The numbers to check every week in a small business

Anyone running a small business should look at a few numbers every week: the margin, not just turnover; overdue customer payments; the cash forecast at 30, 60 and 90 days; payments due to suppliers; and, depending on the business, enquiries, hours worked or stock. Others, such as the margin on each customer or the cost of finding a new one, are fine once a month. Looking at them regularly, each with an alert threshold, matters more than having lots of them.

The ten numbers in one table

In the sections that follow you’ll find how each number is calculated and why it matters.

Sales and margins: what you really earn

Turnover tells you how much you sell; the contribution margin tells you how much is left to pay your fixed costs and make a profit. You calculate it by taking the variable costs away from revenue, meaning the costs that grow with sales: goods, materials, outsourced work, transport, commissions. Divided by revenue, it becomes a percentage. From this you also get your break-even point: fixed costs divided by the margin percentage. With €20,000 of fixed costs a month and a 40% margin, you need turnover of €50,000 a month to break even. The warning sign is turnover that grows while the margin stays flat: you are selling more on worse terms.

Margin by product and by customer is the same calculation, line by line. It often shows that a customer with a high turnover is costing you in discounts, rush deliveries, support and slow payment. Look at it every month. Warning sign: an important customer or product with a margin close to zero.

Customer concentration is the share of turnover that comes from your biggest customer and from your top five. It measures how much you depend on other people’s decisions. Think of an 8-person workshop that works for just two clients: the books look fine until one of them changes supplier. Look at it every quarter. If losing your biggest customer would force you to cut staff, your concentration is too high.

Payments, cash and suppliers: the numbers that prevent surprises

A business can have good margins and still run out of cash: these three numbers are checked every week.

Time to get paid measures how many days pass, on average, between the invoice and the payment. The calculation: amounts your customers still owe you, divided by turnover over the last twelve months (both including VAT), multiplied by 365. Textbooks call it DSO (days sales outstanding). Alongside the average, keep a list of overdue amounts, customer by customer: every extra day is cash you are advancing out of your own pocket. By law, between businesses the standard term is 30 days from receipt of the invoice; beyond 60 days you need an express agreement, in writing and not grossly unfair to the seller. And paying on time cannot be taken for granted: according to the CRIBIS payments study (Studio Pagamenti) updated to June 2026, only 42% of Italian businesses pay on the due date and 4.4% pay more than 90 days late. The alarm should go off when the average rises for several months or the oldest overdue amounts grow.

The cash forecast at 30, 60 and 90 days is today’s bank balance, plus the payments you expect in, minus the payments you expect to make: suppliers, salaries, F24 payments (taxes and contributions), instalments, rent. For money coming in, use the dates on which customers actually pay, not the ones written on the invoice. It gives you weeks to react: chase a customer, put off a purchase, talk to the bank before you need to. Warning sign: the forecast balance falls below a threshold you set yourself, for example one month of fixed costs.

Supplier payments due is the list of what you have to pay in the coming weeks and of what is already overdue. It matters for your cash and for your relationship with the people who supply you. Here the law gives a precise signal: the Business Crisis Code (Codice della crisi d’impresa) treats it as a warning sign when debts to suppliers that are at least 90 days overdue exceed those not yet due.

Customers and sales: where tomorrow’s work comes from

Conversion rate is the ratio of quotes accepted to quotes sent, or of enquiries to orders. Check it every week, because it runs ahead of turnover: if it drops today, you’ll see it in your sales a few weeks from now. Warning sign: a drop several weeks running, or quotes left sitting without a reply.

Customer acquisition cost and customer value matter if you advertise or have a sales network. The cost is what you spend over a period to find new customers (advertising, trade fairs, commissions, part of your sales staff’s time), divided by the number of new customers who arrived. The value is the margin a customer leaves you in a year, multiplied by the number of years they stay on average. An online shop selling regional specialities may find that a customer who came through advertising costs more than the margin on their first order, and only pays off if they come back. Look at both every month. Warning sign: the cost per customer grows faster than the value.

Stock and hours: where value gets stuck

Stock turnover tells you how many times a year you sell what you keep on the shelves. You calculate it by dividing the year’s cost of goods sold by the average value of your stock, also at cost. If you divide 365 by the stock turnover, you get your days of cover: how many days of sales your stock would last. Stock is cash standing still, and it ages. Look at it every month, by product family. Warning sign: items that haven’t moved for months, and days of cover rising while sales don’t.

Hours and productivity matter in services and in work done to order. The calculation: billable hours, or hours spent on jobs, divided by hours worked. Check them every week. Warning sign: non-billable hours rising, or jobs eating up more hours than quoted.

How to build a simple dashboard

A useful dashboard fits on one page and updates without anyone copying data by hand. You already have the data, in three places:

• business software and invoicing: sales, purchases, stock, payment schedule;
• bank: transactions and balances, which you can download from online banking or, often, connect to a piece of software;
• e-invoicing: from the Italian Revenue Agency’s “Fatture e Corrispettivi” portal you can download, in bulk too, all the invoices issued and received through SDI (the Italian e-invoicing system). The files can only be viewed until 31 December of the second year after receipt, so download them regularly.

Start with a spreadsheet updated every Monday morning. For each number, decide who updates it, what you compare it with (last week, the same period last year) and the threshold that triggers a decision. Once the spreadsheet works and you really use it, it makes sense to automate it with a custom dashboard. If your business software doesn’t give you these numbers, read our guide on how much custom business software costs. If the data arrives late because someone copies it by hand, start with how to automate invoices and documents.

The most common mistake is wanting a hundred charts. Nobody looks at a dashboard with too many numbers, and when everything is highlighted, nothing is. The test is simple: if a number changes and you wouldn’t do anything differently, take it out.

Numbers every week, not at year end: your accountant’s role

The annual accounts arrive months after the year has closed: they serve the tax authorities and the banks, but by then it’s too late to change course. A number updated every week leaves you time to react.

There is a legal reason too. The Business Crisis Code requires sole traders to take suitable measures to detect a crisis in time, and companies to have adequate organisational, administrative and accounting arrangements, as Article 2086 of the Italian Civil Code also requires. Among other things, these must make it possible to check that debts are sustainable for at least the next twelve months. A dashboard with a cash forecast and due dates is not enough on its own, but it is a solid starting point.

Your accountant is the right person to define the numbers using the same criteria as the accounts, so that the margin on the dashboard and the one in the annual accounts tell the same story. With up-to-date data, your meeting stops being a look back at what has happened and becomes a decision about what to do. Z-32 is the digital arm of CSF, a consulting and accounting firm for businesses: in the dashboards we build, the numbers speak the same language as your accountant.

Where to start on Monday

1. Choose five numbers from the table: for almost every business, margin, time to get paid, cash forecast and supplier payments due, plus one tied to your line of work (conversion, hours or stock).
2. For each one, write down where the data comes from and who updates it.
3. Set an alert threshold, even a rough one, and review it with your accountant.
4. Block out half an hour every Monday to look at them, always in the same order.
5. After a month, drop the ones you never used and add the ones you missed.

If you’d like to work out which numbers matter for your business and where to get them, you can write to us.