The 5 Numbers Every Electrical Contractor Should Track Weekly

Here's a question that sinks more contracting businesses than any competitor: are you making money right now? Not last quarter. Not "the year looks fine." Right now, this week. Most owner-operators can't answer it without opening three apps and a shoebox of invoices.

You don't need a finance department. You need five numbers, checked once a week, in about thirty minutes. Together they tell you whether work is coming in, whether it's priced right, and whether the cash is actually arriving.

1. Pipeline value: what's waiting to be won

The total dollar value of all open bids and proposals. Not jobs — potential jobs. If your pipeline holds $120,000 in open estimates and you typically close a third of them, you have roughly $40,000 of future work in the queue. When that number shrinks for two weeks in a row, you have a marketing problem, and you know it weeks before the schedule goes empty.

Track it as a single number: sum of open bid values. Update it every time you send an estimate or hear back on one.

2. Close rate: how much of the pipeline becomes work

Of the bids you sent last month, what percentage turned into signed jobs? A healthy small electrical shop closes 25–40% of qualified bids. Below that, something is off — pricing, follow-up, or the kinds of jobs you're bidding.

This number also calibrates the first one. Pipeline value means nothing without your close rate attached. $200,000 in open bids at a 15% close rate is worse than $100,000 at 35%.

3. Gross margin per job: did the work pay?

For every completed job: (price − direct costs) ÷ price. Direct costs are labor, materials, and subs on that job — not overhead. If your target is 35% gross margin and a job came in at 18%, you need to know why: underbid hours, material overruns, or a scope that grew while the price didn't.

Review this weekly for recently closed jobs, not monthly. A pricing leak found in week two costs you one job. Found in month three, it costs you a quarter.

4. Receivables: what you're owed, and how old it is

Total outstanding invoices, bucketed by age: current, 30 days, 60 days, 90+. Cash flow problems in contracting are rarely revenue problems — they're collection problems. A business can be profitable on paper and broke in the bank because $40,000 of completed work is sitting in someone else's inbox.

The weekly habit is simple: look at the 30+ day column and make the calls. The most expensive phone call in your business is the one you keep postponing.

5. Scheduled backlog: how far out you're booked

How many weeks of confirmed, scheduled work do you have? For a small shop, 3–6 weeks of backlog is the comfort zone: enough to plan, not so much that new customers wait forever. Backlog shrinking toward one week means it's time to push estimates and follow up on open bids. Backlog stretching past eight weeks means it's time to raise prices or hire — demand is telling you something.

The weekly routine

Pick a time — Friday afternoon works, when the week is still fresh — and run through all five in order. Thirty minutes with a single dashboard:

- Pipeline value: up, down, or flat versus last week?

- Close rate: any pattern in the bids you lost?

- Gross margin: any completed job under target, and why?

- Receivables: who needs a call today?

- Backlog: how many weeks out, and is that the right number?

Write down the answers. Not in your head — on the dashboard, dated. In three months you'll have a trend line, and trend lines are where the real decisions live.

What these numbers don't do

They don't replace your bookkeeper, your tax planning, or your annual review with an accountant. They're an operating view, not a financial one — the dashboard on the truck, not the engine rebuild manual. But a contractor who watches these five numbers weekly will catch problems months before the contractor who waits for the year-end P&L.

The habit matters more than the tool. A notebook works. A whiteboard works. What doesn't work is carrying all five numbers in your head, because the head is where they go stale. Put them somewhere you can see all five at once, side by side, every Friday — and somewhere you can compare this Friday to last Friday. That comparison is the entire value of the exercise: not the numbers themselves, but the direction they're moving.

When one of the five moves the wrong way, you don't need a strategy session. Pipeline dipping? Send three estimates this week and follow up on two old ones. Close rate sliding? Add a follow-up call three days after every bid. Margin soft on a job? Walk the next estimate line by line before it goes out. Receivables aging? Make the calls before lunch. Backlog thin? That's what the pipeline fixes. Small corrections, made weekly, beat big corrections made yearly.

We built a dashboard that tracks all five automatically: the Contractor Business OS links its pipeline tracker, profit dashboard, and expense tracker so these numbers update themselves as you work. $119 launch price (list $149) — less than the cost of one unpriced change order.