Small business financial health checklist: 30 questions in 45 minutes.

Almost every owner-operator we talk to already knows, in their gut, whether their business is healthy. They feel it in how often they check the bank account, how reluctant they are to open the monthly P&L, how much they avoid pricing conversations. What they cannot do is point at a number and say here is why I feel that way. This checklist makes the intuition specific. 30 questions across six categories — revenue, margin, cost, cash, pricing, operating discipline — each a yes or no. Tally at the end. The score tells you where the business actually sits, and the second half of this post breaks down what the most common no answers are silently costing.

TL;DR

Most small shops score in the 12-19 range on the first run. That is not a verdict on the owner; it is the baseline for businesses run without daily P&L visibility. Owners who track EBIT daily for 90 days typically move 8-12 points up the next time they take it. The checklist is not a personality test — it is a map of which numbers you do not currently see and what each blind spot costs.

How to use this checklist

Print it or save it. Set 45 minutes aside on a quiet evening — not a Sunday morning when you are tempted to score charitably, not a Monday after a slow weekend when you are tempted to score harshly. A normal Tuesday or Wednesday evening with a calculator and your last bank statement is the right setting.

Three ground rules.

• Do not fudge. A maybe is a no. If you cannot point to the number on a screen or a piece of paper within 60 seconds, the answer is no. The whole exercise breaks if you grade on partial credit.
• One pass, then walk away. Do not re-score after thinking about it. First-instinct answers are honest answers. If a question feels uncomfortable, that discomfort is the signal — write the no.
• Score against today, not what you plan to do. If you have been meaning to review subscriptions for six months but have not, the answer is no. Intent does not count. Action does.

What you will need: your last bank statement, your monthly fixed cost list (or ability to assemble it), your last three months of till totals or revenue figures, and a calculator. No accountant, no software, no spreadsheet template. The checklist is designed to surface what you can already access in 45 minutes.

Part 1: Revenue health (5 questions)

Revenue health is the foundation. It is not about whether revenue is high or low — it is about whether you actually know your own revenue patterns well enough to plan against them. A shop with €18k months that knows them precisely is healthier than a shop with €35k months that does not know which days drive the total.

1. Do you know your average monthly revenue for the last 12 months? Within €1,000. If you have to log into three different systems to answer this, the answer is no. A healthy owner has this number in their head or on a single page.
2. Is revenue trending up over the last 3 months? Month 3 higher than month 1, after stripping out seasonality (compare to same months last year if you can). Flat is okay if prices have not moved. Declining without a known cause is a no.
3. Do you know which days and weeks are your peaks? Can you name your top 3 trading days of a typical week and your top 2 weeks of the year? Owners who cannot are usually over-staffing slow periods and under-staffing peaks — both expensive mistakes.
4. Have you measured month-over-month seasonality? Do you know that February is typically 15% below average, that August dips 20%, that December peaks 40%? Or do you discover each dip as a fresh surprise? Without the seasonality map you cannot plan cash for the slow months.
5. Is no single customer or product responsible for more than 25% of your revenue? Concentration risk. If your top product is 40% of revenue and a supplier price hike makes it unsellable, the business has a structural problem. Healthy shops have a top product/customer band at 10-22% — meaningful but replaceable.

Part 2: Margin health (5 questions)

Margin health is the most-skipped category in small-shop self-assessment because the numbers are uncomfortable. A weekly revenue total feels good. A weekly margin total exposes whether the revenue paid for the cost of producing it. Most owners can answer revenue questions and stall on margin questions — that gap is exactly the problem.

1. Do you know your gross margin percentage? Net revenue minus COGS, divided by net revenue. A café should know whether it is 68%, 71%, or 74%. Within 2 points. If you do not know, you are pricing against a feeling, not a number.
2. Has your gross margin moved more than 2 points in the last 90 days? If yes, do you know why? Margin drift of 2+ points is almost always a stale COGS line — supplier prices moved and the menu costing did not. A no here is a fix worth several hundred euros a month for most shops.
3. Do you know your prime cost (COGS + labor as % of net revenue)? Prime cost is the dominant cost ratio in service and hospitality businesses. Healthy café prime cost is 55-65%, healthy restaurant 60-67%, healthy salon 35-45%. If you cannot quote your number, you are not managing the dominant cost line in the business.
4. Do you compare margin per product or category? Not gross sell price — margin contribution after COGS. If you sell 12 menu items and cannot name the 3 highest-margin and 3 lowest-margin, you are running a mix you have not measured.
5. Did you apply card fees to card-only revenue (not total revenue)? Card fees apply to card sales, never to cash. If your spreadsheet or P&L applies the processor rate to total revenue, your fee line is overstated and your EBIT understated by 0.5-1.0 percentage points. Why this matters daily.

