Glossary

Business, accounting, and platform terms in plain English.

A

Accounting periods: An accounting period is the span a set of financial statements covers. Closing one means fixing the figures so the period can be compared and relied on.
Active customers: Active customers is how many distinct customers you invoiced in a period, which is a truer measure of the shape of the business than revenue alone.
After-hours and emergency work: Work outside normal hours costs more to deliver and is worth more to the customer. Pricing it the same as ordinary work loses money and misprices urgency.
Aging: Aging groups what you are owed by how overdue it is, because the age of an invoice predicts whether it will be paid far better than its size does.
Allowance for doubtful accounts: An allowance for doubtful accounts is an estimate of the money owed that will not be collected. It stops receivables from being reported as if every invoice will be paid.
Amortization: Amortization spreads the cost of something intangible, or the interest portion of a loan, across the periods it relates to rather than charging it all at once.
Appointments per route: Appointments per route is how many jobs a technician gets through in a day on average — the most direct measure of whether your scheduling is dense or scattered.
Assets and liabilities: Assets are what the business owns or is owed. Liabilities are what it owes. The difference between them is the owners' stake.
Average job value: Average job value is the revenue on a typical completed job over the last 90 days, and the most direct read on whether your prices have kept up.

B

Bad debt and write-offs: Bad debt is money owed that will not arrive. Writing it off is not giving up — it is making every number that depends on receivables true again.
Balance sheet: A balance sheet is a snapshot of everything the business owns and everything it owes at one point in time.
Bank and merchant fees: Merchant fees are what a card processor keeps from each payment, and they are the most common cost owners treat as too small to examine.
Bidding on commercial work: Commercial bidding is a formal process with its own vocabulary and its own risks. The work is larger, the margins are thinner, and the terms are written by the other side.
Bills you owe: Bills you owe is the total owed to vendors and suppliers, whether due now or coming due. In accounting it is called accounts payable.
Bonding: A bond is a third party's guarantee that you will complete the work or pay what you owe. It is not insurance for you — it protects the customer, and you repay any claim.
Books versus bank variance: The variance is the gap between what your accounting software says you have and what the bank says. A small one is normal timing; a growing one is a warning.
Breach of contract: A breach is a failure to do what was agreed. What follows depends on how serious it is, what the contract says about it, and what the other side did in response.
Break-even: Break-even is the revenue at which the business covers its costs and keeps nothing — the number you have to clear before any month is profitable.
Budgeting: A budget is a plan for what the business intends to earn and spend. Its value comes from comparing it against what actually happened.
Burn rate: Burn rate is the average amount a business spends per month.
Business bank account: A dedicated account for the business is the practical foundation of separate records. It is required for a company and advisable for a sole proprietor.
Business credit: Business credit is a company's own borrowing record, separate from its owner's. Building it takes deliberate steps and time.
Business entity types: The legal form of a business decides who is liable for its debts, how its profit is taxed, and how its owners are paid.
Business insurance: The policies a service business typically carries, what each one is for, and which risks fall between them.
Business interruption insurance: Business interruption replaces income lost while the business cannot operate after covered damage. It covers the consequence of the loss rather than the loss itself.
Business loans: A business loan is borrowed money repaid over a term. What decides the cost and the risk is the security behind it, the covenants attached, and whether the owner guarantees it personally.
Business model: A business model is how a business creates value and gets paid for it. Changing it is a bigger lever than working harder inside the current one.
Business name registration: A business trades under a legal name and may trade under others. Registering them is a separate step from forming the entity, and neither one grants a trademark.
Business plan: A business plan sets out what a business does, for whom, and on what numbers. Its main use to an established business is obtaining finance and forcing the arithmetic to be checked.
Business taxes: A business meets several separate taxes with separate rules and deadlines. Confusing them is how a business that owes nothing still incurs penalties.
Buy-sell agreements: A buy-sell agreement settles in advance what happens to an owner's share when they die, leave, or become unable to work, and how it will be paid for.
Buying a business: Acquiring another business buys customers, staff and reputation rather than building them. What is bought, and what liabilities come with it, turns on the structure of the deal.

