Most small business owners track too many things, or not enough of the right ones. The result is the same: Monday morning rolls around and you're pulling numbers from six different tabs, hoping they tell a coherent story. They usually don't.
Here are the five metrics that actually tell you whether your business is healthy — and why they're worth watching weekly, not monthly.
1. Revenue Run Rate
How much revenue will you do this year at your current pace? This single number answers more questions than almost any other metric. It tells you whether you're on track against your annual goal, whether a recent campaign worked, and whether you need to accelerate or can afford to breathe.
Track it weekly. A 10% dip in a single week is a flag worth investigating. A 10% dip you only catch at month-end is a crisis.
2. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
How much does it cost to acquire one new customer? If you're spending $50 to acquire a customer who generates $40 of lifetime value, your business has a math problem — regardless of how good the product is. Weekly CAC tracking helps you spot when a channel is burning money before the quarter is over.
3. Churn Rate
For SaaS and subscription businesses, churn is the silent killer. A 5% monthly churn rate means you're replacing your entire customer base every 20 months. Even a 1% improvement in monthly churn materially changes your LTV curve. If you're not watching churn weekly, you're flying blind on one of your most important leading indicators.
4. Gross Margin
Revenue is vanity; margin is sanity. You need to know not just how much money is coming in, but how much you keep after direct costs. Many SMB owners watch top-line revenue closely and are blindsided when margins compress. Track both, weekly.
5. Pipeline Coverage
If you're selling B2B or high-ticket, pipeline coverage — the ratio of total pipeline value to your monthly revenue goal — is your early-warning system. Most teams need 3–4x coverage to reliably hit quota. If your pipeline drops below 2x in a given week, you have a prospecting problem. Better to know on Monday than at month-end when it's too late to fix.
The Hard Part: Getting the Data
Knowing which five metrics matter is the easy part. Getting them in front of your team every Monday — without a VA pulling spreadsheets — is where most businesses fall down. That's the problem Orbit Scorecard was built to solve.