Part 3: Cost health (5 questions)

Cost health is the silent killer. Revenue you notice the day it changes. Costs creep up quarter by quarter, usually below the threshold any single bill would trigger an alarm at. Software subscriptions, insurance renewals, supplier price adjustments — each is a 4-9% nudge that compounds invisibly until the EBIT line is structurally smaller than it was eighteen months ago.

1. Do you have a written list of every fixed cost? On one page, with the monthly amount. Rent, salaries, insurance, accountant, software, utilities, loan repayments. Most owners can name 6-8 and have actually been paying 12-18. The fixed costs primer covers the four kinds most owners miss.
2. Have you reviewed every subscription in the last 90 days? Software, SaaS tools, memberships, professional services. Most shops carry 3-7 subscriptions they no longer use or barely use. A 30-minute audit recovers €40-180/month for most owners, every month, forever.
3. Do you know your owner's wage as a fixed cost? Even if you do not actually pay yourself, do you account for what you would pay someone to do your hours at market rate? If your EBIT is computed without this line, it is overstated by €2,500-€4,500/month for a 50-hour-week owner-operator.
4. Do you know your daily fixed cost slice? Monthly fixed total divided by 30.4375. The floor every trading day has to clear before any profit accrues. If you cannot quote this within €20, you are pricing every product against a target you have not computed.
5. Have any fixed costs jumped more than 10% in the last 6 months? Insurance renewals, rent escalations, payroll inflation, software price hikes. If yes, did you re-price products in response? Most owners absorb the cost jumps and let margin compress quietly rather than have the pricing conversation.

Part 4: Cash + runway health (5 questions)

Cash health and profit health are two different conversations. A profitable shop can run out of cash because supplier invoices arrive before customer payments settle. An unprofitable shop can have months of cash on hand because the previous owner left a balance. Both situations are dangerous and both are knowable. The questions below force you to size the cash buffer in terms of how many days the business survives if the till stops.

1. Do you know how many days of runway you have if revenue stops? Current cash balance divided by daily fixed cost slice. If you have €18,000 in the bank and €400/day of fixed cost, that is 45 days of runway. If you cannot quote a runway number, you cannot tell whether a 3-week downturn is a manageable dip or an existential threat.
2. Do you have at least 60 days of fixed costs in cash? The minimum buffer for an independent shop. 60 days lets you survive a heatwave, a flu wave, a local roadworks period, a payment delay from a major customer. Under 60 days and every disruption is a crisis.
3. Are you paying yourself a real salary or only "what's left"? A real salary is a fixed amount transferred to a personal account on a fixed date every month, treated as a non-negotiable cost. "What's left" is a euphemism for unpaid labor. If you take whatever is in the account on the 28th, the answer is no.
4. Do you have any debt repayments you haven't accounted for in profit? Loan principal payments do not appear on the P&L (only the interest does) but they do leave the bank. If you have a €40,000 loan being repaid at €700/month, that is €700/month of cash leaving that your EBIT calculation does not capture.
5. Are taxes (VAT, income tax) accruing in a separate account? VAT collected from customers is not yours — it sits in your account until the next return. Income tax is owed on profit. Healthy shops sweep these into a separate sub-account weekly so they cannot be spent. Shops that mix them into operating cash routinely face surprise tax bills that drain working capital. Why VAT was never your money.

Part 5: Pricing + market health (5 questions)

Pricing is the single highest-leverage decision an owner makes and the one most often left untouched. A 5% price increase typically loses 0-2% of unit volume in independent shops and drops straight to EBIT. A 5% cost cut takes weeks of negotiation and rarely captures the headline number. Owners who have not raised prices in 18 months are almost always under-priced relative to current costs by 8-15%.

