The 7 Numbers Every $5M Contractor Should Check Weekly

The Problem With "Know Your Numbers"

Every contractor coaching program, industry conference, and business consultant says the same thing: "You need to know your numbers."

Nobody tells you which seven.

Instead, you get dashboards with 30 metrics that take 3 hours to populate once a month — after the data is already 45 days stale. By the time your monthly P&L closes, the slow-paying customer is 90 days out, the underperforming tech has already done 40 more jobs at bad margins, and the quote that was drifting cold for two weeks is now dead.

The contractors who run their businesses cleanly aren't checking 30 metrics. They're checking 7 — every Monday morning, in about 15 minutes. They catch problems when they're small. They act before the month is over.

Here are the 7. For each one: what it is, what the benchmark is, and what to do when it's off.

1. Cash Position + Collectible AR

What it is: Your bank balance right now, plus the AR you can realistically collect in the next 14 days (current and 1-30 days outstanding, minus any disputes).

How to get it: Check your bank directly. Pull current AR from QuickBooks — include invoices 0-30 days old. Exclude anything in dispute or that's been consistently slow.

The benchmark: At $5M annual revenue, you should have 8-10 weeks of operating expenses accessible at all times — roughly $200-300K in combined cash and near-term AR. Less than 6 weeks is tight. Less than 4 weeks is a problem.

What to do when it's off: If cash + collectible AR is below your 8-week floor, trigger the collection sequence on every invoice over 15 days old before you do anything else that week. The why contractors can't collect post has specific follow-up scripts and sequences. One phone call on a $15K invoice beats any marketing spend you'll do this week.

Why Monday, not month-end: Cash problems compound. If you're trending tight and you catch it at week 1, you have 4 weeks to fix it. If you catch it when the bank account is at $12K and payroll is Friday, your options are limited.

2. Backlog by Committed vs. Pipeline

What it is: Your committed backlog (contracts signed, work not yet started or in-progress) vs. your pipeline (quotes submitted, not yet won).

How to get it:

Committed backlog = signed contracts in your project management system, WIP remaining
Pipeline = open quotes by dollar value, segmented by age (0-7 days, 7-14 days, 14+ days)

The benchmark: For a $5M contractor, you want 6-8 weeks of committed backlog at all times. Below 4 weeks means your ops team goes from "busy" to "scrambling for work" fast. Your pipeline should be running at 2-3x your conversion target to give you enough at-bats.

What to do when it's off: If committed backlog drops below 5 weeks, this is a sales activation week. Follow up on every open quote over 5 days old. The average quote conversion sits at 73% for decided quotes — the issue is usually quotes that aren't getting decided, not quotes that are losing. Quote follow-up at 7 days is where the money is.

The nuance: Backlog quality matters too. A $500K install job backlog is very different from $500K of service work across 40 customers. Install backlog is lumpy and concentrated. Service backlog is diversified and more predictable. Track them separately.

3. Revenue Per Truck This Week vs. Trailing 4-Week Average

What it is: Total revenue generated this week, divided by the number of trucks you have deployed (including service vans). Compared to your trailing 4-week average.

The benchmark: From the contractor financials I've reviewed — across PE diligence, working with 1,000+ contractor teams, and profitability audits at Level — the median revenue per truck per week runs roughly $15-22K for residential/light commercial service contractors. Commercial/specialty contractors run higher. If your number is below $12K/truck/week and you're doing residential service, that's a utilization problem.

What to do when it's off: A week that's 20%+ below trailing average is worth a post-mortem before Monday is over. Was it weather? A tech out sick? Slow dispatch? Cancellations? Understanding the cause determines whether it's noise or a signal. Two consecutive weeks below average is a signal. Act on it.

Why this number: Revenue per truck is your utilization proxy. It captures scheduling quality, tech efficiency, job mix, and pricing all at once. You don't need separate metrics for all four — if revenue per truck is healthy, the inputs are working. If it's not, you know where to dig.

The revenue per truck benchmarks post has the full industry data if you want to calibrate your target.

4. Gross Margin on Completed Jobs This Week

What it is: For every job that closed this week, what was the actual gross margin? Quoted vs. actual.

The benchmark: Your blended gross margin target depends on your service mix, but the median well-run contractor runs 43-44% overall. More importantly: are this week's closed jobs within 5 points of your quote? If you're quoting at 42% and delivering at 32%, you have an execution problem.

What to do when it's off: When you see a job close at 15 points below quote, that's not a rounding error — that's a problem to investigate before the next similar job goes out. Common causes: labor overruns (actual hours far exceeded estimate), material cost surprises, scope creep without change orders. Each cause has a different fix.

Why this matters weekly, not monthly: The contractor who sees a job at -12% margin on Monday morning can talk to the tech and PM today, understand what happened, and adjust the estimating template before the next bid. The contractor who sees it in their month-end P&L is fixing problems from 6 weeks ago — and has usually already sent out 20 more bids with the same bad estimating assumption.

Set up a simple report in QuickBooks or your FSM that shows actual vs. estimated cost for every job closed in the past 7 days. This is the single highest-return thing you can do to improve job profitability. See phantom margins — why you don't know your real job margin for how this typically breaks down.

5. Open Quotes Aging (The 7-Day Rule)

What it is: Every open quote you've sent, sorted by age. Flag anything over 7 days old with no customer response.

The benchmark: The median quote conversion on decided quotes is 73%. But a quote the customer hasn't responded to in 7 days is a quote that is quietly dying. The close rate on quotes that go past 14 days without contact drops below 30% in most service businesses.

