You open the banking app, see the balance is fine, and close it again.
The trouble is, the bank balance is the last place a problem shows up.
The money coming in now is from sales you made a while back, so it can look fine for a couple of months while something underneath it is going wrong.
I run a business that makes over a million dollars a year in profit, with no staff, and these are the numbers that tell you first.
Check 1: Cost per enquiry and conversion rate, together. Say three thousand dollars of ads used to bring in a hundred enquiries, thirty bucks an enquiry, and now it brings in seventy.
If fewer of those turn into sales as well, that's a real problem.
If one goes up and the other comes down at the same time, fix it that week.
Read them over a rolling seven days so one bad day doesn't throw you.
Check 2: When enquiries go quiet, walk it back. Don't change anything first.
Check whether it's costing you more to be seen, then whether people are still clicking through to your website, then whether they're still getting in touch once they're on it.
If four in every hundred visitors used to enquire and now it's two, the problem's the page, not the ads.
Check 3: Your pipeline against your target. If you need a hundred thousand dollars of work next month and you win one in three quotes, you need three hundred thousand of quotes out.
If you've got a hundred and fifty, you're already short, and now's the time to follow up the quotes that went quiet.
Check 4: Your win rate. If you win nearly every quote, you're probably too cheap.
Win nine of ten jobs at two thousand profit and you make eighteen thousand.
Lift the price ten percent and win seven, and you make twenty one thousand with two fewer jobs to do.
And when you lose one, send a text: "No worries at all, mind if I ask what swung it?" Twenty answers will tell you if it's price, speed or the offer.
Check 5: Who owes you, and your biggest customer. Any invoice sixty days overdue is your money sitting in someone else's business.
And if one customer is more than about a quarter of your revenue, losing them takes more than a quarter of the business overnight.
To see all of that without pulling reports, I built a dashboard with an AI tool called Claude Code, connected to my customer records, accounting software and bank.
It took a few evenings, and I've never written a line of code.
Keep the bank connection read only, so it can see the balance and never move money.
Dane
P.S. I'm putting the full build, step by step, into a course called Scoreboard.
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