Weekly reporting packs tend to grow until nobody reads them. Each report was added for a good reason, but the owner skims the cover page and everyone else assumes someone is watching the detail. A short list of numbers that each lead to a decision is more useful than a long list that leads to none.
Here are five that fit most food distributors, with how to work out each one, what to compare it against, and what to do when it moves. The thresholds are yours to set. Use your own last few months as the baseline, not a benchmark from someone else's business.
1. Cash for the next two weeks
What it is: cash on hand, plus customer payments you expect in the next two weeks, minus supplier bills, payroll, rent, loan payments and taxes due in the same period.
How to estimate collections: do not count every open invoice as cash coming in. Count what each customer actually tends to pay. If a customer usually pays two weeks after the due date, move their expected date out by two weeks. Your own payment history is the best guide.
What to do: if the number is tight, this week's priority is collecting what is owed and timing outgoing payments, ahead of anything else.
2. Overdue receivables past 60 days, and the trend
What it is: total dollars more than 60 days past due, taken from your AR aging report, shown for each of the last four weeks or more. Use whichever overdue category your business treats as serious; 60 days is a common choice, not a rule.
What to compare: this week against the last few weeks. One week tells you little. A total that has gone up three weeks in a row tells you a lot.
What to do: look at the accounts that moved into the bucket this week. Call the largest now, and decide whether any should go on credit hold before their next order ships. For more on running receivables, see AR aging 101.
3. Fill rate
What it is: cases shipped divided by cases ordered, for the last seven days. A hypothetical example with round numbers: 9,500 cases shipped against 10,000 ordered is a 95% fill rate, with 500 cases short.
What to compare: your own recent weeks. Then sort the shorts by item. If a handful of items explain most of them, you know where to start.
What to do: a drop means demand is outrunning purchasing, or the stock records are wrong. For each of the top short items, ask the buyer which it was: a late supplier, an order that was too small, or a system that thought the stock was there.
4. Margin trend on your largest customers
What it is: for your top 10 or 20 customers, gross margin dollars over the last four weeks compared with the four weeks before.
Why margin dollars and not sales: sales can hold steady while margin falls, if a customer shifts to lower-margin items or a deal is applied more widely than intended. Margin dollars show both falling volume and falling price.
What to do: set a threshold that suits your business, as a percentage or a dollar amount. For anyone past it, the owner or the rep calls this week and asks what changed. For a deeper look at which accounts earn their keep, see per-customer profitability.
5. Stops per route
What it is: the average number of stops per route for the week, with the lowest and highest.
What to compare: your normal range for each day of the week, since one weekday's routes can look very different from another's.
What to do: fewer stops than normal can mean routes are being built poorly or a truck went out half empty. More than normal can mean drivers are stretched, which can show up as late deliveries, overtime and mistakes at the door. Look at on-time delivery alongside it.
What is not on the list
- Total revenue. It matters, but it moves slowly and rarely tells you what to do this week.
- New customers. Better reviewed monthly or quarterly, when there is enough to see a pattern.
- Inventory turns and days sales outstanding. Important, but monthly measures. The DSO calculator shows how the second one is worked out.
Leaving them off the Monday list does not mean ignoring them. It means looking at them on the schedule where they can change a decision.
How to run the review
- Put the five numbers on one page or one screen, with the trend next to each.
- Have it refresh automatically before Monday morning, so nobody spends Sunday night building it.
- Read it in a few minutes. Pick the one number that most needs action this week, and name who owns it.
- Next Monday, start with what happened to last week's number.
Review the list itself every few months. A number that has not led to a single decision in that time is a candidate to replace with one that will.
How APFoodz handles it
APFoodz opens on a home dashboard of what needs attention today. On the customer side, customer analytics flags accounts that are slipping from their usual buying, so reps know whom to call.