What to do when it's off: Every Monday, look at your open quote list. Any quote over 7 days old with no response gets a call that day. Not an email — a call. "Hi, this is [Name], I sent over the proposal last week and wanted to see if you had any questions." That's it. The answer is either "yes, we're moving forward" or "we decided to go with someone else" or "I've been meaning to call you." All three are better than letting it drift.

The math: If you're quoting $200K/week and converting at 73%, you're closing $146K. If better follow-up moves your conversion from 73% to 80% on the same volume, you're closing $160K — an extra $14K/week from a Monday morning habit that takes 30 minutes.

6. Technician Utilization This Week

What it is: For each tech, what percentage of their available hours were billable this week? Available hours = scheduled working hours minus PTO and training.

The benchmark: Strong-performing service contractors run 75-85% billable utilization on their techs. Below 65% means your scheduling has gaps — dead drive time, unbooked slots, techs sitting waiting for parts. Above 90% for multiple weeks typically means you're understaffing and burning people out.

What to do when it's off: If a tech is at 50% utilization two weeks in a row, that's a scheduling conversation — or a capacity planning conversation. If you're consistently at 88%+ and getting callback complaints, that's a hiring signal.

Track utilization by tech, not just in aggregate. The aggregate will hide a great performer carrying two underperformers — and that's both an operational issue and an HR conversation you need to have. The technician utilization KPI post has the full benchmarking picture.

7. Overhead Spend Rate vs. Monthly Budget

What it is: Through however many weeks of the month you are, what have you actually spent on overhead? Are you on pace to hit your monthly overhead budget, or running over?

The benchmark: Well-run contractors target overhead at 25-30% of revenue. The critical number is whether you're on budget — if your monthly overhead budget is $85K and you're $62K through week 2 with two weeks left, you're running hot.

What to do when it's off: Overhead creep is silent. Each individual purchase seems reasonable. In aggregate, a $5M contractor running 5% over overhead budget is burning an extra $25K/month — that's $300K/year in EBITDA. If you're on pace to run over, freeze discretionary overhead purchases mid-month and understand what drove it before approving more.

Why weekly, not monthly: Overhead spend patterns are front-loaded in most businesses. By the time your month-end P&L shows you ran 8% over budget, you've already spent it. Checking at week 2 gives you a chance to course-correct.

The overhead rate benchmarks post shows how overhead rates vary by revenue size and service type.

Building the Monday Morning Ritual

These 7 numbers are not a full financial review. They're a 15-minute weekly pulse check. Here's how to structure it:

What you need: QuickBooks (or equivalent), your field service management software, your bank login. All three open at the same time.

The cadence:

Monday morning, before your first call. Not Tuesday. Not when you have time.
15-20 minutes. If it's taking longer, your systems aren't set up for efficient extraction.
Review personally or with your operations manager — not delegated to the office manager who "checks it and tells you if something is wrong."

The outputs: Three categories — green (on track, no action needed), yellow (trending wrong, watch it), red (needs action today). One action item from any red number, assigned to a specific person, with a due date.

The key insight: The value of this review isn't the numbers themselves. It's what you do between Monday and the following Monday. The review creates accountability loops — your ops manager knows you're looking at utilization every week, so scheduling gaps get addressed. Your office manager knows you're looking at AR aging every week, so follow-up actually happens.

If you're building the full dashboard infrastructure around these weekly numbers, the contractor financial dashboard post covers the data source setup, the red/yellow/green threshold framework, and how to get your team using it without it dying after week 3.

The Contrarian View

Plenty of contractors will tell you: "I know my business intuitively. I don't need to check numbers every week."

Maybe. But here's what I've seen reviewing hundreds of P&Ls: the contractors with the most confident "I know what's happening" attitude are often the ones with the worst collection rates, the highest overhead creep, and the biggest quote follow-up gaps. Intuition is calibrated on what you see and hear directly. The numbers capture what you don't.

I've reviewed contractors doing $8M in revenue who were genuinely surprised that their technician utilization was 58% — they thought it was 75% because the field "felt busy." I've seen contractors with $180K in AR over 60 days who said "we have no collection problems" because they'd never looked at the aging report.

The 7-number Monday review isn't replacing your judgment. It's making sure your judgment is calibrated against reality.

The Bottom Line

Seven numbers. Fifteen minutes. Every Monday. That's the practice that separates contractors who find out about problems in their monthly P&L from contractors who fix problems before they compound.

Start with the number that's most broken for your business. If you've never tracked quote aging, start there. If your AR is chronically problematic, start with cash + AR. You don't need all seven on day one. You need one that changes your Monday behavior.

Q: Can Level help me set up this weekly review process? A: Yes. We'll pull the data sources for your specific system stack (QuickBooks + ServiceTitan, QuickBooks + Jobber, etc.), set up the weekly extraction, and define the green/yellow/red thresholds based on your benchmarks. The goal is 15 minutes of your Monday, not a data project.

Q: Which of the 7 numbers matters most? A: Cash + collectible AR, because cash problems kill contractors that everything else looks good for. After that: gross margin on completed jobs, because it's the most direct leading indicator of profitability that most contractors don't track in real-time. Start with those two.

Q: My team doesn't look at numbers — how do I create accountability? A: Share the weekly 7-number summary with your ops manager and office manager every Monday. Don't just review it yourself — make it a shared artifact. When the same team members see the same numbers weekly, they start managing to them. Utilization improves when the ops manager knows it's being tracked. AR improves when the office manager knows the aging report is on Monday's agenda.

Ready to see where your money is going?