The CoreOS method
Which numbers should a business owner check weekly?
Last updated 5 July 2026 · Reviewed by Nick Thorpe
The short answer
Check six numbers weekly: cash in the bank, sales pipeline value, revenue against plan, a gross margin signal, aged debtors and one delivery metric. Weekly beats monthly because you catch drift in days rather than weeks. Fifteen minutes, same time each week, written down. If a number surprises you, dig in before it becomes a problem.
Most owners look at their numbers at month end, or when something already feels wrong. Both are too late to steer with. A short weekly check exists to spot drift while it is still cheap to fix. I run one across my own companies every Monday, and it is one of the first habits we install with coaching clients.
The six numbers to check every week
Check your cash position, sales pipeline, revenue against plan, a gross margin signal, aged debtors and one delivery metric. Six is deliberate. Fewer misses a whole side of the business. More turns the habit into a chore, and chores get skipped.
| Number | The question it answers |
|---|---|
| Cash position | Can we pay everyone this month, and next? |
| Sales pipeline | Is enough new work coming in to replace what we finish? |
| Revenue vs plan | Are we on track for this month’s target? |
| Gross margin signal | Are we keeping enough of every pound we bill? |
| Aged debtors | Who owes us money, and how overdue are they? |
| Delivery metric | Are we keeping the promise we sell? |
Cash position means the bank balance plus what is due in and out over the coming weeks, so you see the shape of the month rather than one day’s snapshot. Pipeline is the value of live opportunities and whether it moved since last week. Revenue against plan is simple arithmetic: what you have billed so far this month against where the plan says you should be by now.
The margin signal does not need a full profit calculation. Pick a proxy you can read in a minute: actual hours against quoted hours, materials cost against the estimate, or discounts given this week. Aged debtors is your unpaid invoices sorted by how overdue they are. The delivery metric is whichever number your customers would name if you asked what matters: jobs finished on time, response time, complaints, refunds, cancellations.
Why weekly beats monthly
Weekly wins on correction speed. Management accounts usually land weeks after the month closes, so a problem that starts early in a month can be a couple of months old before it reaches your desk. By then a slow payer has become a bad debt and a quiet pipeline has become a quiet quarter.
| Weekly numbers check | Monthly accounts | |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Catch drift early | Confirm the full picture |
| Lag | Days | Weeks after the event |
| Depth | Six headline numbers | Full profit and loss, balance sheet |
| Prepared by | You, in about 15 minutes | Bookkeeper or accountant |
| Drives | This week’s actions | This quarter’s decisions |
You need both. The weekly check is the smoke alarm. Monthly accounts are the structural survey. Nobody cancels the survey because they fitted an alarm.
How to make it a 15-minute habit
- Fix a slot and defend it. Monday morning before email works well, because the numbers then shape the week rather than describe it.
- Use one sheet with one row per week. Same six numbers every time, so trends are visible at a glance. The free Weekly Numbers Sheet on our resources page is laid out for exactly this.
- Write this week next to last week. A single number tells you little. The direction of travel tells you nearly everything.
- Note one sentence against any number that surprised you: what you think caused it, right or wrong.
- Pick one action and put it in the diary. One call, one quote review, one chase.
- Stop at 15 minutes. If it takes an hour, you will stop doing it altogether.
What to do when a number drifts
Act in the same week you spot it. That is the whole payoff of checking weekly. An invoice two weeks overdue gets a phone call today, while it is still a polite conversation rather than a write-off. A light pipeline gets outreach time booked this week, because work you do now takes a full sales cycle to become revenue. A slipping margin signal gets checked at the next quote, before it is baked into another job.
If the same number drifts three weeks running, that is no longer a blip. It is a pattern, and patterns need a decision rather than a nudge.
What if you never look at the sheet?
Then the problem is accountability rather than information, and it is the most common one I see. Owners rarely lack data. They lack someone who asks, every week, what the numbers said and what they did about it. That is a large part of what Momentum exists for: a monthly strategy session with accountability between sessions, so the weekly check actually happens.
Start smaller if you like. Download the free Weekly Numbers Sheet from the resources page, fill it in this Monday, and see what surprises you. The first week usually turns something up.
Nick Thorpe
16 years a British Army officer, then a decade building his own companies. Coaches business owners on the CoreOS framework. The story.