What Should a Plumbing Company Track Every Day?
Scoreboardz was built by a practicing attorney to run his own firm before it was a product. The grid below is the same one — labeled for a plumbing company.
The same thing every business tracks: four inputs and nine outputs. The inputs are cold outreach, warm outreach, content, and ad spend — the four ways any business creates attention. The outputs run leads, connected, qualified, booked, showed, won, follow up, lost, revenue. A plumbing company doesn't need its own metrics. It needs the same grid, filled in with what a plumbing company actually does.
Search for KPIs for plumbers and you'll get a different list from every source — some with forty metrics, most with a dozen nobody could count daily. All of them are inventing structure that already exists.
Every business generates attention in four ways. Everyone who shows up then moves through the same stages on the way to paying you, or falls out along the way. That's the whole model, and it doesn't change with the trade.
Why today's ticket count is the wrong daily number
Most shops watch how many calls got run today. That is throughput on work already booked, and it looks fine right up until it doesn't. It also treats every job as the same job — a drain clear and a repipe count as one apiece, which hides the only question that actually matters about a month's work.
By the time the outcome number moves, the fix is weeks out. Whatever you change today shows up in Won in a few weeks and in Revenue after that. That delay is exactly why the daily number has to be an input.
The four inputs
These are the reps. You control them directly, you can change them this afternoon, and they're the only part of the board that responds to effort on the same day you apply it.
Reaching people who don't know you yet.
Reaching people who already do — past customers, people who didn't buy the first time, anyone you've talked to before.
Anything you publish that keeps working while you're on a job.
Dollars in. The one input measured in money rather than reps, which is why it belongs beside the other three — so you can see whether you're buying what you could have generated.
What goes in each column is your call, and it's the part worth thinking through carefully — the mix that produces the work you actually want is different for every business. The board doesn't decide it for you. It just makes it impossible to pretend you did the reps when you didn't.
The nine outputs
These are results. You don't do them; they happen to you, as a consequence of the inputs. Each is a stage, and the gap between any two is a diagnosis.
Someone raised a hand.
You actually reached them, human to human.
Real job, in your area, and they can pay for it.
On the schedule with a date.
Tech on site.
Work approved.
Estimate out, no decision yet.
Went elsewhere, or declined the work.
Money actually collected.
The point isn't the numbers. It's that you can't avoid them.
Everyone already knows what they should be doing. That's rarely the problem. The problem is that the week fills up with whatever is loudest, the reps get pushed to tomorrow, and nobody notices until the month is over.
"I need something to look at and keep it top of mind, as I can let the week slip by without getting everything done that I should."
— a Scoreboardz user, describing why he signed upThat's what the board is for. It sits on top of whatever you're working in — not a dashboard you log into twice and abandon, but a number you can't help seeing on the days you'd rather not. When a team shares it, the same thing happens out loud: everyone can see who put in the reps and who didn't, without anyone having to ask.
Accountability is the whole mechanism. The reps produce the work, and the reps you choose determine which work — because the jobs you want and the jobs that happen to call you are not the same list.
Reading the board
Revenue is one number, so it can only say up or down. Thirteen numbers tell you where.
Nothing else is broken. The reps stopped. The fix isn't strategy.
They're coming in and nobody's reaching them.
No-shows and cancellations, not a closing problem.
Something at the point of decision isn't landing. Presentation or price.
Same amount of work, worth less. The mix changed, and that's the number most businesses never see.
Without the stages you're guessing, and the guess almost always defaults to spending more on ads — the right answer in exactly one of those cases.
Where the numbers come from
You enter three numbers. Cold, Warm, and Content are manual, because they're your reps — nobody but you knows whether you actually did them, and no system can infer it. Ads pulls in from the ad platforms on its own.
The entire output side is connected. Your CRM feeds the funnel — Leads through Lost — and your payment system feeds Revenue. The conversion rate between every stage calculates itself. You never type an outcome; you only type the work.
Common questions
Do plumbers need industry-specific KPIs?
No, and the custom sets mostly produce numbers nobody can compare to anything. Every business generates attention four ways and moves people through the same nine stages. What changes is what fills each row.
We're too busy answering the phone to log anything.
Three numbers at the end of the day. If the shop is too busy to enter three numbers, that is worth knowing too — it usually means every hour is going to whatever rang loudest, and nothing is going to the work you would rather be doing.
How is this different from my CRM?
It doesn't replace it — it connects to it. Your CRM already knows who came in and what happened to them; it just won't tell you at a glance whether this month is on pace, and it will never tell you whether you made the calls.
Does this work for a one-truck shop?
It matters more. When the same person sells, runs the work, and does the billing, the reps are the first thing dropped on a busy day — and the absence shows up weeks later. A visible daily count makes that tradeoff obvious while you can still correct it.
Put your business on the board
Same four inputs, same nine outputs, labeled for your business — on screen where you and your team can't miss them.