C

Call handling: A missed call is a customer who already decided to buy and could not reach you, and they do not call back — they call the next result.
Callbacks and return visits: A job needing a second visit usually has no margin left, and the most common cause is the part not being on the van.
Capital and operating expenditure: Capital expenditure buys something lasting; operating expenditure runs the business day to day. The split changes when the cost hits profit and how it is treated for tax.
Cash and accrual: Cash accounting counts money when it moves. Accrual counts it when it is earned or owed. The same business looks different under each, and both are correct.
Cash balance: Cash balance is the total money held across all connected checking and savings accounts.
Cash flow forecast: A cash flow forecast projects money in and money out over the coming weeks so a shortfall is visible before it happens rather than on the day.
Cash flow management: Runway extends two ways — hold on to more of what you have, or bring money in sooner — and the second usually moves faster than cutting.
Cash flow statement: The cash flow statement explains the gap between profit and the change in the bank balance, sorted into operating, investing and financing activity.
Cash runway: Cash runway is the number of months a business can keep operating at its current rate of spending before it runs out of money.
Causes of a falling cash balance: A sharp fall in a bank balance is nearly always one of six things, and five of them are timing rather than trouble.
Certificates of insurance: A certificate of insurance evidences that another party holds coverage. Collecting one is routine; checking what it actually says and whether it is still current is where the protection lives.
Change orders: A change order is agreed extra work added to a job after the price was set. Pending ones are work you may already be doing for free.
Chargebacks: A chargeback is a customer reversing a card payment through their bank. The money is taken back immediately, and the business has to evidence the sale to recover it.
Chart of accounts: A chart of accounts is the list of categories your income and expenses are sorted into.
Chart of accounts for a creative or media business: Project work paid in stages, with costs incurred long before delivery, makes deposits and work-in-progress the numbers that matter.
Chart of accounts for a fitness or wellness business: Membership businesses live on recurring revenue and retention, so the books should separate memberships from everything else and make churn visible.
Chart of accounts for a healthcare practice: A practice's books turn on the gap between what is billed and what is collected, which is larger and slower here than in any other service business.
Chart of accounts for a home services business: Cleaning, moving and similar trades are labor-dominant with low materials, so the books should make crew cost and route density visible.
Chart of accounts for a pet services business: Grooming, boarding and daycare have different economics inside one business, and boarding carries a liability exposure the others do not.
Chart of accounts for a professional services business: For consultancies and agencies the cost that matters is people, and the revenue split that matters is retainer against project.
Chart of accounts for a property or real estate business: Commission timing and money held on behalf of others are the two things these books must get right, and the second is not the business's money at all.
Chart of accounts for a salon or spa: Salons mix service revenue, retail and chair rental, and the books should keep those apart because their margins have nothing in common.
Chart of accounts for a service contractor: How an HVAC, plumbing or electrical business is best set up in its books: revenue split by kind of work, direct costs separated from vehicles, and compliance as its own group.
Chart of accounts for a tutoring or education business: Prepaid packages and term-based enrollment mean most of the money arrives before the teaching happens, which makes deferred revenue the central number.
Chart of accounts for an automotive shop: A shop's books should separate parts from labor, because they have very different margins and mixing them hides which side of the business is working.
Chart of accounts for an events business: Events are booked far ahead, paid in deposits, and cost most of their money in the final week, which makes timing the whole problem.
Close rate: Close rate is the share of quotes that turn into work. It tells you whether your problem is getting leads or winning them, which are different problems with different fixes.
Collectible receivables: Collectible receivables is the part of what you are owed that you can realistically expect to receive, which is always less than the total.
Collections: Getting paid faster is mostly process rather than persuasion — invoice sooner, make paying easy, and ask early and consistently.
Commercial and residential work: The two differ in how work is won, how long payment takes, and what the contract requires. A business moving between them is changing more than its customer type.
Commercial auto insurance: Commercial auto covers vehicles used for business. A personal policy generally does not, and discovering that at the point of a claim is the common and expensive failure.
Commercial leases: A commercial lease is usually the largest fixed commitment a small business makes. What decides the real cost is which expenses sit with the tenant, not the rent.
Commission and bonus plans: Variable pay ties earnings to results. It works when the measure is something the person controls, and misfires when it is not.
Competitive analysis: Competitive analysis is working out who else serves the same customers and on what basis. Most of what matters is public and rarely looked at.
Competitive positioning: Positioning is the reason a customer chooses this business over the alternatives. Where none is stated, the customer defaults to price.
Complaint handling: A complaint handled well retains the customer and frequently produces more loyalty than a job that went smoothly. Handled badly, it produces a public review.
Completion and handover: Handover is the point work passes to the customer. What is agreed there decides when payment is due, when warranties start, and what remains outstanding.
Compound growth: Compound growth is growth that builds on itself. Small consistent improvements outrun large one-off ones over any meaningful period.
Contribution margin: Contribution margin is what a job leaves toward overhead and profit after its own direct costs — what it contributes rather than what it earns.
Cost of goods sold: Cost of goods sold is what it cost to deliver the work you sold — materials, the labor on the job, and anything else that only exists because that job happened.
Cost of services: Cost of services is the service-business equivalent of cost of goods sold: what it cost to deliver the work, as distinct from the cost of being in business.
Cost per lead: Cost per lead is marketing spend divided by the inquiries it produced. It measures the front of the funnel and says nothing on its own about whether the spend was worthwhile.
Cost-benefit analysis: Cost-benefit analysis lists what a decision costs against what it returns, including the parts that are awkward to put a number on.
Credit control: Credit control is deciding who is allowed to pay later, how much they may owe, and what happens when they do not pay. It is a policy rather than a reaction.
Credit notes: A credit note reduces or cancels an invoice already issued. It corrects the record rather than deleting it, which is what keeps the numbering intact.
Current ratio and quick ratio: Both ask whether you can cover what is due soon out of what you can turn into cash soon. The quick ratio asks the harder version by leaving stock out.
Customer acquisition cost: Customer acquisition cost is everything spent to win one new customer. Read against what a customer is worth over time, it decides how much marketing can afford to spend.
Customer concentration: Customer concentration is the share of your income that comes from your single biggest customer.
Customer contracts: A contract records what was agreed. Most small-business disputes are about what was agreed rather than about who was at fault.
Customer diversification: If one customer is a large share of revenue, they are not a customer — they are a business risk with a friendly face.
Customer financing: Customer financing lets a customer pay over time while the business is paid in full up front. It raises the size of work customers accept, at a cost taken from margin.
Customer lifetime value: Lifetime value is what a customer is worth across the whole relationship rather than on one job, which is what decides how much a new customer is worth winning.
Customer relationship management (CRM): A CRM is the system that remembers your customers for you — who they are, what you have quoted them, when you last spoke, and what happens next.
Customer reviews: Reviews influence both what prospective customers decide and where a business appears in local search results. Volume and recency matter as much as the average rating.
Customer service: Customer service is how the business handles the contact around the work rather than the work itself. Most of what a customer judges happens before and after the job.
Cyber liability insurance: Cyber liability covers the cost of a data breach or a compromised system. Small service businesses are targeted because they hold customer data and defend it lightly.

