A solar firm runs on seven numbers. An owner who knows all seven makes the next decision on evidence. An owner who keeps them in their head makes it on the customer who rang this morning.
The accountant tells you what happened last year. These are the figures that say what is happening now: what came in and from where, what the open work is worth, what you win and lose and why, what each job made, what the team can carry, and who did what. One section per number, with the principle and the mistake firms make there. Keep all seven on one sheet. The first month it can be paper. After that it lives where the office can read it.
1. What came in, and from where
Count the new enquiries each week, with a source written against every one: the website, a referral, a directory, the van, a leaflet. The source answers what the marketing money buys, so for each one you want four things: enquiries sent, how many became customers, what those customers were worth, and what the source cost. Cost divided by customers won is the figure that lets you compare a directory listing with a leaflet drop.
The mistake: judging a source on enquiries instead of wins. The directory that sends twenty people pricing up a daydream looks better than the past customer who sends two neighbours who both buy. The second mistake is the blank. An enquiry with no source can never be judged, and the advertising renews itself each year without evidence.
2. What the open work is worth, and where it stalls
List every open enquiry with its stage and an estimated value, and add it up. That is the raw figure. Then weight it: give each stage a chance of winning, low for a fresh enquiry and high for a quote under negotiation, and multiply. Plan the diary and the stock on the weighted figure. Write both beside last week's, so you see the pipeline draining before the diary does. Then find where it stalls. Each stage has a number of days an enquiry is allowed to sit. Count the enquiries past their number, by stage. The stage with the largest count is the bottleneck.
The mistake: treating the raw total as next quarter's income. A pipeline full of quotes nobody has followed up is worth less than the sheet says. The other is leaving enquiries on the list that should have been closed months ago, which inflates the total and hides the stall.
3. Conversion, stage by stage, and the reasons you lose
Conversion is won divided by won plus lost, counted over the enquiries decided in the month. Then break it down by stage: of the enquiries that came in, how many reached a survey, a quote, a decision, a signature. The stage with the biggest drop is where next month's effort goes. Then the reasons. Every enquiry closed as lost gets a reason from a short, fixed list, and so does every quote the customer declines: went elsewhere, no answer, not suitable, could not wait, too dear. Count them each month. One reason larger than the rest is the thing to change.
The mistake: measuring conversion against the enquiries that arrived in the same month. That mixes the people who arrived with the people who decided. The second mistake is "no answer" as a reason. Silence is a symptom, and it points at your follow-up.
4. What each job made
For every completed job, four figures: what it sold for before tax, what it cost, the profit, and the margin. Job by job, because a monthly average hides the two jobs that lost money behind the eight that did fine. The cost comes from a cost sheet filled in when the job completes, from the invoices and the hours worked: materials, labour as hours times a rate, subcontractors, and the rest, scaffold included. A job with no costs on its sheet is not a job with a full margin. It is a job nobody has costed yet, and it stays out of the average until someone does.
The mistake: using the quote's costings as the actuals. The second visit to pair the monitoring, the extra week of scaffold hire, the hours nobody wrote down: those are the difference between the margin you quoted and the margin you made. Look at the low-margin jobs first and ask what they had in common.
5. What the team can fit in
Three counts of installs: scheduled for the next month, completed this month, and late, meaning commissioned after the planned date or still open past it. Then the same by person: jobs per installer, booked and completed, and open jobs per designer. Decide how many jobs a crew can do in a month and compare it with what is booked, so you know what is spoken for before sales promises a date. Jobs with no install date are the queue, and the queue is the number the customer asks about.
The mistake: taking on work by the feel of the diary. The diary shows the next fortnight, the sales desk sells dates for the month after, and the crews are overbooked before anyone notices. The quieter version is one installer carrying every job while another has gaps.
6. Who did what
Sales performance, person by person, over the same period and with the same definitions for everyone: enquiries owned, won, lost, conversion, the value won, and the activity recorded as calls, emails and notes. The purpose is not a league table. It is to see the person carrying forty open enquiries while a colleague has six, or the conversion rate that fell the month its owner was out on surveys. Beside that, keep the record of changes: when a quote price moved, a stage changed or an install date shifted, who did it and when, with the value before and after. That record is how you answer the customer who says they were promised the fourteenth.
The mistake: ranking people on revenue alone. Someone who wins fewer, larger jobs looks worse than someone who wins many small ones. The second is keeping the record of changes in people's memories, which leave when they do.
7. The review rhythm: a weekly half hour and a monthly hour
Numbers do nothing until someone looks at them on a fixed day and decides something, so two meetings, both in the diary like a survey. The weekly half hour is the pipeline: what came in and from where, what the open work is worth, each stage oldest first with a date or a reason for anything past its number, the reasons behind the last ten losses, and who is carrying what. The monthly hour is the money and the team: conversion for the month, what each completed job made and which lost money, next month's bookings against what the crews can do, and sales performance person by person. Each review ends with one change, written down with a name and a date, and the next review opens by checking it. One change, not five.
The mistake: a review that reads the numbers and decides nothing. The weekly pipeline review sets out the half hour as five questions in a fixed order. The monthly hour is the same discipline applied to the other four numbers.
Installa keeps the numbers for you
- Stop tallying enquiries by source. The enquiry sources report counts enquiries, open, won and lost for every source, what the won ones were worth from their accepted quotes, and the cost per job won where you have entered what a source costs a month.
- Stop adding up the board. The sales board shows the count and value of every stage, the chance of winning you set against each, and the likely total beside the raw one. The home screen lists the enquiries past their stage's target, longest first, and the live jobs that have not moved for a fortnight.
- Stop guessing why you lose. Closing an enquiry as lost, or recording a declined quote, takes a reason from your own list, and the reports count those reasons across both. The conversion report shows won, lost and the rate month by month, and by source.
- Stop costing jobs in a spreadsheet. Every job has a cost sheet: materials, labour hours and rate, subcontractors and other costs, against what the job sold for. The profitability report lists each job's cost, profit and margin, flags the low-margin ones, splits costs by type, and averages margin over costed jobs only.
- Stop counting the diary. The installation metrics report shows installs completed, on time and late, installs booked, jobs per installer, and the jobs still waiting for a date. The workload report shows open jobs per designer and installer, and crew utilisation sets jobs done against the capacity you set per installer.
- Stop reconstructing who did what. Sales performance lists each person's enquiries, won, lost, conversion, value and activities for the same period, and the audit log records every change on the account with who made it, when, and the values before and after, filtered by person, record and date. Enquiries, jobs, tasks, the pipeline summary and sales performance export to CSV.
Seven numbers on one sheet, a half hour a week and an hour a month, and one change written down each time. That is the whole routine, and it is what the reports in Installa are built to run.