Guides / Money
The numbers worth watching
A report earns its keep when it changes a decision. Most contractor dashboards show revenue, which is interesting and almost never actionable. These six are actionable, and a company this size can track all of them.
1. Close rate, and what it is telling you
Quotes sent versus quotes won. Low is not automatically bad and high is not automatically good — a 90 percent close rate usually means you are too cheap, and a 15 percent rate means you are quoting work you should not be driving to.
The useful version is close rate split by job type and by lead source. That is where you find out that you win almost everything from referrals and almost nothing from one paid channel you are still paying for.
2. Average job value
Revenue divided by jobs completed. It is the lever most owner-operators underuse: the same number of estimates, the same driving and the same scheduling, at a higher average, is a different business with the same workload.
Rising average job value with a stable close rate is the single healthiest trend available to you.
3. Hours variance by task
Quoted hours versus actual hours, broken out by task. This is the one that corrects your pricing, because it names the rate that is wrong rather than just reporting that something was.
Watch it as a pattern across jobs. One job over on trim is a difficult house; six is your rate.
4. Gross margin by service
Margin on interior versus exterior, repaint versus new construction, residential versus commercial, cabinets versus walls.
There is usually one service you are quietly bad at pricing and one you are unusually good at. Knowing which is which changes what you bid on, which is a bigger decision than any individual price.
5. Overhead rate
Overhead as a percentage of revenue, recalculated whenever you add a fixed cost. If it is drifting up while your prices are not, your margin is being consumed quietly.
This is the number that makes growth either profitable or exhausting, and it is covered in full in the overhead guide.
6. Revenue per field hour
Total revenue divided by total field hours. It compresses pricing, production and scheduling into one figure, which makes it a good trend line and a poor diagnostic — when it moves, the other five tell you why.
It is also the honest answer to "are we getting better?" in a way that revenue alone is not, because revenue can grow on more hours rather than better ones.
What not to track
Anything you will not act on. A measure that has never changed a decision is costing you the time it takes to produce and giving the impression of control, which is worse than not having it.
Six numbers, monthly, acted on, beats thirty on a dashboard nobody opens.
Questions
What KPIs should a painting business track?
Close rate by job type and lead source, average job value, hours variance by task, gross margin by service, overhead rate, and revenue per field hour. Six, monthly, acted on.
Is a high close rate good?
Not necessarily — a very high close rate usually means you are priced too low. Split it by job type and lead source to see what it is really telling you.
What is the most useful single number?
Hours variance by task, because it is the one that corrects your pricing on every future quote rather than describing a job that is already finished.
Where this stops being arithmetic
Aerys prices a job from your own catalog and production rates, sends it with an accept link and the invoice already attached, and then compares what the job actually cost against what you quoted — by task, while the job is still running.