D

Daily transaction velocity: Transaction velocity is the average amount leaving your bank accounts per day, averaged over 30 days — the practical version of what the business costs to run.
Days to get paid: Days to get paid is the average number of days between issuing an invoice and receiving payment. In accounting it is called days sales outstanding.
Days to pay bills: Days to pay bills is the average number of days you take to pay your own suppliers. In accounting it is called days payable outstanding.
Dead stock: Dead stock is the share of your inventory that has not sold in 90 days or more — cash sitting on a shelf that is not coming back on its own.
Debt schedule: A debt schedule lists every borrowing the business carries with its balance, rate, payment and payoff date, so the total commitment is visible in one place.
Debt service coverage: Debt service coverage compares the money the business generates against the loan payments it has to make.
Debt to equity: Debt to equity compares what the business has borrowed against what it is worth on paper — how much of the company is funded by other people.
Deferred revenue: Deferred revenue is money a customer has paid you for work not yet done — cash in the bank that belongs to them until you have earned it.
Deposits and progress payments: A deposit is money taken before work starts. Progress payments are staged through a longer job. Both reduce how much of the work the business is funding itself.
Depreciation: Depreciation spreads the cost of something long-lived across the years it is used, rather than counting it all in the month it was bought.
Diagnostic fees: A diagnostic fee charges for finding out what is wrong. It is separated from the repair because the diagnosis has value whether or not the repair follows.
Differences between Omnyra and accounting software: They read overlapping but different sources, and where they disagree the difference is shown rather than averaged away.
Discounting: A discount comes entirely out of profit, so the volume needed to replace it is far larger than the discount looks. It is the most expensive concession a business can make casually.
Dispatching: Dispatching decides who goes where and in what order. It is the daily lever on utilization, because the schedule sets how much of a paid day is spent driving.
Double-entry bookkeeping: Double entry records every transaction twice, once as where the money came from and once as where it went. It is what makes the books self-checking.
Dues and subscriptions: Dues and subscriptions covers recurring memberships and software. It grows quietly because each charge is small and nothing prompts a review.
Duplicate payments: A duplicate payment is the same bill paid twice, usually because it arrived through two routes or was entered again after being paid.

