# The five numbers every trades owner should actually track > Forget the thirty-KPI dashboard. Five numbers do the real work of telling you whether the business is healthy. Here they are, and what to do when each one starts moving. Source: https://toolbagcrm.com/blog/five-numbers-every-trades-owner-should-track/ Author: The Toolbag Crew Updated: 2026-10-17 Five numbers, checked monthly, beat any dashboard you can buy. ## What most owners get wrong You don’t need thirty KPIs. You need five. Most trades owners track none of them, and the ones who try to track ten get buried in spreadsheets, get bored by month three, and quit. Then there are the ones who only watch revenue. Revenue feels good. **Revenue doesn’t tell you whether you made any money.** Here are the five worth knowing. Anything outside this list is noise. ## 1. Gross margin per job Not revenue. Margin. A $12,000 re-roof sounds great until you back out materials, dump fees, the crew’s wages, and a slice of the truck. What’s left over is the only number that pays you. Some owners watch the deposit hit the bank and think they had a good week. They didn’t. They had cash flow. That’s a different thing. You don’t need fancy software to start. A spreadsheet with two columns gets you most of the way there: revenue minus direct cost. Do it on every job for a month and patterns appear. Maybe your small service calls run at twelve percent and your install work runs at forty. Now you know where the money lives. Most owners are surprised at the answer. ## 2. Quote close rate Quotes you sent. Quotes that turned into work. Divide the second by the first. A sixty percent close rate is healthy. Eighty means you’re probably underpricing, the customers who said yes felt like they were stealing it. Thirty means your pricing is too high for the market, or your follow-up is broken, or both. Usually it’s the second one. People hear the number, ask for time to think, and never hear from you again because nobody called them back. The fix is rarely the price. It’s almost always the follow-up. Send the quote, text two days later, text a week after that, then let it go. Watch which touch closed the deal. **A chunk of your wins came on a follow-up nobody bothers with.** ## 3. Average ticket size Revenue from every job last month. Divided by the number of jobs. That’s your average ticket. It’s the easiest number to move and the one nobody watches. A trade that does forty jobs a month at $400 each is making $16k. Same trade with the same forty jobs at $550 each is making $22k. Same crew. Same trucks. Same hours. The difference is one extra upsell per visit, or a price increase you’ve been putting off for two years, or tighter scoping on the small stuff so you stop doing $80 calls. Look at it monthly. When the number slides, ask yourself whether you’ve been quoting last year’s prices on this year’s materials. ## 4. Repeat and referral percentage Of the jobs booked this month, how many came from somebody you’ve worked for before, or somebody they sent your way? That number is your real marketing dashboard. Paid ads buy the first job. Repeats and referrals buy the next ten. If your repeat-and-referral percentage is under a third, your retention is bleeding somewhere and you don’t see it yet. Over half, and you’ve built something that compounds, you can spend less on Google every year instead of more. How to track it without buying software: ask one question when you book a job. “How’d you find us?” Write the answer somewhere you’ll see at month-end. A sticky note on the dispatch board works fine. Then count. ## 5. Cash on hand, in weeks of payroll Not your bank balance in dollars. Your bank balance, divided by what it actually costs to keep the lights on for a week. Two weeks is a panic number. Four is uncomfortable. Eight is healthy. Twelve means you can take a slow January without laying anyone off. This is a survival metric, not a vanity one, and it’s the one that quietly decides whether the business is still here next year. Most trades that fold don’t fold from a bad month. They fold from a string of mediocre months that drew the cash buffer down to zero before anybody noticed. By the time you do notice, you’re calling your accountant on a Friday afternoon, and the answer is the wrong answer. Check it every Monday. Same time. Same way. Write the number down somewhere you’ll see it again. > Most trades that fold don't fold from a bad month. They fold from a string of mediocre ones nobody was watching. ## What you can leave alone Plenty of stuff sounds important and isn’t. Website traffic. Social followers. Truck count. Square footage of your shop. None of those tell you whether the business is healthy. They feel like progress because the line goes up. They don’t pay you. Margin, close rate, ticket size, repeat percentage, cash buffer. That’s the whole list. If you only ever knew those five and updated them once a month, you’d be running tighter than most of your competition. ## Where ToolbagCRM fits Use ToolbagCRM invoice and payment records to review billed work and collections. The optional Job Costing plug-in reports revenue, cost, profit, and margin from the entries you record. Lead-source attribution, automatic labor capture, and a complete set of the five reports described here are not included in the current product. Free and Founders include unlimited users. [See plan terms, plug-in slots, and payment fees.](https://toolbagcrm.com/pricing/) ### Before you build the dashboard - **Track margin, not revenue**: Revenue per job is a vanity number. Subtract materials and labor to get the figure that actually pays you. - **Count quotes sent vs. quotes won**: A simple ratio. If it's under fifty percent on small jobs, your follow-up is the gap, not your price. - **Compute your average ticket every month**: Revenue divided by job count. The easiest lever in the business, and the one nobody pulls. - **Ask 'how'd you find us?' on every booking**: Stick the answer somewhere you'll see at month-end. The split of paid vs. repeat vs. referral is your real marketing dashboard. - **Check cash on hand every Monday**: Bank balance divided by weekly burn. Two weeks is a panic number. Eight is healthy. Write it down each week. > The rule-of-thumb percentages here (close rates, repeat ratios, weeks of cash) move by trade and by region. Treat them as rough rails, not industry standards. Your own trailing numbers are the only useful comparison. - [HVAC CRM](https://toolbagcrm.com/crm-for-hvac/) - [Plumbing CRM](https://toolbagcrm.com/crm-for-plumbers/) - [Electrician CRM](https://toolbagcrm.com/crm-for-electricians/) - [Roofing CRM](https://toolbagcrm.com/crm-for-roofers/) - [Landscaping CRM](https://toolbagcrm.com/crm-for-landscapers/) - [Cleaning CRM](https://toolbagcrm.com/crm-for-cleaners/) - [Handyman CRM](https://toolbagcrm.com/crm-for-handymen/) - [How to price and quote jobs for profit](https://toolbagcrm.com/blog/how-to-price-and-quote-jobs-for-profit/) - [Job costing: which jobs make money](https://toolbagcrm.com/blog/job-costing-which-jobs-make-money/) - [Cash flow for seasonal trades](https://toolbagcrm.com/blog/cash-flow-for-seasonal-trades/) - [Founders pricing — get started](https://app.toolbagcrm.com/signup/) ## Related resources - [How to price and quote jobs for profit](https://toolbagcrm.com/blog/how-to-price-and-quote-jobs-for-profit/) - [Job costing: which jobs make money](https://toolbagcrm.com/blog/job-costing-which-jobs-make-money/) - [Cash flow for seasonal trades](https://toolbagcrm.com/blog/cash-flow-for-seasonal-trades/) - [Best CRM for small contractors](https://toolbagcrm.com/blog/best-crm-small-contractors-unlimited-users/)