MAC - thanks for sharing about the article, here is the link to it for anyone else.
http://www.landscapemanagement.net/l....jsp?id=406047
This is a concept we've been working at refining, and I'm hoping this is the year. We have the systems to provide the regular updated information. As the push to make sure it happens I bought a dry erase board for the common office area where we are going to post our goal and actual numbers.
I'm not sure exactly which numbers to put up there and what is most important for us to look at on a weekly basis. Certainly budget to actual for a time period (last two weeks, or one week) but also an accumulated total to date.
Production labor hours, non-billable hours and total hours actual to budget. Also some sales numbers, I'm not sure if I'll break them down by category or do an aggregate. Probably an aggregate, but I might print it out on paper and post the more detailed numbers. What I'm looking for are those two or three key indicators that I can put up on the dry erase in big numbers that you can see from 15' away, numbers that will remind, motivate and mean something. Lots of ratios and data may be helpful when drilling down to some level of detail, but that can be distracting on daily basis.
We're new using QXpress this year, so getting numbers and information should be closer to real time if we get our work from the previous day in on a timely basis. But since we're not sure how we're going to use QXP yet and what we can do with it, I'm just a little uncertain.
I'm sure to some degree it will sort itself out this year, but it would be nice to have all the answers up front. Even if I did, it's a process, and I know it's going to change again anyways.