1. Have you raised prices on at least one product in the last 12 months? Not a special, not a one-off — a permanent price change on a real product. If no, you have absorbed 12+ months of supplier inflation through margin compression rather than price.
2. Do you know what your 3 closest competitors charge for your top 3 items? Within 5%. If you cannot quote a comparable on your bestseller, you are pricing in a vacuum. Most owners over-estimate how price-sensitive their customers are and under-price by 8-15%.
3. Have you tested a new menu item, product, or service in the last 90 days? A test does not need to be a hit. The point is the discipline of refreshing the assortment. Shops that go 12+ months without a single new product see same-store revenue decline 4-7% per year on average as customer interest decays.
4. Do you know your customer acquisition cost? For e-commerce: ad spend divided by new customers in a period. For physical retail: harder to measure but still knowable through promotion ROI or referral source. If you cannot estimate it, you cannot tell whether marketing spend is profitable.
5. Do you know your repeat customer rate? Percentage of revenue from customers who bought from you before. A healthy local business runs 40-65% repeat. Under 30% and you have a retention problem masquerading as a revenue problem — every euro of growth has to come from net new customers, which is the most expensive kind.

Part 6: Operating discipline (5 questions)

The previous five categories measure what you know about the business. This one measures the habits that keep what you know current. A shop with great numbers from six months ago is operating blind today. The discipline questions are the ones that determine whether your score improves or degrades over the next 90 days.

1. Do you close out your books daily or at least weekly? Daily entry of cash and card totals, weekly reconciliation against bank. If you batch monthly or wait for the accountant, the answer is no. Monthly batching is the single biggest predictor of which shops are surprised by their year-end numbers.
2. Do you log every cost as it happens? Variable costs (cleaning supplies, packaging, small repairs) entered the day they happen or the week they happen. If you discover them in the bank statement at month-end, the answer is no — you are reconstructing, not tracking.
3. Do you review your P&L at least monthly? Sit with it for 20 minutes, line by line, compare to the previous month and the same month last year. If you glance at a number and close the file, that is not a review. How to read a P&L line by line.
4. Do you have a written financial decision rule? Something like "I will not hire until EBIT margin > 12% for 3 consecutive months" or "I will not add a fixed cost without cutting one of equal size" or "I will raise prices once EBIT margin drops below 8% for 60 days." Written rules prevent emotional decisions during stressful months.
5. Do you have a written goal for this quarter? One sentence, with a number and a date. "Get EBIT margin to 11% by end of August." "Cut fixed costs by €600/month by end of July." "Test 4 new menu items by end of September." Without a written quarterly goal, every month is a fresh improvisation.

Scoring: what your number means

Tally your yeses. Round honestly — a 'mostly yes' is a no. Then read the row your score lands in. The verdict is not a personality assessment, it is a description of where the business sits structurally today.

What the most common 'no' answers actually cost

A no on the checklist is not just a missing answer — it is a leak you can quantify. Below, the cost of each of the most common no's, sized for a typical €25k-month independent shop. Multiply or divide for your scale. The pattern is consistent.

Not knowing the daily fixed cost slice (Part 3, Q4)

Cost: mispricing every product. If your daily fixed slice is €400 and you do not know it, you cannot tell whether a €450 trading day cleared its overhead or lost €30 once COGS and variable came off. Owners who do not compute the daily slice routinely price slow-day menus too low because they think "any revenue helps" — when in fact some sales lose money once the day's slice is allocated. Typical correction: €600-€1,200/month of recovered EBIT once products are repriced against the real floor. Break-even analysis walkthrough.

Not separating VAT into a sub-account (Part 4, Q5)

Cost: surprise quarterly tax bills that drain working capital exactly when you need it. A shop doing €25k/month gross collects roughly €4,000/month of VAT it owes to the tax office. Over a quarter, that is €12,000 sitting in operating cash, feeling like a buffer, until the return is due. Owners who spend it mid-quarter and then scramble to pay the bill effectively run on credit they did not know they had taken on. The fix is mechanical: sweep VAT into a sub-account weekly the same evening you log the day's revenue.

Not knowing prime cost (Part 2, Q3)

Cost: silent margin erosion. Prime cost (COGS + labor as % of net revenue) is the dominant cost ratio in food service and salons. A 1.5 percentage point drift in prime cost on €20k/month of net revenue is €300/month — €3,600/year — invisible in any single bill but compounding every month. Shops that do not track prime cost typically discover the erosion six months in, when a full quarter of margin has already evaporated.

