A company writes five million dollars in estimates over a year and sells three and a half. Ask an owner what happened to the other million and a half and the answer, nearly everywhere, is a shrug with a number attached.
The total is not information. It is a status report on money that already got away. The information starts when the total gets split into what it actually consists of.
The split
The first eight lines are explained dollars. The last line is unexplained dollars, and it is the line this firm cares about most, because it is the only one where the company does not even know what problem it has.
Different reasons, different decisions
The financing line is an argument for a second lender or a re offer process. The competitor line is a pricing and presentation question, and it comes with names attached. The postponed line is a set of dated tasks. The still deciding line is this week’s call list. Not one of those decisions can be made from the word unsold.
One number tells an owner he lost. The split tells him where, and where is the only part he can manage.
Where the dollars actually sit
The other thing a ledger shows is concentration. Take a thousand unsold estimates. Nine hundred fifty of them are smaller tickets adding up to $475K. The remaining fifty are replacements adding up to $900K. Five percent of the paper holds nearly twice the money of the other ninety five percent.
An office that works the list top to bottom by date spends almost all of its calls on a third of its money. Working the book by dollars and recoverability instead of by date is not sophistication. It is reading the ledger before spending the labor.
The standard for a useful reason
Not interested is not a reason. It is a mood, filed as an answer. A useful reason does three jobs: it names what stopped the sale, it says whether the customer is still deciding, and it points at the next action with a date on it.
Went with a competitor whose quote came in twenty eight hundred lower is a useful reason. It closes the row, records who won and by how much, and teaches the pricing conversation something. The record that says not interested teaches nothing, and the record that says nothing at all is at least honest about it.
The sold side of every company already runs on a ledger. Deposits, invoices, receivables, every dollar accounted for. The unsold side is bigger at most shops, and it runs on memory. The whole argument of this firm is that both sides deserve the same bookkeeping.