E

EBITDA: EBITDA is earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. It approximates operating performance by removing effects that come from financing and accounting choices rather than from trading.
Employee benefits: Benefits are what an employee receives beyond wages. They are a real cost, they influence retention more than headline pay in some trades, and several carry legal conditions.
Employee handbook: A handbook states the rules of employment in one place. It is useful because it is consistent, and risky where it promises more than intended.
Employee onboarding: Onboarding is the period between accepting an offer and working independently. Its quality is closely tied to whether the person stays.
Employee or contractor: The classification is decided by how somebody actually works, not by what the paperwork calls them, and getting it wrong is assessed retrospectively.
Employee retention: Retention is keeping the people already employed. Replacing someone costs a large multiple of the pay rise that would have kept them, most of it invisible.
Employment practices liability: Employment practices liability covers claims brought by employees over how they were treated. Defense costs arise whether or not the claim succeeds.
Equipment financing: Equipment can be bought outright, financed, or leased. The choice changes the cash profile and the tax treatment rather than whether the equipment is needed.
Estimate decline rate: The decline rate counts customers who actively said no, as distinct from quotes that simply expired — which is a different problem with a different fix.
Estimate, quote and bid: An estimate is an informed guess, a quote is a fixed price you are bound to, and confusing them is how work gets done for less than it costs.
Estimated tax payments: Estimated tax is paid in installments through the year by businesses and owners whose income is not subject to withholding. Missing them incurs penalties even where the eventual return is correct.
Estimating: An estimate is a prediction of what a job will cost to deliver, built from labor, materials, subcontractors and a share of overhead. Its accuracy is only knowable by comparing it against what the job actually cost.
Exempt and non-exempt employees: Classification decides who must be paid overtime. It turns on duties and how someone is paid, not on job title or on being salaried.
Exit planning: Exit planning is preparing a business to be sold, passed on, or closed. What raises the price is largely done years ahead of the sale.
Expense anomalies: An expense anomaly is a charge far larger than the category's normal pattern. Most are legitimate and worth confirming; the ones that are not are error, duplication or fraud.
Expense trend: Expense trend compares the last 90 days of spending against the 90 before it, which is long enough to see a real change and short enough to still act on it.
Extending cash runway: Cash runway is extended in only three ways: spend less each month, collect what is owed sooner, or bring in money that is not sales. Each works on a different timescale.

F

FICA: FICA is the payroll tax funding social security and medicare. It is paid twice on the same wage: once withheld from the employee and once by the business.
Financial ratios: Financial ratios express one figure against another so businesses of different sizes and periods can be compared. They are read as a direction rather than as a verdict.
Fixed and variable costs: Fixed costs continue whether or not you work; variable costs only happen when you do. Which is which decides what a slow month actually costs you.
Fleet management: Fleet management is the running of the vehicles a business depends on. In a mobile trade the fleet is usually the second largest cost after people.
Form W-9: A W-9 collects the legal name and taxpayer identification number of anyone the business pays as a contractor. It is obtained before payment, not at year end.
Fraud prevention: Most small-business fraud is internal, small and long-running rather than a single large theft. It is prevented by separating duties and by someone independent reviewing the records.

G

General liability insurance: General liability covers claims that your work injured someone or damaged their property. It is the policy most customers and contracts require you to hold.
Geographic expansion: Extending the service area adds customers without adding services. Its constraint is drive time, which consumes margin before any other cost changes.
Gross margin: Gross margin is what is left of revenue after the direct cost of doing the work, before any overhead — the number that says whether the work itself is priced correctly.
Gross pay and net pay: Gross pay is what an employee earns before anything is withheld. Net pay is what reaches them. The difference is tax and deductions, and the business pays more than the gross figure.
Growth capacity: Growth capacity is a score for whether the business could absorb more work right now without breaking, rather than whether more work is available.

H

Health score movement: A health score moves when a tier moves, when something temporary distorts a period, or when better data lets it measure something it previously could not see.
Hiring decisions: Hire when the work is reliably there and the margin can carry the cost — not when you are busy, because busy is not the same as profitable.
Hiring paperwork: A new hire brings a fixed set of documents with deadlines attached. Most are required regardless of business size, and several carry penalties for being late rather than wrong.

I

Improving close rate: Close rate rises through speed of response, the form of the estimate, follow-up, and declining work that was never going to close. It is not always the price.
Improving inventory turns: Inventory turns rise by holding less of what does not move rather than by holding less overall. Stock is cash sitting on a shelf, but running out costs more than holding.
Improving utilization: Utilization rises by removing unbilled time rather than by working longer. Travel, waiting and rework are the three places it usually goes.
Increasing average job value: Average job value rises through scope, bundling, options and the mix of work accepted. It is usually a cheaper source of revenue than winning more customers.
Intellectual property: Intellectual property covers the business name, logo, written material and processes. For a service business the name and reputation are usually the only parts worth protecting.
Inventory turns: Inventory turns is how many times a year you sell through your average stock, and its companion, days inventory outstanding, is the same figure expressed as time.
Inventory valuation: Inventory valuation decides what cost is assigned to the parts used on a job when they were bought at different prices. The method changes reported margin and reported profit.
Investment readiness: Investment readiness is a score for whether the business can afford to put money into equipment or expansion, as opposed to whether it wants to.
Invoice factoring: Factoring sells unpaid invoices to a third party for immediate cash at a discount. It converts receivables into money now, at a cost that is high when expressed as an annual rate.
Invoices: An invoice is a request for payment for work delivered. What it must contain, and how soon it goes out, determine when the money arrives.

