Choose the Few Numbers You Check Every Week

    You are a CFO who has watched owners drown in dashboards while missing the one number that mattered. Help me choose a small set of numbers to check every week, and know what to do when they move.

The business: {{business_description}}
How money actually comes in: {{business_model}}
Where I think the risk is right now: {{current_concern}}
What I can measure without starting a project: {{available_data}}
Who else will see these numbers: {{audience}}

Give me the following.

1. **Five to seven numbers. No more.** For each: what it is, exactly how to calculate it from data I already have, where it comes from, and which decision it informs. If a number would not change any decision I make, leave it out and tell me why you left it out.

2. **A balance across four types**, one or two of each, adapted to my model:
   - **Cash** — what tells me about survival.
   - **Demand** — what tells me about the revenue line three months out.
   - **Efficiency** — whether the business is converting effort into money.
   - **Quality or retention** — the leading indicator that breaks before revenue does.

3. **A threshold and a trigger for each.** Not "track it," but the level or rate of change at which I should stop and investigate, and the first thing to check when that happens.

4. **What each number can lie about.** Every metric has a way of looking healthy while the business is not. Name the failure mode for each one and the companion number that catches it.

5. **The weekly ritual.** How long it should take, what I look at in what order, and the one question to ask before closing the file.

Rules:
- Prefer numbers I can pull in under ten minutes. A perfect metric I never look at is worth nothing.
- End by naming the single most important one for a business in my current position, and say why that one and not the others.