What KPIs should a manufacturing job shop track?

The seven that matter most every day are: job-level gross margin, on-time delivery rate, work-in-process (WIP) value, quote win rate, AR overdue past 60 days, revenue versus target, and material cost variance. Together they tell you whether you're making money, getting paid, and keeping promises.

How do I know which jobs are losing money?

Track gross margin per job, not just shop-wide margin. A job is losing money when its actual margin falls below the floor you need to cover overhead. If you only see blended margin at month-end, you find out too late — the loser already shipped, and you've probably quoted three more like it.

How often should I look at my shop's numbers?

Daily for the operational ones (open jobs, on-time, overdue AR) and at least weekly for the financial ones (margin, win rate, revenue vs target). The whole point of a live dashboard is that the answer is current, not last month's report someone had to pull by hand.

The 7 numbers every job shop owner should see every morning

Most job shop owners can tell you, off the top of their head, how many jobs are on the floor. Far fewer can tell you which of those jobs is losing money right now — and that's the number that actually decides whether this is a good year or a brutal one.

The problem isn't that the data doesn't exist. It's scattered: margin lives in your accounting system, due dates live in your shop or ERP system, quotes live somewhere else entirely. By the time anyone stitches it together, the job already shipped.

Here are the seven numbers worth putting on one screen — and why each one is really a dollar figure in disguise.

1. Gross margin, per job

Shop-wide margin hides the bodies. You can run a healthy 34% blended margin while two jobs quietly bleed at 14%. Track margin per open job and you can kill the losers before you quote that customer again.

If you only watch blended margin, you find out which jobs lost money after they ship. By then you've already quoted three more like them.

2. On-time delivery rate

Late jobs don't just cost expedite fees — they cost the customers who pay your bills. An 88% on-time rate sounds fine until you see that the 12% you're missing are your three biggest accounts. The number to watch isn't the percentage; it's which jobs are slipping.

3. Work-in-process (WIP) value

WIP is cash you've already spent that hasn't turned back into money yet. When WIP climbs faster than revenue, you're funding the shop floor out of your own pocket. It's an early warning that cash is about to get tight.

4. Quote win rate

Your win rate tells you whether you're pricing to win or pricing to lose. A win rate that's too high often means you're leaving margin on the table; one that's cratering means you've priced yourself out. Tracked over 90 days, it's one of the cleanest signals you have.

5. AR overdue past 60 days

This is the number that quietly strangles shops. Money sitting in 60- and 90-day buckets is money in someone else's bank account. Surfacing it — by customer, by age — is usually the fastest cash you'll ever "find," because it's already yours.

6. Revenue versus target

Not revenue in a vacuum — revenue against the number you needed to hit to cover overhead and pay yourself. A shop doing $487K against a $520K target is a different conversation than one doing $487K against $450K.

7. Material cost variance

Material creep is the leak you don't notice until quoting season, when suddenly nothing pencils out. Watching actual material cost against quoted material cost, job by job, catches the leak while it's still small.

The point isn't the list — it's the one screen

Any decent owner already knows these numbers matter. The reason they don't get watched is that pulling them means logging into three systems and exporting spreadsheets nobody has time for. So they get checked at month-end, if at all — which is exactly when it's too late to do anything about them.

Put all seven on one live screen, and the question changes from "what happened last month?" to "what's leaking right now, and which job is it?"

That's the entire idea behind a control dashboard: your real numbers, from the systems you already run, on one screen — kept current, with the money leaks flagged for you. No new software, no migration, no IT project.