#metrics
Metrics
Key financial metrics and KPIs for business health
What Is a Flash Report? A Weekly Early-Warning System for Small Business Finances
A flash report is a one-page, weekly summary of liquidity, productivity, and profitability metrics that surfaces cash problems weeks before the monthly close — critical when cash flow issues contribute to roughly 82% of small business failures. Here's what to include and how to build one in under 30 minutes a week.
Return on Equity (ROE) Explained: What It Measures, What Counts as Good, and How to Break It Down
Return on Equity (ROE) divides net income by owner's equity — a 15% ROE means the business earned 15 cents per dollar of the owner's capital. This guide covers healthy benchmarks (12–15% baseline, 15–20%+ strong), the three-part DuPont breakdown of margin, asset turnover, and leverage, and the pitfalls — debt-inflated returns, negative equity, one-time items — that distort the ratio.
Inventory Turnover Ratio Explained: Formula, Industry Benchmarks, and How to Improve It
Inventory turnover ratio = COGS ÷ average inventory, and it shows how many times a business sells through its stock each year. This guide covers the formula, converting turnover to days sales of inventory, industry benchmarks from 2–4 turns (industrial parts) to 10–20+ (grocery), and why slow-moving stock costs 20–30% of its value annually to hold.
Setting Up Google Analytics 4 Conversions: A Small Business Owner's Guide to Knowing Which Marketing Actually Works
GA4 tracks events by default but reports zero conversions until you manually flag key events — a 30-minute fix. This guide covers the event → key event → conversion chain, which events to track by business type, the last-click attribution trap, and tying channel data back to your books.
Return on Invested Capital: The One Number That Tells You If Your Business Is Actually Worth Running
ROIC measures how efficiently a business turns debt and equity into after-tax operating profit — NOPAT divided by invested capital. Learn the formula, why it beats ROI and ROE, the WACC benchmark that separates value creators from value destroyers, and the five calculation mistakes owners make most.
Economic Value Added (EVA) Explained: The Profit Metric That Charges for Capital
Economic Value Added (EVA) = NOPAT − (WACC × invested capital) — the profit left after every source of capital, debt and equity alike, is paid its going rate. A worked example, how to estimate NOPAT and WACC, why EVA avoids ROI's percentage bias, and how small business owners can use it for capital decisions.
Bootstrapped SaaS Valuation Multiples in 2026: What Indie Founders Actually Get on Acquire.com
2026 data from 600+ Acquire.com listings shows bootstrapped SaaS selling at roughly 2.6x TTM revenue and 10.7x profit — a 30–50% discount to public comps. Here's how NRR, CAC payback, customer concentration, and reconciled books move your multiple, and the diligence documents buyers actually request.
Bookkeeping for VR Arcades: Deferred Deposits, Per-Station Depreciation, and Revenue by Stream
How VR arcades and location-based entertainment venues should keep their books — split revenue across six streams, book party deposits as deferred-revenue liabilities, depreciate each $50,000+ station separately, and track revenue per available station hour, the LBE equivalent of a hotel's RevPAR.
Fitness Studio and Personal Trainer Bookkeeping: Deferred Revenue, Instructor Pay, and the KPIs That Matter
Prepaid training packages are a liability, not income — how fitness studios should use deferred revenue accounting, classify instructors under the FLSA economic-reality test, and track the KPIs, like the 70–75% class utilization benchmark, that separate profitable studios from struggling ones.
Days Cash on Hand: The Liquidity Metric That Predicts Business Survival
Days cash on hand measures how many days a business can pay operating expenses using only its current cash balance, with small businesses typically running 30–60 days and 90+ days considered a strong cushion.
Bookkeeping for Independent Doulas: Prepaid Packages, Scope-of-Practice Risk, and the KPIs Behind a Profitable Perinatal Practice
How independent doulas should structure their books — allocating prepaid birth packages across performance obligations, classifying backup doulas correctly, handling HSA/FSA and Medicaid payment pathways, and reading the KPIs that predict whether a perinatal practice is actually sustainable.
Indoor Golf Simulator Lounge Bookkeeping: Tracking Bay-Hour Revenue, Capitalizing Hardware, and the KPIs That Drive Profit
A working playbook for owner-operators of boutique indoor golf simulator lounges — how to recognize bay rental, membership, league, and breakage revenue under ASC 606; capitalize $24K Trackman units and $60K bay buildouts via Section 179, bonus depreciation, and QIP cost segregation; classify teaching pros correctly; and read the bay-utilization and revenue-per-bay-hour KPIs that separate profitable lounges from the rest.