Not raising prices in 12+ months (Part 5, Q1)

Cost: structural under-pricing of 8-15%. Supplier prices moved 4-9% over the last 12 months in most categories. If your prices have not moved, your margin has compressed by 3-7 percentage points. On €20k/month of net revenue, that is €600-€1,400/month of foregone EBIT. The first price test is uncomfortable for every owner; almost none of them lose meaningful volume.

Not closing books daily or weekly (Part 6, Q1)

Cost: late discovery of every other problem on this list. The shop that closes monthly finds a margin drift six weeks after it started. The shop that closes daily catches it in week two. The difference compounds — a leak caught fast costs four weeks; a leak caught slow costs sixteen. Across a year, daily close vs monthly close is typically worth 2-4 percentage points of EBIT margin difference, just from faster reaction time. Daily vs monthly P&L.

Not paying yourself a real salary (Part 4, Q3)

Cost: a flattering EBIT line that hides whether the shop is actually a business or a job. If you work 55 hours/week and pay yourself nothing, your reported EBIT is overstated by €2,500-€4,000/month of unpaid labor at market rates. Many owners who think they are running a profitable shop are running a shop that consumes €30-50k/year of their unpaid time to produce the appearance of break-even. The owner-salary test in full.

The 3 questions every healthy owner can answer in 5 seconds

Of the 30 questions in this checklist, three are the irreducible minimum. A healthy owner-operator can answer all three from memory in five seconds, without opening anything. If you cannot, that is the place to start.

1. What was yesterday's EBIT? Not gross revenue, not transaction count — operating profit. The honest number after VAT, card fees, COGS, variable, and the day's fixed cost slice have come off. If you can answer this within €30, you are in the top 10% of owner-operators on visibility.
2. What is this month's break-even revenue? The monthly revenue floor below which you lose money. Computed as monthly fixed costs divided by gross margin percentage. If your fixed costs are €12,200/month and your gross margin is 70%, your break-even is €17,429/month. Below that, EBIT is negative. The break-even calculator runs this in 30 seconds.
3. How many days of runway do you have if revenue stops tomorrow? Current cash balance divided by daily fixed cost slice. The single most important number in a downturn. Healthy independent shops can quote this within 5 days at any moment.

These three questions are not a test — they are the operational dashboard a healthy owner runs in their head. The owners who score 25-30 on the checklist have these numbers as visible to them as the weather. The owners who score 0-9 cannot answer any of the three without a 30-minute spreadsheet exercise. The gap between those two states is not talent — it is the daily habit of looking at the same numbers in the same place every evening.

How nouz answers 12 of the 30 questions automatically

Most owners who run this checklist for the first time find that 8-15 of their no's are not because they refuse to track the numbers — it is because no system surfaces them in a single place. The numbers exist; they are scattered across a POS, a bank account, a supplier inbox, and the back of an envelope. nouz exists to consolidate the 12 most decision-critical numbers into one screen each evening.

Specifically, after a one-time 7-minute setup (enter fixed costs, VAT rate, card processor rate, products with cost prices), nouz computes and displays these answers automatically every evening from your daily close-out entries:

The remaining 18 questions are not things software can answer for you — they require either business judgement (Part 5: competitor prices, customer acquisition cost) or decisions about discipline (Part 6, Q4: writing down financial decision rules). But removing the friction on the 12 automatable questions typically lifts a first-time checklist score by 6-10 points within the first month of daily use, just from making numbers visible that previously required reconstruction.

Try the live demo to see the close-out flow and the daily EBIT dashboard with pre-loaded data, or use the free daily profit calculator to run today's EBIT manually in your browser. Pricing is one number, monthly, no tiers — built for solo owners, not accountants.

If you scored low on this checklist, the recovery path is not a 12-month transformation project. It is a 90-day visibility build: log every day, read the EBIT line every evening, audit fixed costs once, raise prices on one product, sweep VAT into a separate account. Most owners who do those five things move from operating blind (0-9) to fragile-with-progress (18-22) inside a single quarter. The shop that survives year three is the one whose owner knew by Sunday morning whether Saturday paid for itself — and the checklist above is the map of which numbers you need to know to get there.

Related reads while you are here: the 5-minute profitability diagnostic, the 7 hidden leaks of busy-but-broke shops, EBIT explained in plain English, how to read a P&L line by line. For the once-a-year sit-down, the free annual P&L review template is the longer-form companion. And the supporting calculators: daily profit, break-even, cash runway.

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