What KPIs Should a Service Business Track Every Week?

The weekly KPI sheet: six numbers beyond revenue

Each number below sits at one hand-off between the first inquiry and collected cash, and each is a count or a dollar figure one named person can pull from existing records before the weekly meeting. Revenue billed and cash in the bank stay at the top of the sheet; these six go underneath.

• Inquiries with no reply. New calls, web forms and emails this week, and how many got no answer by the end of the next business day. The second count is the one to watch: the phone system logs a missed call, but the log alone does not show whether anyone called back.
• Quotes past their follow-up date. The count and dollar value of open quotes, and how many are past the date someone was supposed to follow up. The ones past their date are the part of the pipeline nobody is working.
• Booked work ahead. Scheduled jobs for the next two to four weeks, in crew-days, technician hours or dollars, whichever unit the schedule already uses. It is an early sign of a slow month, because the schedule thins before revenue does.
• Finished, not invoiced. Jobs completed and still without an invoice, as a count, a dollar total and the age of the oldest. This is money the business has already earned and has not yet asked for.
• Receivables past due. Dollars past their payment terms, split into 1–30, 31–60 and over 60 days, plus the single oldest invoice and its age. The past-due part, not the total, is what needs a call.
• Gross profit on jobs closed this week. For each job that closed, the price billed minus the direct cost to deliver it: labor hours at a loaded rate, materials, subcontractors, equipment rented for the job. List the jobs that came in under the company’s own floor. One company-wide margin for the month hides which jobs were thin; the job list shows them while the crew still remembers what happened.

Six is not a rule. A company that never quotes drops that row; one that sells maintenance agreements may add agreements due for renewal. Any added row has to come from a record that already exists, have one owner, and carry a level that sets off a specific action. A number that fails the test belongs in the monthly review.

Where each number comes from in the records already kept

None of the six needs new software. Each comes from a record the business already keeps for its phones, its schedule, its billing or its tax return. IRS Publication 583 lists invoices, bank deposit slips and receipt books among the documents that show gross receipts, and says the records behind a tax return are generally “the same records you use to monitor your business and prepare your financial statements.” The weekly sheet reads a few more of them, once a week:

• Inquiries with no reply: the phone system’s call log, the website form inbox, and the CRM or job system where leads are entered. A call or form with no recorded reply is the count.
• Quotes past follow-up: the estimate list in the field-service software or the quote spreadsheet, with a sent date, a follow-up date and a status on each. Quotes with no follow-up date are the first finding.
• Booked work ahead: the schedule or dispatch board, read forward two to four weeks. Count only work with a date and a crew, not tentative holds.
• Finished, not invoiced: the week’s completed jobs or work orders, matched against the invoice register. Any completed job with no invoice number goes on the list.
• Receivables past due: the accounts receivable aging report in the accounting software, filtered to invoices past their terms.
• Gross profit per job: the job’s invoice, plus the timesheets, supplier bills and subcontractor invoices coded to it. The SEC guide describes cost of sales as “the amount of money the company spent to produce the goods or services it sold”; at the job level, that is the labor, materials and subcontractors that went into that one job.

When a number cannot be produced because the record does not exist, because calls are not logged, timesheets carry no job code or quotes carry no follow-up date, write “no record” on that row. The blank is a finding, and fixing the record comes before fixing anything the record would show.

Who owns each number, and the level that triggers action

A number with no owner gets read and nodded at. Each row gets one person, by name, who brings the count to the weekly meeting and can act on it without asking first, and a trigger: a level, set from the company’s own last eight to twelve weeks, at which a specific thing happens. Published benchmarks describe other companies and other markets; the company’s own history is the baseline it can act on.

• Inquiries with no reply. Owner: the office manager, or whoever runs the phones. Trigger: any inquiry unanswered by the end of the next business day gets a call that day; above zero two weeks running means a look at who covers the phone at lunch and after hours.
• Quotes past follow-up. Owner: the estimator or salesperson who sent them. Trigger: every quote past its date gets a touch before the meeting ends, and a quote past its second follow-up date gets a decision, pursue or close, with the reason written down.
• Booked work ahead. Owner: the owner or general manager. Trigger: booked work below the same weeks last year sends the meeting to the inquiries and quotes rows before anyone talks about marketing spend.
• Finished, not invoiced. Owner: whoever does billing. Trigger: any job finished longer ago than the company’s own billing rule allows, for example two business days, gets a name next to it and the date its invoice will go out.
• Receivables past due. Owner: the bookkeeper or office manager. Trigger: an invoice that crosses its terms gets a phone call, not another email; an oldest invoice still the oldest two weeks running goes to the owner to call the customer.
• Gross profit per job. Owner: the owner or project manager, with the crew lead. Trigger: any closed job under the floor, set from the company’s own average over the last quarter, gets ten minutes at the meeting: was the price wrong, did the hours run over, or did extra work go unbilled?

