Read the reports without being misledUpdated
Profit, cash, debtors and hours — what each figure counts, and what it deliberately does not.
Written 30 September 2026 · updated 11 October 2026
What is said in this recording
The reports page answers four questions: what are we making, when does the money arrive, who owes us, and where is the time going. Every figure on it is built to be honest about what it does not know, which is why some of them look more cautious than you might expect.
Step by step
- 1
Go to Reports.
- 2
Set the period at the top.
Everything on the page follows it, with one deliberate exception noted below.
- 3
Read the profit figure with its coverage percentage.
The coverage tells you how much of the work the figure can actually speak for. A healthy margin across a third of your jobs is not a healthy margin.
- 4
Look at when the money arrives, not just how much.
The gap between raising an invoice and being paid is what tells you whether a busy month will actually feel like one.
- 5
Check the debtor ageing.
Who owes you, in bands, worst first.
- 6
Read “Where the work comes from” before you spend on advertising.
Each way of getting work, ranked by the money it actually brought in — accepted quotes, not enquiries. Under each one: how many enquiries came that way, and how many turned into work.
- 7
Open the team report for hours and utilisation.
What each person earns per hour, and how much of their available time is booked.
- 8
Export to a spreadsheet if your accountant wants it.
The same figures, as a CSV.
Worth knowing
Profit comes off the line items, never the invoice total
Line prices are stored before VAT while invoice totals include it. Mixing the two would flatter the margin by the VAT rate, so the reports never do.
Margin here means markup on cost
A 30% margin means the price is the cost plus 30%. Your accountant's “30% margin” probably means 30% of the sale price, which is a different number. Neither is wrong; they are answers to different questions.
Debtor ageing ignores the period selector
What is owed today is owed today whichever range you pick. The card says so on screen.
Utilisation counts from someone's first clocked day
Not from the start of the range. Otherwise a business that turned time tracking on last month would see its whole team at 2% across a year. Somebody who has never clocked on reads as unmeasured, never as 0% — there is no way to tell a quiet week from an unrecorded one, and pretending otherwise would be a lie about a real person.
Where the work comes from is ranked on money, not on how many came in
Twenty enquiries for bleeding a radiator are worth less than three for bathrooms, so ranking on the count puts the noisiest channel at the top and the most valuable one further down. The bar is the money won. “Won” means a quote that was accepted — not an enquiry somebody ticked as accepted with nothing priced behind it, which would put money against a source that earned none.
The estimate on an enquiry is never counted as money won
That figure is somebody's guess before anybody priced the job. Ranking your advertising on guesses is how whichever channel over-promises hardest wins the budget, so it is reported separately, with how many enquiries carry one at all.
“Other” includes every enquiry where nobody chose a source
The two cannot be told apart — the form starts on Other, so an enquiry nobody answered looks exactly like one deliberately filed there, and nothing can recover what was never recorded. The card says what percentage that is, and if it is most of them it says plainly that the report is not yet measuring much. Choosing a source on the enquiry form is what makes the whole card worth reading.
A conversion rate off one or two enquiries is not a fact
One referral that turned into work reads as 100%, which is true and means nothing. Below five enquiries the card shows the count instead of a percentage rather than printing a number you might act on.
Profit per person follows the job, not the person
The money and the hours are both put against the job's assigned engineer. Whoever gets sent to the tight-priced work will show a lower rate through no fault of their own, and the page says so. Read it as a fact about the work, not a ranking of your staff.