The five numbers to put on a weekly dashboard

A monthly close gives you the full, reconciled picture: profit and loss, balance sheet, the whole story. It is the right cadence for most of your numbers. But a month is a long time to be wrong about cash. If your bank balance is drifting in the wrong direction, you want to notice in week one, not when the close lands three weeks after the month ends.

The answer is not a second full report. It is a short weekly dashboard, four or five numbers, that you can read in two minutes on a Monday morning. It does not need to be perfect or audit-grade. It needs to be fast, consistent, and honest enough to tell you when something is off.

Here are the five we would put on it, and the reasoning for each. The point is not the exact list. It is picking numbers that genuinely change week to week and that you can act on while there is still time to act.

1. Cash on hand

Start with the simplest number you have: the total across your bank accounts as of this morning. Not your accounting balance, which lags because of timing, but the actual cleared cash. One line, one figure.

Watched weekly, this number tells a story that a single monthly snapshot hides. If you ended January at $480,000 and you are at $430,000 by the second week of February, that is a $50,000 move in ten days. Maybe it is a planned vendor payment. Maybe it is not. Either way, you want to know now.

2. Runway

Runway is cash on hand divided by your average monthly burn, the amount you spend over what you bring in each month. If you hold $430,000 and burn $60,000 a month, you have a little over seven months. That single number reframes every other decision you make that week.

Update it weekly using a rolling three-month average burn so one unusual month does not distort it. When runway crosses a threshold you care about, say nine months, that is your signal to start a raise or tighten spending while you still have room to do either calmly.

3. Revenue versus plan

Take the revenue you have booked so far this month and compare it to where your plan said you should be by this point. If your February plan is $200,000 and you are two weeks in with $85,000 closed, you are tracking a little behind the halfway mark, which is worth a second look.

This is a directional read, not a precise one, since revenue lands unevenly through a month. The value is in the trend across weeks. Behind in week one is noise. Behind in week one, two, and three is a pattern, and patterns are what you want to catch early.

4. One leading indicator

The four numbers above all look backward. Add one that looks forward: a leading indicator that predicts next month's revenue before it shows up in the bank. For most companies that is pipeline, signed bookings not yet billed, new trials, or qualified demos, depending on how you sell.

Pick one and stay with it. If your sales cycle is six weeks, today's pipeline is roughly next quarter's revenue, so a soft pipeline now is an early warning you can still respond to. A leading indicator is the difference between seeing trouble coming and being surprised by it.

5. The biggest variance

The last slot is not a fixed number. It is whatever moved most against expectation this week, with a one-line explanation. Maybe a customer's payment slipped and receivables jumped. Maybe a contractor invoice came in 30 percent over the estimate. Naming the single biggest surprise each week keeps the dashboard honest and forces a real look rather than a glance.

Keep the whole thing to one screen. A few rules make it work:

• Same five rows, same order, every week, so your eye learns where to look
• Pull the numbers the same way each time, even if the method is rough
• Note last week's figure beside this week's so the change is visible
• One sentence of context on anything that moved more than you expected
• Send it at the same time each week so it becomes a habit, not a project

How this fits with your monthly close

The weekly dashboard does not replace your monthly reporting and it should not try to. The monthly close is where you get accuracy, accruals, and the full balance sheet. The weekly view is an early-warning system: fast, approximate, and focused on the handful of numbers that can hurt you if you wait a month to see them.

Done well, the two reinforce each other. By the time your close lands, nothing in it should surprise you, because the weekly numbers already told you which way the month was heading. That is the real payoff, fewer surprises, more time to act.