Why Every Business Needs DealSheets.
Most businesses produce accounting information, but very few produce actionable financial information.
A typical business owner can usually tell you:
- Revenue
- Profit
- Cash in the bank
Whilst these metrics are important, they don’t tell the full story when assessing the resilience, quality and scalability of a business. There is a reason investors, lenders and acquirers look beyond standard management accounts when evaluating a company. They want answers to questions such as:
- What is the profile of the customer base?
- What percentage of revenue is recurring?
- How much revenue is non-recurring or project-based?
- What are the customer churn rates?
- How dependent is the business on a handful of key customers?
- What is the true, normalized EBITDA of the business?
- How efficient is customer acquisition?
- What does it cost to acquire a new customer?
- How strong are the company's working capital dynamics?
- What factors are influencing the company's valuation?
These are not obscure financial metrics. They are the indicators that help determine whether a business has sustainable growth potential and long-term value.
Most business owners never routinely track these metrics. If they do, it is often only when they enter a fundraising process, seek external finance, or begin discussions about a potential sale of the company.
At that point, there is often a frantic scramble to assemble information that has never been routinely measured or analyzed.
The irony is that if these metrics had been regularly reviewed and acted upon, the business itself would likely be significantly more valuable by the time that critical moment arrived.
How Actionable Financial Metrics Can Improve Your Business
Actionable, investor grade, financial metrics are not simply useful for investors. They can help management teams make better decisions every day.
For example:
Customer Diversification
Understanding customer concentration can help identify potential risks and dependencies within your business. It can also support better customer targeting and highlight opportunities to broaden and strengthen revenue streams.
Recurring Revenue
Understanding the recurring revenue profile of your business provides greater visibility into resilience, future performance and growth potential. It may also reveal opportunities to improve customer contracts, pricing structures and retention strategies.
Customer Churn
Monitoring customer churn helps identify underlying issues that may be affecting customer satisfaction and retention. Reducing churn often leads directly to stronger profitability and lower customer overall acquisition costs.
Customer Profile Analysis
Understanding which types of customers generate the greatest value can improve future marketing, sales targeting and strategic planning. It can also expose hidden weaknesses in the composition of your revenue base.
Valuation Drivers
Understanding the factors that influence company valuation helps management teams and shareholders measure genuine progress. It also enables better strategic decision-making long before any exit, acquisition or fundraising activity is contemplated.
Building a Better Business
The greatest value of actionable, investor-grade reporting is not that it helps you sell your business one day.
It is that it helps you build a stronger, more resilient and more valuable business every day.
The same metrics that attract investors and acquirers are the metrics that help management teams make better decisions, identify risks earlier and create sustainable long-term growth.
For too long, financial reporting has been viewed as a compliance exercise or a board meeting agenda item rather than a genuine business enabler. DealSheets helps surface the real stories hidden within your financial data, transforming standard accounts into meaningful business intelligence.
You can run a business without this information. Just not as well. Give yourself the edge. Understand the drivers of value within your business and start making decisions based on the metrics that matter most.
