We will mark which ones could be pulled weekly with what you already have, which need the close, and where a billing habit is costing you cash nobody has priced. One reply from a person, inside a business day.
A person reads every one.