Speedometer first: a Monday report that steers, not just reports

1. A dashboard of indicators is not a plan

Many owner reports are lists of indicators: sales this month, gross margin, cash at bank, overdue invoices. Each number is true, and each one is a thermometer. A thermometer tells you something is warm. It does not tell you whether you are on course.

The Monday report gets more useful when it starts from a speedometer: one monthly target that follows from where the business must be at year end. Indicators then answer a different question: do we top up, or do we fix the system?

2. Why measurement choices steer behaviour

Robert Kaplan and David Norton opened their 1992 Harvard Business Review article on the balanced scorecard with a blunt line: "What you measure is what you get." They argued that a measurement system strongly affects how managers and employees behave, and that traditional financial measures alone can give misleading signals for continuous improvement.

The Office for National Statistics tracks management practice scores for UK firms in its Management and Expectations Survey, with a longitudinal analysis for 2016 to 2023 released in May 2026 as official statistics in development. The scores exist because how a business is managed is treated as something you can measure over time, not a matter of feel.

3. Build the speedometer first, then read the gauges

Take one illustrative business (the figures are for illustration only). Its goal is £600,000 of gross profit for the year, so the required pace is £50,000 a month. After four months it needs £200,000 and has £164,000. That is 82% of pace, a £36,000 gap.

The speedometer also says what the rest of the year demands: £436,000 over eight months is £54,500 a month, about 9% above the original pace. This is the first sentence of the report.

Now read the gauges, as you would a car's temperature and coolant. Overdue invoices stand at £52,000. A single reading says little. The level and the change say more: if it has risen by about £6,000 in each of the last three months, topping up (chasing three invoices) will not hold. The collection process needs repair. If it moves within a narrow band, chase and move on.

The rule: the target says whether you are late, the level says how much, the change says whether the cause is a one-off or the system.

4. Why a target hierarchy works

The principle is old and general. The scorecard method links a financial goal to the measures that drive it, so each team can see how its own number moves the one above it. A department goal becomes a monthly pace, and indicators sit under that pace as diagnostics. Nothing here depends on a particular product or software, and a spreadsheet is enough.

Tips and tricks for this week

• Write the year-end target for gross profit and divide it into a monthly pace. Put it at the top of Monday's report.
• Show actual against pace as a percentage, and say what the remaining months require.
• For each indicator, record the level and the three-month change, not only this month's figure.
• Mark each indicator "top up" or "fix the system" in one word, and give one owner a date.
• Delete any number on the report that nobody has acted on in a quarter.

The average hides the story. If you would like a structured read of your own numbers, there is the Business Health Check. One change, one date.