1. Gross profit margin
Take your revenue, subtract what it cost you to deliver the work (materials, subcontractors, the labor that touches the job), and divide the result by revenue. That percentage is your gross margin.
This is the number that tells you whether the work itself makes money, separate from the cost of running the office. An owner doing $80,000 a month at a 22% margin is in more trouble than one doing $30,000 at 55%, and the first owner usually has no idea, because the top line looks healthy.
Watch the trend more than the level. What counts as a good margin varies enormously by industry, but a margin that slid from 48% to 39% over four months is telling you something regardless of the industry.
2. Cash on hand, in weeks
Not your bank balance. Your bank balance divided by your average weekly operating spend.
Answering "about $40,000" is not useful, because $40,000 is a comfortable cushion for one business and two weeks of oxygen for another. Answering "about nine weeks" is immediately useful, and it is the number that tells you whether you can afford to wait out a slow month, take on a hire, or float a large job's materials.
3. Accounts receivable over 60 days
The total your customers owe you that has been outstanding more than 60 days, and the name attached to each piece of it.
Revenue you have earned but not collected is not revenue yet. Aged receivables are the most common reason a profitable business runs out of money, and they get worse quietly: the older an invoice gets, the less likely it is to ever be paid. If you look at one number on this list weekly, make it this one.
4. Your break-even point
The revenue you need in a month to cover every fixed cost: rent, insurance, software, your own draw, the staff who get paid whether or not the phone rings.
Knowing this converts a vague anxiety into a target. It also changes how you price. Owners who know their break-even quote differently, because they can tell the difference between a job that is thin but worth taking to cover overhead and a job that loses money on contact.
5. Owner's pay, as an actual number
What the business paid you this month, recorded as its own line rather than absorbed into whatever was left over.
This one is less about arithmetic than about honesty. A business that cannot pay its owner is not profitable, it is subsidized. Tracking your own compensation as a real cost is what makes the other four numbers tell the truth, and it is the single most common thing missing from the books we take over.
Where to find them
Gross margin and break-even come off your profit and loss statement. Cash position comes from your bank feed once it is reconciled. Receivables come from your A/R aging report. If your bookkeeping is current, all five take about ten minutes to pull; if pulling them is hard, that difficulty is itself the finding.
None of this requires new software. It requires the books to be reconciled and categorized consistently, which is the part most owners are too busy to keep up with.