Monthly management accounts tell the leadership team what happened. By the time they arrive — two or three weeks after month end — a cash problem that started in week one is six weeks old. A finance scorecard closes that gap: a short set of numbers, most of them weekly, that tells leaders whether the business is on course financially this week.
It doesn’t replace the monthly pack. It’s the early-warning layer on top of it.
Weekly for cash, monthly for profit
The single most useful rule for a finance scorecard: cash metrics weekly, profitability metrics monthly.
Cash moves daily and can be known quickly — bank balances, invoices raised, payments received. Profitability depends on accruals, cost allocation and month-end adjustments, so a weekly margin number is usually noisy or wrong. Tracking it monthly, once the close is done, keeps the scorecard honest.
Example finance KPIs, with cadence and direction
“Inverted” means lower is better — Clarion shows it red when it rises above target.
| Metric | Cadence | Inverted? | Example target |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cash balance (all operating accounts) | Weekly | No | $400,000 |
| Cash collected this week | Weekly | No | $90,000 |
| Invoices raised (billings) | Weekly | No | $95,000 |
| Receivables over 60 days | Weekly | Yes | $25,000 |
| Payables due in the next 14 days | Weekly | Yes | $60,000 |
| Revenue | Monthly | No | $380,000 |
| Gross margin | Monthly | No | 55% |
| Net profit margin | Monthly | No | 12% |
| Net burn (for loss-making companies) | Monthly | Yes | $50,000 |
| Runway (months of cash at current burn) | Monthly | No | 18 months |
| Days sales outstanding (DSO) | Monthly | Yes | 40 days |
| Payroll as a percentage of revenue | Monthly | Yes | 45% |
Choose eight to ten. Not every company needs all of these:
- Profitable businesses can drop burn and runway and add a monthly operating expense vs. budget metric (inverted, target = budget).
- Funded startups should keep burn and runway prominent; runway is the number the board asks about first.
- Project and agency businesses often add work in progress not yet invoiced (weekly, inverted) — revenue earned but not billed is a cash problem waiting to happen.
- Inventory businesses add inventory value or days of stock (monthly, usually inverted above a ceiling).
Also add a 13-week cash forecast low point if you maintain one — the lowest projected balance in the next 13 weeks, updated weekly. It’s the best single predictor of a cash crunch.
Setting it up in Clarion
Open Metrics for your finance or leadership team and click Add Metric for each one:
- Name and Definition — “Receivables over 60 days: total of unpaid invoices more than 60 days past invoice date, from the aged debtors report.”
- Target and Unit — mostly $ or %; use a custom unit for “days” or “months”.
- Frequency — Weekly for cash, Monthly for profitability. Weekly values are stored against the week starting Monday; monthly against the month.
- Owner — the finance lead for most; consider making a sales or account manager the owner of overdue receivables if they’re responsible for chasing.
- Inverted metric — tick it for receivables, payables due, burn, DSO and payroll ratio.
Full clicks in create a metric and set targets and inverted metrics. Star cash balance and runway (or net profit) as key metrics — they’ll appear on everyone’s dashboard.
Getting the numbers in
Your accounting system and bank are where these figures live. Clarion doesn’t connect to accounting software directly — there’s no native integration — but the numbers can still arrive automatically:
- From a spreadsheet. Most finance teams already keep a weekly cash sheet. A short Google Sheets Apps Script can post each figure to the metric’s private push URL on a schedule. See Google Sheets.
- From an automation platform. Zapier, Make or n8n can read from many accounting tools and post the result to a push URL.
- From a JSON API. If a report is available at a JSON endpoint, an admin can have Clarion fetch it on a schedule. See JSON API.
The details, including security, are in automate financial metrics. Or simply type the weekly numbers in each Monday — see record metric values. One thing to know for monthly figures: a value entered in the app is recorded for the current period, so September’s margin typed in after an October close would be filed under October. Send month-end figures by push URL with a date in the closed month instead.
Using it in the leadership meeting
Put the finance scorecard in front of the leadership team in their weekly sync — finance numbers belong in the main scorecard, not a separate finance meeting nobody else attends. The finance lead reads each number: on or off.
Anything off target gets flagged: expand the metric and click Flag as challenge, which creates a challenge with the actual and target values, owned by the metric’s owner. Then it’s worked in the challenge discussion like any other problem. Rising receivables is rarely a finance-only problem; it usually needs sales or delivery to act. See challenges.
Common mistakes
- Weekly profit numbers. They’ll swing with timing and erode trust in the scorecard. Keep profitability monthly.
- Only lagging numbers. Revenue and profit tell you what happened. Cash collected, receivables and the forecast low point tell you what’s about to.
- No definitions. “Cash” can mean the operating account, all accounts, or all accounts minus the tax reserve. Write it down.
- Finance owns everything. If receivables never improve, check who can actually change them.
- Hiding bad news until month end. The point of a weekly finance number is to see trouble early, while there’s time to act.
For setting the targets themselves, see track cash and profit targets. For a founder’s-eye view, see check company health.