Illustrative example: a hypothetical 15-person home services company’s Friday sheet reads $68,000 billed; 54 new inquiries, 6 with no reply by the next day; 31 quotes open worth $142,000, 9 of them past their follow-up date; 2.5 weeks of booked work against 3.5 in the same weeks last year; 7 jobs finished and not invoiced, worth $11,400, the oldest 6 days; $23,000 past due, $4,100 of it over 60 days; and 3 of 22 closed jobs under the company’s own gross profit floor. That is five actions with five names: call back six people today, touch nine quotes before noon, bill seven jobs by Tuesday, phone the customers behind the $4,100 over 60 days, and walk through three jobs with the crew lead. The thinner schedule has its likely answer two rows up. Every number here is hypothetical; the company’s own replace them.

When business slows: what to check before buying more leads

When the schedule thins, buying more leads is the obvious lever. The Federal Reserve Banks’ 2026 Report on Employer Firms, from the 2025 Small Business Credit Survey, says that “Reaching customers and growing sales was the most commonly reported operational challenge.” Before spending on it, read the sheet in this order, because each row rules out a cheaper fix.

• First, inquiries with no reply. If calls and forms arrive and go unanswered, more leads add more of the same, and some lead programs charge for calls nobody picked up: Google’s Local Services Ads help page counts a call missed during business hours as a valid lead when “the customer stays on the line for more than 20 seconds,” and applies the same rule to a call that reaches voicemail.
• Second, quotes past their follow-up date. Open quotes nobody has called back are demand the company already paid to create; a second touch costs a phone call.
• Third, booked work against the same weeks last year. The same weeks, not last month, separate a seasonal dip from a real drop.
• Fourth, new inquiries per week against the same weeks last year. Only if this count fell is the problem upstream of the office, and only then is lead spend the right question.

For a plumbing company, the first check in that order is the CSR booking rate and unbooked calls: calls that came in for work the company does and ended without a job on the schedule. That count takes a week by hand and comes before any new lead spend. If new inquiries did fall against last year, the question becomes whether the market moved or the company did. The Census Bureau’s Business Trends and Outlook Survey, an experimental data product, collects answers every two weeks on topics including “employment and revenue changes, prices and demand,” and publishes results by industry sector and by state, so an owner can see whether businesses in the same sector or the same state report the same slowdown.

How a weekly KPI sheet differs from a dashboard

A dashboard shows what the software counts, all the time, to whoever opens it. A weekly sheet shows a handful of numbers once a week, each read out loud by its owner, with the action written next to it. The difference is not paper against screen: the sheet has a name and a trigger on every row, and the meeting does not end until each row has an action or a stated reason for none.

A dashboard also cannot show what was never recorded. A call that went to voicemail and never reached the CRM, an extra done on site that never reached the ticket, a quote with no follow-up date: none of them appear on a screen built from those records, so the screen can look healthy while money slips around it. Counting by hand forces the question of where each number comes from, and the blanks show up in week one.

Start on paper or a plain spreadsheet for four to six weeks. The free Friday Ledger is a printable six-row version built around the hand-offs; this guide’s sheet adds booked work and gross profit per job. To start smaller, begin with a three-number cash check every Friday; a law firm can use the law firm version of this sheet, six intake numbers with the reports behind them. Once the counts are steady and read without effort, software can fill in the rows; a tool should fill in a sheet that already works, not stand in for one nobody reads.

When a weekly sheet is not worth it, and where the Review fits

Skip the sheet while the owner still answers every call, writes every quote and sends every invoice; at that size, the owner’s own week is the sheet. Skip it for now when the records do not exist; start by logging calls, dating quotes and coding hours to jobs. If cash is short this week, collect what is owed first; the sheet can start next Friday.

If the counts are hard to produce, or they disagree with each other, the Revenue Review builds them from the company’s own records: call logs, estimates, the schedule, invoices and payments. It rebuilds the numbers on this sheet for the past twelve months wherever the records allow, prices the gaps, and ends in a written report the company keeps. It takes two weeks. It does not keep the books or replace the accountant.

If one row turns out to be the problem, the next step is a free 20-minute call, where we say whether the sheet alone is enough, which may well be the honest answer.