Lumina Business Advisory
Self-audit · from your answers, not your records
Your verdict draws here when the thirteen answers are in.
From memory, not records
Free revenue self-audit · 13 questions Audit your own chain.
Thirteen questions a senior operator would ask first, answered from memory. Hand-off one is right here.
Start here · two taps
Hand-off 1 of 6 · Inquiry → Quote
Choose the answer that sounds like your business.
Score the other five hand-offs
That was one of six hand-offs where money changes hands, from first inquiry to collected cash. The other five take about three minutes and end in a dated sheet that names where to start.
Each question probes a hand-off where money changes hands. No email. No score out of a hundred. You get a verdict on all six hand-offs of your chain, one place to start, and a dated sheet that is yours to keep.
This instrument scores what you remember. The Revenue Review counts what your systems recorded. Both are useful. Only one is free.
Your answers stay on this page. We note only that a sheet was finished, through our ad pixel — described in our privacy policy.
13 questions3 optional numbersyours to keep
Before you start
How it is scored.
Each question offers four plain statements. You pick the one that sounds like your business — no scales, no sliders.
Each of the six hand-offs earns one of four named verdicts, from Sealed to Open. The cutoffs are printed below, not hidden. If you cannot answer, say so: “I can’t say” counts as a finding, not as a zero.
There is no invented peer group here and no score out of a hundred. There is your chain, described by you — and a way to replace your description with counts.
The instrument
Thirteen questions. Six hand-offs.
From your entered values
All thirteen answers are in. Your sheet is drawn below.
Score it against the table under “Estimates, and what they are not” below.
The sheet
Your chain, as you described it.
Your verdict draws here when the thirteen answers are in.
Start here
- What a sealed hand-off looks like
- What you said
- Why it leaks
- What it costs
- What a count would show
The arithmetic, shown
All six hand-offs
Where each hand-off stands.
Inquiry → QuoteStart hereRead the findingClose
What you said
Why it leaks
What it costs
Revenue Leak Calculator — Put a dollar figure on the inquiries nobody chases — four numbers, about ninety seconds.
Quote → ContractStart hereRead the findingClose
What you said
Why it leaks
What it costs
Friday Ledger — Its quote line counts, every Friday, the quotes due for a follow-up and how many actually got one.
Contract → DeliveryStart hereRead the findingClose
What you said
Why it leaks
What it costs
Friday Ledger — Its scope check counts work done beyond the original scope — and how much of it was in writing.
Delivery → InvoiceStart hereRead the findingClose
What you said
Why it leaks
What it costs
Cash Gap Calculator — Draw the days between done and paid on a ruler — four inputs you already know.
Invoice → PaymentStart hereRead the findingClose
What you said
Why it leaks
What it costs
Cash Gap Calculator — Put your real terms and your real days on the ruler and see what is parked.
Payment → MarginStart hereRead the findingClose
What you said
Why it leaks
What it costs
Operating Scorecard — No free instrument measures job margin; its Executive Intelligence row shows what running on weekly numbers looks like, stage by stage.
Your chain holds. Keep it that way. We will not suggest a two-week Review for a chain that reads like this — a weekly six-check sheet is how you keep an eye on it. Retake this audit in ninety days and compare the two sheets.
One hand-off needs attention: .
This sheet crossed the line where a count beats an estimate. That line is printed on this page, not invented for you: two hand-offs at Loose or worse, or any hand-off nobody can see. You can firm this up yourself, hand-off by hand-off, with the free instruments — they are yours to run without us. Or a senior team can do it in two weeks, from your systems instead of your memory: The Revenue Review reads a year of your CRM, invoices, phone records, and books, and returns nine documents holding the counts this sheet could only estimate. If you would rather start with a conversation, send this sheet. A person reads it — we reply the same business day.
The method
Estimates, and what they are not.
Sealed 6Holding 4–5Loose 2–3Open 0–1Not visible · no answer
Each hand-off asks two questions. Each answer is worth 0 to 3 points, and the anchors are printed in the questions themselves — no hidden weighting, no algorithm. If you could not answer either question, the hand-off is not scored at all: it reads Not visible, and it outranks everything that is. If you answered one of the two, we score the hand-off from that answer alone, doubled onto the same cutoffs, and mark the verdict thin.
Hand-offs are never weighted against each other — we have no honest basis for saying your Quote hand-off matters more than your Invoice hand-off, so we do not say it. The weakest hand-off leads; when two hand-offs tie at the same verdict and the same points, we point you upstream, because an early leak shrinks everything downstream.
Two or more hand-offs at Loose or worse, or any hand-off Not visible, is the point where a count beats an estimate.
You will notice this sheet compares you to no peer group. That is deliberate: we do not have a benchmark base, and we will not invent one. What you were measured against is the rubric printed here. The published figures below are context from named datasets — not your grade.
- Researchers writing in Harvard Business Review sent web inquiries to 2,241 US companies: 23 percent never replied, and among those that replied within a month, the average first reply took 42 hours. HBR, 2011
- In Intuit’s 2026 survey, 59 percent of US small businesses said some invoices were 30 or more days overdue; businesses with unpaid invoices were owed about $17,700 on average. QuickBooks Late Payments Report, 2026
- On Xero’s platform, US small businesses waited an average of about 29 days to be paid in the second quarter of 2026 — roughly eight and a half days past terms. Xero Small Business Insights, 2026
- JPMorgan Chase Institute, reading 470 million transactions from about 600,000 small businesses, found the median firm held 27 days of cash — and one in four held fewer than 13. JPMorgan Chase Institute, 2016
- The Exit Planning Institute reports that only 20 to 30 percent of businesses that go to market actually sell. Exit Planning Institute, State of Owner Readiness
A word about what this is. Everything on the sheet was built from thirteen answers you gave from memory. Memory is a fine place to start and a poor place to stop — it rounds up on the good weeks and forgets the invoices that sat. These are the questions a senior operator starts with. The difference is who answers. Here, your memory did. In the Review, your records do: a year of your CRM, your invoices, your phone logs, and your books — counted, not recalled — returned as nine documents in two weeks.
If a hand-off on your sheet says Not visible, the number may already exist in your systems, or it may need to be made to exist. Either way, you cannot see it from here. Neither can we — until we count it.
A person, if you want one
Have a senior operator read this page — we reply the same business day.
Finish the thirteen questions and your sheet travels with this message. Send now, and a person replies to what you write.
Your sheet travels with this message — the answers you gave marked as yours, anything you skipped marked as skipped. The person who replies will have read it first.
This sheet is yours to run without us. Print it. Keep it with the books. Retake it in ninety days and compare the two — we report movements between verdicts, not points, because estimate noise is bigger than a one-point move.
Compare with a previous sheet
The other four instruments
- Revenue Leak Calculator
What the inquiries nobody chased were worth — four numbers, about a minute.
- Cash Gap Calculator
The days between finished work and money in the bank, drawn to scale.
- The Friday Ledger
Six checks, once a week, by hand — a printable sheet.
- Operating Scorecard
The published rubric behind the stages — six dimensions, five stages.