Revenue tells you what happened last month. It does not tell you why, or what is about to happen next month. A restoration job has a long life — first call, inspection, mitigation, estimate, approval, rebuild, invoice, payment — and money can stall at any step along the way. The right KPIs make those stalls visible while you can still do something about them. Here are 12 numbers worth putting on a weekly scorecard, grouped by where they sit in the life of a job.

Before you start: define each number once

Every KPI needs a written definition: what counts, which date starts and stops the clock, and who owns it. "Cycle time" means nothing if the office measures from the first call and the field measures from arrival on site. Pick the definition, write it down, and measure it the same way every week.

Trend matters more than the absolute number. A KPI that moves in the right direction for eight straight weeks tells you more than how it compares with a company you have never seen.

Sales and intake

1. Lead-to-job conversion by source

Of the leads that came in from each source — plumbers, agents, adjusters, TPAs, Google, repeat customers — what share became a signed job? Track it by source, not as one overall rate. A single blended number hides the plumber who sends five jobs a month that almost always sign, and the paid channel that sends thirty calls that rarely do. This is the number that tells you where to spend your marketing time.

2. Speed to site on emergency calls

Time from first call to a technician on site for emergency water losses. On mitigation, speed is the product. Homeowners and adjusters remember who showed up first, and every hour water sits makes the loss bigger. Track the median, then look at the slowest 10 percent of calls — that is usually where you find the after-hours handoff that broke.

3. Revenue by referral source

Conversion tells you who sends good leads. Revenue by source tells you who sends valuable ones. Look at the two together, and put your top referral partners on a regular touchpoint schedule so the relationships that pay you never go quiet.

Production

4. Estimate turnaround time

Days from inspection or scan to the estimate going to the carrier. A slow estimate delays approval, which delays the rebuild, which delays payment. When this number runs long, find where the estimate waits: for the sketch, for the estimator, or for photos from the field.

5. Job cycle time by loss type

Days from first notice of loss to job completion, split by loss type: water mitigation, rebuild, mold, fire, contents. A mitigation job and a full rebuild run on different clocks, so one blended average helps no one. Watch for jobs that sit in a single stage much longer than the rest.

6. Drying days by class of water

For water jobs, average drying days, compared within the same class of water loss. A crew that consistently runs longer than its peers on the same class may have an equipment placement issue — or a documentation gap that will be hard to defend later. Pair this number with carrier-defensible drying logs so every day on the invoice maps to a reading.

7. Equipment utilization

The share of your air movers, dehumidifiers, and air scrubbers that are deployed and billing on a given day, plus any unit that has been on a job longer than the drying log supports. Idle equipment is capital sitting on a shelf. Equipment left running on a finished job is revenue walking out the door.

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Money

8. Gross margin by job

Revenue minus direct labor, materials, subcontractors, and equipment — per job, not just per month. The monthly number hides the losers. Sort jobs by margin and look at the bottom five every month. There is usually a pattern: one loss type, one carrier, one subcontractor, or one step in the process.

9. Supplement recovery rate

Of what you requested in supplements, what share did the carrier approve and pay? This is one of the most direct measures of documentation quality. A low rate usually points to thin photos, missing readings, or line items without a written reason.

10. Work in progress not yet invoiced

The dollar value of work that is done but not yet billed. WIP that grows week over week is the clearest sign of a paperwork bottleneck: the work is getting finished, but the closeout package — final photos, final readings, the certificate of completion — is not getting assembled.

11. Aging accounts receivable

Receivables grouped by age: under 30 days, 30 to 60, 60 to 90, and over 90. Insurance work usually pays slower than retail work, which makes this number more important, not less. Give everything over 60 days an owner and review it weekly. Old receivables get harder to collect every week they sit.

Customers and team

12. Reviews and callbacks

Two quick signals per completed job: new reviews, and callbacks or rework. The first tells you whether customers are happy enough to say so. The second tells you whether the job was right the first time. Both feed the referral engine behind KPI 1.

How to run the scorecard

Give each number an owner. Review them in the same weekly meeting, in the same order, in about 30 minutes. Mark each one on track or off track, and spend the meeting only on the ones that are off. When a number goes off track, its owner brings a cause and a next step. This is the heart of running the business on an operating system like EOS, and our post on EOS for restoration goes deeper.

Start small. Five numbers reviewed every week beat twelve numbers reviewed whenever someone remembers. Add more once the habit sticks.

Where the numbers come from

The hard part of KPIs is rarely the math. It is that the data lives in five places: leads in the CRM, readings on a clipboard, equipment on a whiteboard, invoices in QuickBooks, and supplements in someone's inbox. Pulling it together every week becomes a part-time job, which is why so many scorecards are abandoned by spring.

When jobs, drying logs, equipment, estimates, and invoices live in one platform, most of these numbers come out on their own. Riivet's reports and analytics cover revenue, WIP, close rate, supplement recovery, and aging AR without exporting anything, and AI analytics lets you ask in plain language — "which referral sources signed the most water jobs this quarter?" — instead of building a report. Scorecards live in the same place as the jobs that feed them. For more on the reporting side, read the complete guide to analytics and reporting for restoration companies.

The takeaway

Revenue is the scoreboard. KPIs are the game film. Track conversion and revenue by source, speed to site, estimate turnaround, cycle time, drying days, equipment utilization, margin by job, supplement recovery, WIP, aging receivables, and reviews and callbacks. Define each number once, give it an owner, and look at it every week. The trend will show you where to look long before the bank balance does.