J

Job costs: Job costs are the labor and materials a specific job consumed, as opposed to overhead, which the business carries whether or not the job happens.
Job descriptions: A job description states what a role does and what good looks like. Without one, hiring is guesswork and performance cannot be measured against anything.
Job documentation: What is recorded on a job — the request, the assessment, the photographs, the completion — is what settles disputes and what makes the numbers behind the job trustworthy.
Job margin: Job margin is the profit left on a single job after the labor and materials that job consumed.
Job margin variance: Margin variance measures how much your job margins scatter around their average — high variance means the average is not describing any actual job.
Job pricing: Price from the margin you need backwards, not from your cost forwards, and count every hour the job actually consumes.

K

Key performance indicator (KPI): A KPI is a number chosen in advance because it tells you something you would act on. The word gets attached to any number on a dashboard, which is most of the problem with it.
Key person risk: Key person risk is a business's dependence on one individual. In an owner-operated business that person is usually the owner, and the exposure is rarely quantified.

L

Labor burden and production rates: Labor burden is the true hourly cost of a person. A production rate is how long a task actually takes. Estimating without both produces prices that look profitable and are not.
Labor cost: Labor cost is the full cost of employing someone: wages plus employer taxes, insurance and benefits. It is materially higher than the wage itself.
Landing pages: A landing page is the page an advertisement sends someone to. Its job is a single action, and sending paid traffic to a home page instead is one of the commonest ways advertising money is wasted.
Leading and lagging indicators: A lagging indicator reports what already happened. A leading indicator moves first and gives time to act. Most businesses watch only the lagging ones.
Leasehold improvements: Leasehold improvements are alterations made to premises the business does not own. They are usually paid for by the tenant and usually stay with the building.
Leave and breaks: Required rest breaks, meal breaks and leave are set by state and local law rather than by the employer, and several apply from the first employee.
Liability and negligence: Liability is legal responsibility for harm. Negligence is the usual route to it for a service business: failing to take the care a reasonable business in the trade would take.
Licenses and permits: Licenses authorize the business or the tradesperson to operate; permits authorize a specific job. Both are recurring costs and both stop work when they lapse.
Lines of credit: A line of credit is a pre-approved facility a business can draw on and repay repeatedly. It is built for timing gaps rather than for funding losses.

M

Margin erosion: When revenue grows and profit does not, costs grew faster — and there are only four places that can have happened.
Margin improvement: Margin improves through price, cost or mix — and price is almost always the fastest, largest and least attempted of the three.
Market research: Market research is finding out what customers want and what competitors offer, before committing money to an assumption.
Marketing and advertising costs: Marketing spend is the overhead line most likely to be cut first and most likely to be the reason revenue falls two months later.
Marketing channels: A marketing channel is a route by which customers find a business. Each has a different cost, speed and durability, and the mix matters more than any single one.
Markup and margin: Markup is added to your cost. Margin is taken out of your price. A 50% markup is a 33% margin, and confusing the two is the most expensive arithmetic mistake in the trades.
Meals and entertainment: Meals and entertainment is treated differently from other costs for tax, with limits that vary by purpose, so it is recorded separately rather than among general expenses.
Mechanic's lien: A mechanic's lien is a claim a contractor can register against a property they improved but were not paid for. Its deadlines are short and unforgiving.
Minimum charges and call-out fees: A minimum charge ensures a visit covers the cost of making it. Without one, small jobs are subsidised by large ones and nobody can see it.
Money owed to you: Money owed to you is the total customers have been invoiced for but have not yet paid. In accounting it is called accounts receivable.
Multi-visit job rate: The multi-visit rate is the share of jobs needing more than one appointment — normal for installs, and a warning sign for service calls.

N

Net cash position: Net cash position is your cash minus what you owe. A positive number means you hold more than you owe.
Net present value: Net present value discounts future money back to what it is worth today, because a pound in three years is worth less than a pound now.
Non-competes and confidentiality: Restrictive covenants limit what a departing employee may do next. Enforceability varies widely by jurisdiction, and confidentiality terms are generally far more reliable than non-competes.

O

Occupancy cost: Occupancy cost is everything premises cost, not just the rent. It is the only figure that lets two differently structured leases be compared.
Operating agreements: An operating agreement is the internal contract between the owners of a business: who decides what, how profit is split, and what happens when someone wants out.
Operating expenses: Operating expenses are the costs of running the business that are not tied to any single job: rent, utilities, insurance, software and admin.
Operational waste: The operational waste score flags money leaving the business without producing anything — duplicate payments, work sold below cost, and overhead grown out of proportion.
Opportunity cost: Opportunity cost is what was given up by choosing one option over the next best. It is the reason a profitable decision can still be the wrong one.
Organizational structure: Organizational structure is who reports to whom and who decides what. In a small business it is usually implicit, which works until it does not.
Overdue invoices: An overdue invoice is one past its due date and unpaid. The count matters, but the age of the oldest one matters more.
Overhead percentage: Overhead percentage is the share of your total costs that are fixed, meaning they continue whether or not you sell anything.
Overhead reduction: Overhead is the cost that continues when the work stops, so cutting it lowers the revenue you need every month — permanently.
Owner distributions: A distribution is a payment of profit to an owner of a corporation, made in proportion to ownership and taxed differently from a wage.
Owner pay and draws: How an owner takes money out — wage, draw or distribution — changes the tax treatment and changes whether the profit figure means anything.
Owner's draw: An owner's draw is money an owner takes out of the business for personal use. It is not a wage and it is not a business expense.
Owners' equity: Owners' equity is what would remain for the owners if every asset were converted to cash and every debt paid. It is the balancing figure of the balance sheet.
Ownership percentage: Ownership percentage is the share of a business an owner holds. It governs how profit is distributed and how much of a sale each owner receives.

