The Monday Morning Financial Check: 5 Numbers Every Contractor Should Review Weekly

You spend 60 hours a week running your business. Dispatching techs, handling callbacks, chasing permits, quoting jobs, managing the chaos. Can you spend 5 minutes on Monday morning knowing whether the business is actually healthy?

Five minutes. Five numbers. Every Monday. That's the habit that separates contractors who get blindsided from contractors who see problems coming three weeks early.

This isn't about software or dashboards or hiring a CFO. It's about building a practice. A Monday morning ritual that takes less time than your first cup of coffee and gives you more clarity than your quarterly meeting with your accountant ever has.

Why Weekly Beats Monthly

Most contractors look at their numbers once a month. Some look quarterly. A few only look at tax time. All of them are finding out about problems too late.

Financial problems compound. A slow-paying customer at week one becomes a cash crisis at week six. A dipping average ticket in early March becomes a full pricing emergency by May. A creeping customer dependency goes unnoticed until that customer leaves and takes 30% of your revenue with them.

Monthly review means you're discovering week-two problems at week-six. By then, the damage is done. You're scrambling instead of adjusting.

Weekly review means you catch it at week two. You make a phone call. You adjust a price. You send an invoice reminder. Small corrections, early, before they become expensive corrections late.

The math is simple: 52 chances per year to course-correct versus 12. Which business would you bet on?

The 5 Numbers

1. Cash Position

Not revenue. Not projected income. Not what QuickBooks says you "earned" this month. What is actually sitting in your operating account right now, today, Monday morning?

What "good" looks like: Divide your current cash by your average weekly expenses. That gives you your runway in weeks. Below 3 weeks of runway is the danger zone. You're one slow-paying customer or one unexpected repair away from missing payroll. Between 4 and 8 weeks is healthy for most trades. Above 8 weeks means you might be sitting on capital that could be working harder (equipment, marketing, hiring).

What action it drives: If you're below 3 weeks, stop everything else and focus on collections. Call overdue customers today. Delay any non-essential purchases. If you're consistently below 4 weeks, you have a structural cash flow problem that needs addressing, not just a bad week.

Example: Your operating account shows $34,000. Your average weekly expenses (payroll, materials, truck payments, insurance, rent) run about $11,000. That's 3.1 weeks of runway. Tight. Not an emergency yet, but one big material purchase or one customer paying 15 days late pushes you into the red zone. Time to chase those outstanding invoices before Friday.

2. Accounts Receivable: Total and Overdue

Two numbers here, and the split between them tells the story. Total AR is what customers owe you across all outstanding invoices. Overdue AR is the subset past 30 days.

The overdue number is the one that predicts your future.

What "good" looks like: Your overdue AR (past 30 days) should be less than 10% of your total AR. Industry target for days-to-payment is 14 to 21 days. Most contractors run 30 to 45 days because they don't track it weekly. If your overdue balance is growing week over week, your future cash position is deteriorating right now, even if today's bank balance looks fine.

What action it drives: Pull up your aging report. Any invoice over 45 days gets a phone call this week, not an email, a call. Any invoice over 60 days gets escalated. You did the work. You deserve to get paid. The longer you wait, the less likely you collect.

Example: Total AR is $67,000. Overdue (past 30 days) is $19,000. That's 28% of your receivables sitting past due. Last Monday it was $14,000. The trend is wrong. Three customers owe you $4,200, $6,800, and $8,000 respectively, all past 35 days. Those three phone calls are your highest-ROI activity this week.

3. Revenue vs. Your Seasonal Average

Raw revenue numbers without context are almost useless. "$42,000 this week" means nothing unless you know what's normal for this time of year in your trade.

A 20% revenue dip in January is perfectly normal for HVAC. Heating demand is high but install work drops. A 20% dip in July, when every AC in the state is running at max capacity, is a five-alarm fire. You need your own historical pattern as the baseline, not some generic "small business" benchmark.

What "good" looks like: Within 10% of your seasonal average for the same period in prior years. If you don't have prior year data yet, use trade benchmarks as a starting point. HVAC peaks July through August and January through February. Plumbing peaks January through March. Electrical is the most stable trade with minimal seasonal swing. General contracting peaks May through September and drops 35% between October and November.

What action it drives: If you're 15%+ below your seasonal average and there's no obvious explanation (weather event, holiday week, you took vacation), something operational is wrong. Marketing stopped working. Your close rate dropped. A competitor opened nearby. Dig in. If you're 15%+ above average, figure out why so you can replicate it.

Example: You're a plumber in Colorado. Your trailing 4-week revenue is $38,000/week. Your March average over the past two years is $44,000/week (spring thaw, sump pump season, outdoor faucet repairs drive demand). You're 14% below normal. No unusual weather. No vacation. That gap is worth investigating. Did you lose a commercial account? Did your Google ranking drop? Something changed.

4. Average Ticket (Trailing 4 Weeks)

Revenue per completed job, smoothed over four weeks to eliminate single-job spikes. This is the number every home services coach obsesses over, and for good reason.

