ElectricalBossPro Blog — Running an Electrical Business

Simple Reports for an Electrical Business Owner: What Is Worth Checking Every Week

Most small electrical business owners don't want dashboards. They want to know whether last week was good, whether money is coming in, and whether anything is about to go wrong. A few simple reports, checked at the same time every week, answer those questions better than a wall of charts.

From Daily Checks to Weekly Numbers

In Tracking What Each Van Did: Daily Records for an Electrical Company, the owner read each van's day in the evening to catch problems. Weekly reports step back from individual jobs and show the pattern.

The point isn't to measure everything. It's to look at the handful of things that tell you whether the business is healthy, and to look at them often enough to act.

Jobs Completed, by Van

Start with what got done. How many jobs did each van complete this week, and how many were skipped? Split by van, this shows which side of the business is busy. If the service van is consistently full and the install van has gaps, that tells you where to put your next hire or your next marketing push.

Skips deserve a look on their own. A few are normal. A pattern — the same reason, the same tech, the same kind of job — is a process problem worth fixing.

Invoices Sent and Paid

Next, the money. How much was invoiced this week, how much has been paid, and what is still outstanding? Reports on invoices show this without anyone adding up paper.

Pay particular attention to past-due invoices. The past-due follow-up does the first reminders automatically, but any customer who has ignored several is worth a personal call. Catching it in week two is easier than catching it in month three. The collection side gets its own article: Getting Paid Faster in an Electrical Business: Card on File, Auto-Charge and Past-Due Follow-Up.

Open Estimates

Open estimates are future work waiting on a yes. Look at:

• How many estimates went out this week.
• How many were approved online and turned into scheduled jobs.
• Which large estimates — a panel upgrade, a generator install, an EV charger — are still waiting.

Estimate follow-up emails go out on their own, but a phone call from the owner on a big quote often makes the difference. A weekly look at the open list tells you who to call.

Plans Coming Due

The Waiting List is a live report all by itself. Every yearly safety inspection, generator maintenance visit and commercial lighting visit that has come due is on the map and the list, with pins colored not due yet, due now, or overdue past a seven-day grace. Once a week, check how many are overdue. A growing number of overdue pins means plan customers are waiting, and plan customers who wait don't renew.

New Customers and Where They Came From

Reports on clients show how many new customers came in. If you tag clients by how they found you — website form, referral, customer app, a sign on the van — you can see which sources keep sending work. Tags and custom fields make this easy without a separate spreadsheet.

Website requests and sign-ups land in Form Responses. If that list has entries nobody followed up on, that's the first thing to fix.

Also look at repeat customers. A healthy residential shop sees familiar names come back: the customer from last year's breaker call now wants recessed lighting, the generator install from two years ago is on a maintenance plan. If almost every job is a brand new customer, the business is working harder than it needs to for each one, and the repeat-customer habits earlier in this series are worth a second look.

What Not to Track

It's easy to fill a week with numbers that don't change anything. A few rules keep reports useful:

• Only track what you'll act on. If a number going up or down wouldn't change what you do, stop looking at it.
• Compare to yourself. This week against last week, this month against the same month last year. Not against other companies.
• Keep it to one sitting. If the weekly review takes more than half an hour, cut something.

A Simple Weekly Sheet

Write the same five numbers down every week: jobs completed, invoices sent, invoices paid, estimates approved, and overdue plan visits. After a few months, those five lines tell the story of the business better than any single week can. Share them with your office manager so they know what you are watching.

Weekly reports work best as part of a routine, which is covered near the end of this series. For the rest of the business side of an electrical shop, return to the electrical business software overview.