P

Paid time off: Paid time off is time an employee is paid for and does not work. It is a real cost that is rarely priced into rates, and in some places it accrues as a liability the business owes.
Pay period: A pay period is the stretch of time a paycheck covers. Its length sets how often payroll must be funded and how predictable the demand on cash is.
Pay-per-click advertising: Pay-per-click advertising charges for each click rather than for being shown. It produces inquiries immediately and stops producing them the moment spending stops.
Pay-when-paid and pay-if-paid: These clauses tie payment to a subcontractor to whether the main contractor has been paid. One delays payment; the other can remove the obligation entirely.
Payback period: Payback period is how long a spend takes to return its own cost. It answers a different question from return on investment: not how much, but how soon.
Payment processing: Payment processing is how a business takes card and electronic payments. Its cost is a percentage of revenue and its main benefit is being paid sooner.
Payment terms: Payment terms say when an invoice is due, and shorter ones get paid sooner in businesses where nobody ever negotiated.
Payroll taxes: Payroll taxes are the amounts withheld from wages and the employer's own contributions on top — money that passes through the business rather than belonging to it.
Performance management: Performance management is setting expectations, saying when they are not met, and documenting both. Its absence is what turns a solvable problem into a dismissal.
Personal guarantees: A personal guarantee makes the owner personally liable for a business debt. It sets aside the liability protection the business structure was formed to provide.
Petty cash: Petty cash is a small held amount for minor purchases. It is worth controlling precisely because the amounts are small enough that nobody watches them.
Planning and goal setting: A planning cycle turns intentions into a small number of measurable goals, reviewed often enough to act on. Its value is the review rather than the plan.
Prepaid and accrued expenses: A prepaid expense is paid before it is used. An accrued expense is used before it is paid. Both exist to put a cost in the period it belongs to.
Preventive maintenance: Preventive maintenance services equipment on a schedule rather than on failure. Its return is the days off the road it avoids, which cost more than the repair it saves.
Pricing adequacy: Pricing adequacy is a measure of whether your prices cover your costs plus a real profit, rather than merely covering costs.
Pricing models: The main ways service work is priced are by time and materials, by a fixed price for the job, and by a flat rate from a published book. Each moves risk differently.
Pricing strategy: Pricing strategy is the reasoning behind a price rather than the method of quoting it: whether the price follows cost, follows value, or is set to win a position.
Privacy and data protection: A business holding customer details carries obligations over how they are collected, kept and disposed of. Those obligations apply to small businesses, and are set by where the customer is.
Product margin: Average product margin is the gross margin across the items you sell, and reading the spread behind it matters more than the average itself.
Professional fees: Professional fees are what you pay accountants, bookkeepers and lawyers — a cost most owners under-buy and then pay for in a different form.
Professional liability insurance: Professional liability, also called errors and omissions, covers claims that your advice or design was wrong — as distinct from physical damage.
Profit and cash: Profit counts work that has been done; cash counts money that has arrived. The gap between them is where most growing service businesses run into trouble.
Profit and loss: A profit and loss statement shows what a business earned and what it spent over a period, and what was left.
Profit margin: Profit margin is the percentage of revenue a business keeps after expenses. Gross margin says whether the work is priced right; net margin says whether the business works.
Progress billing: Progress billing invoices a long job in stages against agreed milestones, so the business is not funding the whole of it before being paid.
Proposals: A proposal presents recommended work to a customer. It differs from a quote by explaining the reasoning, which is what allows it to be judged on something other than price.
Purchase orders: A purchase order is a customer's written commitment to buy before the work happens — and on commercial work, the thing that gets your invoice paid.

Q

Quality control: Quality control is checking work against a standard before the customer does. Its return is fewer callbacks, fewer disputes and better reviews.
Quote conversion: Quote conversion is the share of estimates that became jobs over the last 90 days, read from your field service system rather than from a pipeline you maintain.

