Getting useful numbers out of a trades business

Last updated: September 2026

Most reporting is theatre

Software sells dashboards because they photograph well. But a report only has value if it changes a decision, and most trades dashboards are read once a month, nodded at, and closed.

The test to apply before collecting anything: if this number were twice as bad as I think, what would I do differently? If the answer is nothing, do not collect it.

Six numbers pass that test for almost every small trades business, and all six can be produced without an accountant.

The six numbers

1. Days from completion to invoice. Pure timing, entirely within your control, and usually the single fastest cash improvement available.
2. Outstanding invoice total, split by how overdue. Not one number, three: under 30 days, 30 to 60, over 60. The shape matters more than the total.
3. Quote acceptance rate. How many sent, how many accepted. A rate near nine in ten usually means you are too cheap. Near three in ten means you are quoting the wrong work.
4. Margin by job type. Hours and materials against what you charged, grouped by the kind of work. This is the number that finds the job you lose money on.
5. Jobs finished but not invoiced. Should be near zero. Anything else is money sitting still.
6. Repeat customer share. What proportion of this month work came from someone you had worked for before. It moves slowly and tells you whether the business is healthy.

Where the numbers come from

Four of the six are by-products of running the work properly, which is the point. If quotes, jobs and invoices live on one record, the completion-to-invoice gap and the ready-to-invoice pile are already there to be counted.

The margin number needs two inputs that most businesses are not collecting: hours against the job, and materials against the job. Both are habits before they are features, and both are covered in tracking time and tracking material costs.

Quote acceptance needs only that quotes are recorded rather than sent from a notes app, and repeat customer share needs a customer record that survives the year.

Where Dispatch fits, and where it stops

The dashboard is deliberately small: six tiles covering today visits, tomorrow visits, jobs needing attention, jobs ready to invoice, outstanding invoices and unanswered quotes. Each is a number you can act on the same day, and a field technician sees only their own.

Beyond that, the app is a source of data rather than an analytics package. Money records can be browsed by tax quarter and exported as CSV once that feature is switched on in Settings; hours export as CSV or PDF; CIS carries a tax-year deduction report where that is switched on.

What there is not: no custom report builder, no charts of revenue over time, no profit-by-customer screen, no forecasting. For the six numbers above, the honest route is the CSV export and a spreadsheet, or your accountant.

That is a real limitation and worth stating rather than dressing up. Small trades businesses generally need the six numbers monthly, not a live analytics suite, but if you want the suite you will not find it here.

A monthly hour that is worth it

Set aside an hour at the start of each month. Export what you need, put the six numbers in the same spreadsheet each time, and compare with last month.

Then pick exactly one thing to change. Not five. The businesses that improve are the ones that reprice one job type, or chase one pile of invoices, or drop one customer, and then look again next month.

A year of that is twelve deliberate changes, which is considerably more than most businesses manage with a dashboard full of charts.

Numbers that mislead

Two worth treating carefully. Turnover feels like the headline number and tells you almost nothing on its own; a busier year at a worse margin is a worse year. And utilisation, the proportion of hours billed, punishes the quoting, travelling and chasing that the business genuinely needs.

If you only ever look at two, make them margin by job type and days from completion to invoice. Those two, watched for a year, will change more about a small trades business than any other pair. Improving job profitability is the practical follow-on.