What Contractors Should Actually Measure Every Month
Seven numbers. One page. If your reporting takes longer than a coffee to read, it is not reporting.
Seven numbers. One page. If your reporting takes longer than a coffee to read, it is not reporting.
The seven numbers
Inquiries, qualified opportunities, estimates delivered, jobs booked, average job value, marketing spend, and cost per booked job. Every other metric is diagnostic detail for whoever runs the channels.
Shown with a trailing twelve-month trend rather than a single month, these seven answer nearly every strategic question an owner has.
Definitions before dashboards
Most contractor reporting fails at the definition layer, not the tooling layer. If marketing counts a form fill as an inquiry and sales counts a scheduled appointment, both reports are correct and neither is useful.
Write the definitions down once, get sales and operations to agree, and put them at the bottom of the dashboard where anyone can check them.
Definitions worth arguing about once
- 01Inquiry: any inbound contact requesting work, including calls and texts
- 02Qualified: in service area, in scope, decision-maker reachable
- 03Estimate delivered: a written number in the homeowner's hands
- 04Job booked: signed contract with a deposit or scheduled start
- 05Spend: everything, including agency fees, tools and directories
The reconciliation habit
Once a month, compare platform-reported conversions against CRM jobs. The gap is normal; an unexplained gap that grows is the early warning sign of broken tracking or a vendor counting generously.
Ten minutes of reconciliation prevents a quarter of decisions made on inflated numbers.
An unexplained and growing gap between platform and CRM is the earliest warning you will get.
What to do with the page
One meeting a month, same agenda: what moved, what it cost, what we are changing, and what we need from operations. Decisions get logged next to the numbers that prompted them.
Quarterly, revisit the model itself — job values drift, close rates move, and a budget built on last year's arithmetic slowly stops being true.
The short version
- Seven numbers, one page, trailing twelve months
- Agree definitions before building any dashboard
- Reconcile platform conversions to CRM jobs monthly
- Log decisions next to the numbers that caused them
- Rebuild the model quarterly as job values and rates drift
Wonder what your marketing looks like under the microscope?