Business Health — the thirty-second answerNew
What happened in a period, how it compares, and the one thing waiting on you — with every figure openable.
Written 21 October 2026
What is said in this recording
Business Health is built to be read standing up. The top of the page answers three questions in three sentences — what happened, what that means, and what is waiting on you — and everything under it is the detail behind those sentences. If you only ever read the three lines, the page has done its job.
Step by step
- 1
Go to Business Health.
- 2
Read the three lines at the top before anything else.
What you invoiced, how it compares with the period before, and the one thing most worth clearing. Each line is a link to the records behind it.
- 3
Pick the period along the top.
Today, this week, this month, this quarter or this year. The choice goes into the address, so you can send somebody a link to exactly what you were looking at.
- 4
Open any figure to see what it is made of.
Every tile is a link. Invoiced opens your invoices, Win rate opens your quotes, and so on — a number you cannot open is a number you should not have to take on trust.
- 5
Read the small print under a figure if there is any.
Where a figure speaks for less work than it looks like, the page says so underneath and tells you what is missing.
Worth knowing
A dash means not recorded, never nought
A figure the app cannot honestly work out shows a dash and a line saying what is missing — it never shows £0.00. A quiet month and a month nobody has filled in must not read the same, because you would act on them very differently. Profit per hour, for instance, needs clocked time against the work; without it you get a dash rather than a confident and wrong number.
A total of nothing IS nought, and that is different
If you genuinely invoiced nothing this month, the page says you invoiced nothing. That is a real answer. The dash is only for figures that cannot be produced at all.
There is no comparison until there is something to compare to
A business three weeks old has no previous month in any meaningful sense, so the page says so in words rather than quietly leaving the line out. A missing comparison would read as “nothing changed”, which is a much stronger claim than the app is in a position to make. The same applies to a percentage against a period that was nought — you get the direction and the amount, never “+100%”.
What it deliberately does NOT do
It does not forecast, and it does not tell you what to do about any of it. The third line names the biggest gap in your own records — work with no cost against it, jobs finished and not invoiced — and stops there. It is not advice about your business, because the app does not know enough about your business to give any. Forecasting and cash flow are separate work, and are not on this page.
It is the same arithmetic as the reports page
Every figure here comes from the one place in the software that defines it, which is the same place Reports reads. If Business Health and Reports ever disagreed about what you invoiced, that would be a fault rather than two opinions — and there is a check in the build that exists to stop it happening.