Five Numbers Every Small Business Should Track Weekly

Track five numbers each week: orders, enquiries, the share of enquiries that become orders, repeat customers and days of stock left. They take about fifteen minutes to update and show you what to fix next.

These five are my recommendation for a small product or service business. They are not a Google standard. Choose your own if your business works differently, but keep the list short.

1. Orders received

Count the orders you received this week and their total value. Compare with last week and with the same week last month. Record the date the order was placed, not the date it was paid or delivered, so the figure is consistent.

2. Enquiries

An enquiry is any person who asks about buying: a WhatsApp message, a call, a form or a walk-in. Count them by source.

If you have a Google Business Profile, it shows calls, messages, directions and website clicks, and counts a person once a day. Search Console shows clicks from Google Search to your website. Adding these to your own notes gives you a view of how people find you.

3. Enquiry-to-order rate

Divide the orders by enquiries from the same period. If you had 40 enquiries and 10 orders, the rate is 25 per cent.

If the rate drops, ask why. Slow replies, unclear prices or missing stock are common reasons. If you run a website, Google Analytics lets you mark an important action, such as an order, as a key event, which helps you count it.

4. Repeat customers

Count how many of this week's orders came from someone who has bought before. A low number is a signal to follow up after delivery. A short message asking how the product was, and a reminder when they are likely to run out, are good places to start.

This also links with reviews. Google allows you to ask customers to review you through a link or QR code, but not to offer incentives.

5. Days of stock left

For your top five products, divide current stock by average daily sales. This gives days of stock left. Compare it with your supplier lead time. If days of stock left is lower than the lead time plus your buffer, you are already late in reordering.

This is the same logic as the reorder point formula: average demand multiplied by lead time, plus safety stock.

How to keep it light

Use one sheet, with one row per week. Update it on the same day every week. Write one sentence under the numbers: what changed and what you will do. Review the trend monthly, not just the latest week.

What not to do

Do not track twenty numbers. Do not compare yourself with other businesses' numbers without knowing how they count. Avoid reacting strongly to one week, as small samples swing a lot.

Search figures need patience as well. Google says changes in search can take a few hours to several months to show.

One option for this

MM AgroFlow is a multilingual business-operations platform from MM Rooted Ventures for MSMEs and brands of every kind. Orders, leads, inventory and analytics sit together in it, so the records behind these five numbers are in one place. We built it first for our own operations.