Move at Pace
Financial Reporting
The Weekly KPI
Scorecard
One page. Five categories. Thirty minutes a week. The reporting cadence that turns month-end post-mortems into real-time steering.
Connor McAuley | Move at Pace
The Framework
Five Categories, One Page
Most agencies know two things about their finances: how much they invoiced and how much is in the bank. Revenue is visible. Activity is visible. But gross margin, cash timing, and capacity are blurry until the month ends. By then, any margin problem has already cost you money.
Monthly P&L is a post-mortem. Weekly KPIs are steering. Five categories. One page. Same format every week.
Category 01
Revenue Reality
Three numbers, not one. The gap between them is where control is won or lost.
Recognised revenue (work delivered) · Invoiced revenue (issued) · Cash collected (in bank)
Category 02
Gross Margin Reality
Overall margin is the average temperature for the year. It will not tell you that Tuesday was a heatwave and Thursday was freezing.
Delivery cost (estimate vs actual) · Gross margin % · Revenue per seat (aim 3x–5x salary)
Category 03
Capacity Signal
Drives three decisions: hire, contractor, or slow the pipeline. Without it, those decisions are reactive and expensive.
Billable utilisation % · Forward capacity (2 and 4 weeks out) · Decision this week
Category 04
Pipeline & Bookings
If coverage drops below 1.0, sales needs attention now, not next month.
New qualified pipeline (£) · Proposals sent · Deals closed · Coverage ratio
Category 05
Churn & Risk
Top 5 clients scored red/amber/green. Expansion opportunities with an owner. Prevents surprise churn.
Top 5 risk list · RAG status · Expansion owner
Rule
Seven to ten metrics. No more. The constraint is attention, not data.
The Install
Seven Days to Live
The scorecard without a meeting is just another spreadsheet nobody opens. The meeting without a scorecard is just a chat. You need both. Here is the install.
Day 1
Write your KPI definitions.
What counts as recognised revenue? What counts as delivery cost? What is your unit of measurement: project, client, service line, or team? One page. One version. The arguments end when every person in the room is using the same number.
Day 2
Assign ownership.
One person produces the scorecard. One person runs the meeting. One person tracks the actions. In a smaller agency, this can be one person. But the ownership needs to be explicit. If "everyone is responsible", nobody produces the numbers.
Day 3
Build the scorecard.
One page. Google Sheet, Notion, a whiteboard. The tool does not matter. Fill in the five categories. Leave blanks where you do not have the data yet. Or skip the build entirely:
copy our live Google Sheet version and rename it. Formulas already wired up.
Day 4
Put the meeting in the calendar.
30 minutes. Same day, same time, every week. Non-negotiable. This meeting does not get moved for client calls. It does not get cancelled because "it is a quiet week." It does not run over because someone wants to discuss something unrelated.
Day 5
Run the first meeting.
Follow the agenda below. Separate number production from number interpretation. Production is mechanical: someone pulls the data and fills the scorecard before the meeting. Interpretation is the meeting itself.
The 30-Minute Agenda
| Time | Focus |
|---|
| 5 min | Scorecard review. Numbers only. No stories. No excuses. Read them aloud. |
| 10 min | Variances. What moved and why? If revenue dropped, why? If margin improved, what changed? |
| 10 min | Constraints. Capacity, delivery, cash. What is about to break if we do not act this week? |
| 5 min | Decisions and actions. Written down. Owner assigned. Due date. Definition of done. |
Test
After 4 weeks, ask: did any KPI change a decision we made? If yes, the cadence is working. If no, either the metrics are wrong or the meeting is not producing actions.
Watch For These
Five Ways This Dies
Reporting cadences are easy to start. The pattern I see most often: week one perfect, week two mostly complete, week three "I did not get to it", week four abandoned. The fix is not willpower. It is anticipating the five ways this breaks.
01. Too many KPIs.
If your scorecard has 25 metrics, nobody reads it. Start with 7 to 10. You can add more once the cadence is established.
02. No owner.
If "the team" owns it, nobody produces it. One person, named, responsible. Assign on Day 2, not later.
03. No fixed meeting time.
If the meeting moves around the calendar, it gets deprioritised. Treat it like a client meeting that cannot be moved.
04. Inconsistent definitions.
If "revenue" means something different to sales, delivery, and finance, every meeting becomes a methodology debate. Write definitions once. Stick to them.
05. Actions not tracked.
If the meeting produces decisions but nobody writes them down or follows up, you have a talking shop. The actions list is the output of the meeting.
The Point Buyers Miss Without This
When I went through due diligence on my agency sale, the buyers asked for weekly financial data going back months. Same format. Same definitions. Same rhythm. I had it, because I had installed this cadence two years before exit. If I had not done that, I am not sure the deal would have closed at the same terms.
Weak reporting forces a buyer to assume the downside. "We cannot see the margin clearly, so we will assume it is worse than you are telling us." That hits the multiple directly.
Copy the Live Sheet
Skip the build. The 3-tab Google Sheet with formulas and definitions, ready to duplicate into your Drive.
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