Red, yellow, green
Every metric has one owner and one status. Green is on or ahead of target. Yellow is behind with a written plan. Red is behind with no plan yet. The line between yellow and red is not how close the number is, it is whether somebody has decided what to do about it. Turning red to yellow is a plan, turning yellow to green is execution.
Read the reds first and ask one question of each: what must we do to get this back to green. If the owner does not know what to do, that is a people problem. If they know but cannot act, that is a resources problem. If they know and can act but it is still not happening, that is a priority problem. Write the answer into the plan box and the metric turns yellow. Nothing on this page is a discussion until it has a colour and an owner.
Contribution profit
What is left after product cost, VAT, refunds, payment fees, fulfilment and ad spend. This is the profit line marketing actually controls, which is why it sits above everything else. Fixed overhead is shown separately, because no marketing decision moves it.
Revenue to profit
Every deduction between the money customers paid and the profit left over, for the selected period.
Product margin is weighted by the actual category mix in this period.
Weekly contribution profit
Profit in pounds against profit as a percentage of revenue. A rising bar with a falling line means growth is being bought rather than earned.
Shaded band marks the selected reporting period.
The ten drivers
Each of these feeds profit directly. Traffic, conversion rate and average order value multiply together to make revenue, so any revenue move is one of those three. The customer split sets the quality, the two ROAS figures set the efficiency, and LTV sets how much can be paid to acquire in the first place.
Where the year lands
The forecast is not a separate exercise, it is the same drivers projected forward. Revenue is seasonally indexed from three years of order history, so a quiet summer month is not mistaken for a decline and Q4 is not mistaken for a miracle.
This month
Actual so far plus the projection for the days remaining.
Seasonality
Average daily revenue per calendar month against the all-month average, from the full order history. Above 1.0 means the month runs hot.
Derived from real orders, not from the five months of daily reporting.
Monthly revenue, actual and forecast
Solid bars are recorded months. Outlined bars are forecast. The current month is shown as actual so far plus the remainder of the projection.
The forecast is a claim, and the job is to defend or revise it every month. If projected revenue drifts from plan, the cause is always in tier two: traffic, the new to returning split, or one of the two ROAS figures. Fix the driver, not the forecast.
The maths behind every number
Settle the definitions once and the monthly conversation is about the business rather than the spreadsheet.