If your average ticket is declining while total revenue stays flat, you're running harder to stay in place. More jobs, more windshield time, more wear on your trucks, more hours from your techs, same money at the end of the month. That's a treadmill, not a business.

What "good" looks like: For plumbing service calls, $250 to $500. For HVAC repairs, $150 to $400. These are service tickets, not installs. Track yours over time. The absolute number matters less than the trend. A steady decline over 4 to 6 weeks signals a pricing problem or a service mix shift (more small jobs, fewer big ones). For a deeper dive into what healthy margins look like for your specific trade, see our guide to contractor margins.

What action it drives: If average ticket is declining, ask two questions. First: did your pricing change? Second: did your job mix change? If you're booking more drain cleanings and fewer water heater replacements, your marketing or your CSRs might be filtering wrong. If your prices haven't changed but tickets are shrinking, you might be discounting more or your techs might be skipping upsell opportunities.

Example: Four weeks ago your average ticket was $485. This week it's $412. Revenue is roughly flat because you completed 8 more jobs than usual. You're working harder for the same money. Looking at the job breakdown, you booked 12 more drain cleanings ($150 average) and 4 fewer water heater installs ($1,800 average). Your Google Ads campaign shifted budget toward "drain cleaning near me" keywords last month. That campaign change is costing you $5,500/week in lost ticket value.

5. Top Customer Percentage

What percentage of your trailing 90-day revenue comes from your single largest customer? This number creeps up silently. Most contractors never check it until the day that customer calls to say they're switching providers.

What "good" looks like: Above 15%, watch it. Above 25%, you have a dependency. A single customer representing a quarter of your revenue means a single phone call can crater your business overnight. Commercial accounts and property management contracts are the usual culprits. They feel great when the checks are coming in. They feel catastrophic when they stop. (We wrote an entire post on how customer concentration builds silently and what to do about it.)

What action it drives: If any single customer is above 15%, you need a diversification plan. Not panic, just a plan. Increase marketing spend to attract new customers. Pursue additional commercial accounts to spread the concentration. Build your residential base. The goal isn't to fire your biggest customer. The goal is to make sure losing them wouldn't break you.

Example: You run an electrical company. Trailing 90-day revenue is $180,000. Your largest customer, a property management company, accounts for $52,000 of that. That's 29%. If they switch to a cheaper electrician (and property managers are always shopping), you lose nearly a third of your income in a single conversation. You need 6 to 8 new residential customers per month to bring that percentage below 20% within two quarters. Start now, before you're forced to.

How to Pull These Numbers From QuickBooks

You don't need fancy software for this. QuickBooks Online has all five numbers. It just doesn't hand them to you in one place.

Cash Position: Dashboard → Bank accounts section shows current balances. Or run the Balance Sheet report (Reports → Balance Sheet → filter to today) and look at Total Bank Accounts under Current Assets.

Accounts Receivable (total + overdue): Reports → Accounts Receivable Aging Summary. The "Total" column is your total AR. The "61-90" and "91+" columns are your overdue. Add them up. Write down last week's overdue number somewhere so you can compare.

Revenue vs. Seasonal Average: Reports → Profit and Loss → set date range to last 4 weeks. Compare to the same 4-week period last year (change the date range). If you don't have last year's data, just start tracking now. In 12 months you'll have your own baseline.

Average Ticket: Reports → Sales by Customer Summary → set to last 4 weeks. Total revenue divided by total number of invoices. QuickBooks doesn't calculate this directly, so grab the total from the P&L and divide by your invoice count (Reports → Invoice List, count the rows or export to Excel).

Top Customer Percentage: Reports → Sales by Customer Summary → set to last 90 days → sort by total descending. Top customer's total divided by the grand total. Takes 30 seconds.

Total time for all five: about 5 minutes once you know where to look. Faster after the first couple of Mondays.

The Compound Effect

The first Monday you do this, you'll learn something. Maybe your cash position is tighter than you thought. Maybe a customer you assumed was paying on time is actually 45 days overdue. Maybe your average ticket dropped and you didn't notice.

The second Monday, you'll have a comparison point. Is overdue AR growing or shrinking? Did your cash position improve after those collection calls?

By week four, you'll start seeing patterns. You'll notice that your average ticket dips every time you run a specific ad campaign. You'll notice that one property manager pays like clockwork while another is always 40 days late. You'll notice that your cash position tightens predictably in the third week of every month when insurance and truck payments hit.

By week eight, you'll make decisions differently. You'll raise prices because you watched your average ticket decline for six straight weeks and finally got fed up. You'll fire a slow-paying customer because you tracked their overdue balance growing for two months. You'll turn down a big commercial contract because you realized it would push your top customer percentage past 30%.

None of these decisions require a finance degree. They require a habit. Five minutes, five numbers, every Monday. The contractors who build this practice make better decisions because they see the trajectory, not just the snapshot.

Start this Monday. Open QuickBooks before you open your email. Pull the five numbers. Write them down somewhere, even a notebook works. Next Monday, do it again. Compare. That's it. That's the whole system.

If you want this check automated, Streett Reports pulls these numbers from your QuickBooks every week and delivers them to your inbox Monday morning. Plain English, no login required. First report free.

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