131 Financial Rules Every Small Business Should Be Tracking (And Probably Isn't)

Ask most small business owners how their business is doing and you'll get one of two answers: "Good" (because there's money in the account) or "Not great" (because there isn't).

That's not a financial health assessment. That's a bank balance check.

Real financial health is measured across dozens of dimensions — and the problems that kill businesses almost always show up in these metrics weeks before they show up in your bank account.

The 15 categories most businesses aren't watching

We built Omnyra's rule engine with 131+ rules across 15 categories. Each rule fires automatically when a threshold is crossed, and every alert traces back to the exact transactions that triggered it.

Here's what we're watching — and why.

Cash management

This is survival-tier. If cash runs out, nothing else matters.

Cash runway: At your current burn rate, how many days until you run out of cash? Triggers at 30, 60, and 90-day thresholds.
Cash reserve ratio: How many months of expenses could you cover with current cash? Below 1 month is a red flag.
Cash flow timing gaps: When your payables land before your receivables — the gap that sinks businesses with strong revenue and no cash.

Accounts receivable

The money people owe you is not the same as money you have.

AR aging concentration: What percentage of your outstanding receivables are 60+ or 90+ days overdue?
DSO trend (Days Sales Outstanding): Is it taking longer to collect? A rising DSO means cash is getting further away from revenue.
Customer payment pattern shifts: A customer who used to pay in 15 days now takes 45. That's a signal — maybe they're having cash problems too.

Accounts payable

What you owe — and what it tells you about how you're managing cash.

Early payment discount utilization: Are you paying invoices early enough to capture 2/10 net 30 discounts? That's 36% annualized.
AP concentration: How much of your payables are with a single vendor? Concentration risk applies to the money going out, too.

Profitability

Revenue means nothing without margin.

Gross margin trend: Is your margin holding steady, improving, or quietly eroding? A 2% per quarter decline doesn't feel urgent until it's been happening for a year.
Net margin vs. industry: Are you above or below the benchmark for your industry and size?
Job-level profitability: For service and construction businesses — is each job making money when you include loaded labor costs, materials, and overhead?

Revenue patterns

Not all revenue is equal.

Revenue concentration: If one customer represents 30%+ of your revenue, you're one contract loss away from a crisis.
Revenue consistency: Monthly variation matters. High variance means unpredictable cash flow.
Recurring vs. one-time split: How much of your revenue comes back without you chasing it?

Expense monitoring

Expenses grow silently.

Category growth rates: Materials up 18% while revenue grew 4%? That's margin erosion hiding in a line item.
Subscription creep: SaaS, insurance, services — the expenses that renew automatically and nobody reviews.
Expense ratio trend: Total expenses as a percentage of revenue. If this ratio is climbing, you're working harder for less.

Customer analytics

Who's actually valuable?

True customer profitability: Revenue minus all associated costs (labor, materials, rework, support). Some "top customers" are net-negative.
Customer churn signals: Payment delays, reduced order frequency, declining order size — patterns that predict loss.

Vendor dependency

Your supply chain is a financial risk.

Single-vendor concentration: If one vendor supplies 40%+ of your materials, what happens when they raise prices or can't deliver?
Vendor price trend: Are your top vendors quietly raising prices faster than you're raising yours?

Operations metrics

The operational signals that show up in your finances.

Revenue per employee trend: Is each person you add generating proportional revenue?
Overhead rate: What percentage of every dollar goes to overhead vs. direct revenue generation?

Construction-specific rules

For contractors and trades — the industry-specific rules that generic platforms miss.

Retainage tracking: Money held back on completed work. Easy to lose track of, and it directly impacts cash flow.
Job cost variance: Estimated vs. actual cost per job. If actuals consistently exceed estimates, your bidding is off.
Change order impact: How much do change orders affect final job profitability? Are they covering the real cost of scope changes?

Win detection

Not every rule is a warning. Some catch good news.

Margin improvement: Gross margin improved 3 points since last month — what changed? Knowing what works is as valuable as knowing what doesn't.
DSO reduction: Customers are paying faster. Was it the new payment terms, the follow-up automation, or something else?
Cash reserve milestone: You crossed from 1 month to 2 months of reserves. That's a real accomplishment worth noting.

Why automated rules matter

You could theoretically track all of this manually. Pull the reports. Build the spreadsheets. Set calendar reminders to check them weekly.

Nobody does this. And even if they tried, the rules interact — a rising DSO combined with a declining cash reserve ratio combined with a large upcoming payroll obligation creates a compound risk that no single report captures.

Automated rules run 24/7. They evaluate your data against thresholds built from industry benchmarks. When something triggers, you get an alert with the exact evidence. When nothing triggers, you get the confidence that someone (something) is watching.

That's the difference between hoping your business is healthy and knowing it is.

What we built

Omnyra runs all 131+ rules across these 15 categories automatically. Every alert includes the specific transactions, invoices, and records that triggered it. Your advisor reviews the alerts before your monthly strategy call — so the conversation starts with "here's what to do" not "let me look at the numbers."

Book a free strategy call and we'll show you which rules are firing on your business right now.