R

Raising investment: Raising investment sells part of the business for money that does not have to be repaid. For most owner-operated service businesses it is neither available nor appropriate.
Raising prices: A price increase reaches the bottom line whole, so it moves profit further than an equivalent cut in cost. What it risks is volume, and the two have to be weighed against each other.
Rate cards and price books: A rate card is the business's standard pricing written down. It makes quoting fast, consistent between staff, and reviewable when costs move.
Reach, impressions and engagement: Reach is how many people saw a post, impressions is how many times it was shown, and engagement is how many did something about it. Only the last one predicts anything.
Reading a balance sheet: A balance sheet is a position at a single moment rather than a period. It is read through what is due soon against what will arrive soon, and how much of the business is funded by borrowing.
Reading a profit and loss: A profit and loss runs from revenue down to profit through three subtractions. Reading it means knowing which line each cost belongs on and comparing periods that are comparable.
Real cash balance: Your real cash balance is what the bank says you have right now, as opposed to what your books think you have.
Reasonable compensation: Reasonable compensation is the wage an owner who works in their own corporation must pay themselves before taking profit out as distributions.
Reconciliation: Reconciliation is comparing your bank statement against your own records to confirm they agree.
Record retention: Record retention is how long business records must be kept and in what form. The periods differ by record type, and the cost of keeping too much is far lower than the cost of having discarded something needed.
Recruiting: Recruiting is finding and hiring people. In the trades the constraint is usually the supply of skilled labor rather than the number of applicants.
Recurring revenue: Recurring revenue is the difference between starting each month at zero and starting it with the lights already paid for.
Reducing bad debt: Bad debt is prevented before the work starts rather than recovered afterwards. Screening, deposits and stopping work on non-payment do more than any collection effort.
Reducing callbacks: A callback is a return visit to correct work already done. It is paid for twice and billed once, and the causes are usually diagnosis, parts and expectations rather than skill.
Referral partnerships: A referral partnership is an arrangement with another business serving the same customers. It produces steady work at almost no acquisition cost, and it requires reciprocity to last.
Referrals: A referral is work arriving on someone else's recommendation. Referred customers close at higher rates and cost almost nothing to acquire.
Reserves and sinking funds: A sinking fund sets money aside for a known future cost. It converts an occasional large bill into a predictable monthly one, which is the difference between planning and borrowing.
Retainage: Retainage is money a customer holds back from each payment until the work is finished — earned revenue you are not allowed to have yet.
Retained earnings: Retained earnings are the profits a business has kept rather than paid out to its owners, accumulated across every year since it began.
Return on ad spend: Return on ad spend is revenue produced for each unit of advertising spend. Read against margin rather than revenue, it says whether the advertising paid for itself.
Return on investment: Return on investment is what a spend earned back, expressed against what it cost. It is the common language for comparing one use of money against another.
Revenue: Revenue is the money coming into the business from customers, before any expenses are taken out.
Revenue categories: Splitting revenue by the kind of work it came from is what turns one number into a decision about which work to do more of.
Revenue consistency: Revenue consistency measures how predictable your income is month to month, rather than how large it is.

S

Safety program: A safety program is the set of practices that prevent injury at work. Its financial return arrives through insurance premiums, lost time and liability.
Sales conversion: Close rate improves mainly through speed and follow-up, and only rarely through price — which is the lever most owners reach for first.
Sales process: A sales process is the defined path from inquiry to accepted work. Its value is that nothing is lost between steps because nobody was responsible for it.
Sales tax: Sales tax is money collected from the customer on behalf of a taxing authority. It is never the business's revenue, and treating it as such is how it gets spent before it is due.
Scaling a business: Scaling is growing output faster than cost. Most service businesses do not scale in that sense; they expand, and knowing the difference changes what to expect.
Scope of work: A scope of work states what will be done, what will not, and on what terms. Most disputes over a job are disputes over the scope rather than the price.
Search engine optimization: Search engine optimization is the work of being found in unpaid search results. For a local service business most of it is the business profile, reviews and consistent details rather than the website.
Seasonality: Seasonality is the predictable rise and fall of demand across a year. It is a planning problem rather than a performance problem, and it is what makes month-to-month comparison misleading.
Separating business and personal money: Mixing personal and business money makes the figures unreliable, complicates tax, and can undermine the liability protection an entity was formed to provide.
Service agreements: A service agreement commits a customer to ongoing work at an agreed price. It produces predictable revenue and is valued far above the same amount of one-off work.
Service business benchmarks: Benchmarks for the numbers that matter in a service business, with the caveat that your own trend beats any industry average.
Service line expansion: Adding a service extends what an existing customer base can be sold. It succeeds when it uses capability the business already has and fails when it is entered because it looks profitable.
Service standards: A service standard is a stated commitment about response and delivery. Written down it can be measured, taught and sold; assumed, it varies with whoever answers the phone.
Shortening the cash conversion cycle: The cash conversion cycle is how long money is tied up between paying for work and being paid for it. It shortens by invoicing sooner, collecting sooner, or paying suppliers later.
Software and subscriptions: Software costs are the recurring charges for the tools the business runs on — the overhead line that grows without anybody deciding to grow it.
Staff turnover: Turnover is the rate at which people leave. Measuring it turns a series of individual departures into a pattern that can be acted on.
Standard operating procedures: A standard operating procedure writes down how a recurring task is done, so it can be delegated, taught and improved rather than living in one person's head.
Stockout risk: Stockout risk counts the items that have fallen below their reorder point — the parts about to cause a second visit.
Strategic reserve: A strategic reserve is cash held deliberately for opportunities and emergencies, separate from the cash needed to run next month.
Subcontractors: A subcontractor is another business engaged to perform part of the work. Their cost is a direct job cost, and the risks they carry are insurance, classification and lien rights.
Sunk cost: A sunk cost is money already spent and unrecoverable. It should have no bearing on what to do next, and it routinely does.

