The Top Reports Business Owners and The Executive Team Should be Looking At

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”  -Peter Drucker

“The numbers don’t lie, but they don’t tell the whole truth.”  -Anon

“It’s all about the information!” – Ben Kingsley in the film “Sneakers”

Pick your quote.  These are merely three of them.  There are countless others.

Whether using quantitative or qualitative information, businesses need information to help guide (dare I say “inform”) their decisions and to identify potential (and real) problems.

Do we do more of what we’ve done?

Do less of it?

Why did only 1,300 people open last week’s emails vs. 25,000 the week before?

Something is not right with our payment processor because cash is out of step with revenues!

As I see it, you have two choices.

Measure and monitor your business.

Or hope and pray and then don’t be surprised when your company checks bounce.

In previous posts, after harping on about the importance of knowing the value of your customer, I detailed out how to measure customer LTV.

After last week’s post on how to hire an analyst, several people messaged me asking exactly what types of reports said analyst should run.

Of course there is no comprehensive list of reports for all businesses.  But all businesses share a good number of similarities – revenues, cash, etc.

As such, I’ve put together a spreadsheet with several tabs, detailing a number of key reports that should be run weekly.  Some, such as continuity retention, probably only need to be run monthly.

These are intended to be more dashboard views.  The level of detail for the report you get is obviously your choice.  How big is your team?  How crucial are certain details vs. others?  For example, you probably don’t need cash balances by bank account, but maybe it is important to know revenues by traffic channel?

But clearly, either you or folks on your team should have much more granular data and reporting – that’s actually where everything happens.  The reports in the file linked below should be helpful to keep your finger on the pulse of key areas of your business.

These reports apply to businesses with physical products and info products.  One-time transactions as well as continuity offers.

And you’ll notice there are operational metrics as well.  Too often these are an after-thought.  But having great communication between ops/customer service and marketing can help to inform offers, copy, etc.

Add, subtract, tweak as you see fit.

But I can almost guarantee that the moment you start reporting and paying attention to something in your business, it will get better.

These reports should help get you going or add to what you’re already doing.

Click Here to see the reports.

Finally, I’d be interested to know what you look at – please comment below.

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