T

Target market: A target market is the group of customers a business is built to serve. Naming it makes marketing cheaper, because the message can be specific.
Tax preparedness: Tax preparedness is how much of your estimated tax liability you have actually set aside, expressed as a percentage of what you will owe.
Tax reserve: A tax reserve is cash deliberately set aside to cover tax you already owe but have not yet paid.
Technician utilization: Utilization compares the hours your team actually worked against the hours they were scheduled for, over a rolling 30 days.
Terminations: A termination ends employment. Doing it correctly means a documented reason, a consistent process, and meeting the obligations that survive the employment.
The cash conversion cycle: The cash conversion cycle is how many days pass between paying for work and being paid for it — the length of time your money is somebody else's.
The sales pipeline: A pipeline is the set of deals you have in progress and where each one stands, so you can see what is likely to close before it does or does not.
Throughput and lead time: Throughput is how much work gets completed in a period. Lead time is how long a job waits from request to completion. Both are governed by the tightest constraint, not by overall effort.
Tools and small equipment: Tools and small equipment are the working kit of the trade — usually expensed rather than depreciated, and consistently under-budgeted.
Training and certification: Training raises capability; certification proves it. In licensed trades some of it is a legal requirement with expiry dates the business is responsible for tracking.
Travel charges: A travel charge recovers the cost of reaching work outside the ordinary service area. Absorbed instead, distant jobs quietly carry a lower margin than nearby ones at the same price.

U

Umbrella insurance: Umbrella insurance adds a further limit above policies the business already holds. It is bought for the rare claim that exceeds them.
Undeposited funds: Undeposited funds is money recorded as received but not yet banked. A balance that keeps growing usually means deposits are being recorded twice or not at all.
Unpaid job invoices: The unpaid balance sitting in your field service system, which can differ from what your accounting software shows and is worth reading on its own.
Unreconciled transactions: An unreconciled transaction is one the bank recorded that has not been matched to anything in your books yet.
Useful life and salvage value: Useful life is how long an asset is expected to be worth using, and salvage value what it is worth at the end. Together they set how much depreciation is charged each year.
Utilities, rent and facilities: Facilities costs are rent, utilities, cleaning and everything else that keeps premises open — fixed, and usually the largest overhead line after people.

V

Van stock: Van stock is the inventory carried on the vehicle. Getting it right is the difference between finishing on the first visit and returning.
Variance analysis: Variance analysis compares what happened against what was expected, and asks why each difference occurred. It is what turns a budget into a management tool.
Vehicle costs: Vehicle costs are fuel, maintenance, insurance and finance for the vehicles the business runs — usually the largest cost after people in a mobile trade.
Vendor concentration: Vendor concentration is the share of spending going to one supplier. A high share earns better pricing and creates a dependency the business cannot quickly replace.
Vendor management: Vendors are the businesses a company buys from. Managing them deliberately affects material cost, payment terms, and whether work can proceed on time.
Volume without profit: Being busy and being profitable are unrelated. A full calendar hides underpricing, unbilled hours, and job types that consume more than they carry.

W

Wage and hour basics: Wage and hour law governs minimum pay, overtime, and what counts as hours worked. Misclassifying a role or not paying for travel between jobs are the two errors that most often produce a claim in the trades.
Warranties and guarantees: A warranty is a promise to put defective work right. Its cost is real, arrives later than the revenue, and is rarely priced for.
Website basics: For a service business the website has a small number of jobs: say what you do and where, prove you are real, and make contact effortless.
Work velocity: Jobs completed and revenue earned in the last seven days, which is the fastest read available on whether the business is moving.
Workers compensation: Workers compensation covers employees injured doing their job — their medical costs and lost wages — and is legally required almost everywhere once you have staff.
Working capital: Working capital is what you could turn into cash within a year minus what you owe within a year — the money the business has to operate on.