Somebody asks to see the numbers — a buyer, a lender, a landlord, a partner. The question is not whether the business is good. It is whether you can show it, and how long that takes.

At some point somebody asks to see the numbers. A buyer, a lender, a landlord considering a renewal, somebody thinking about coming in as a partner. Sometimes it is your own accountant.

⚠️ The question is never whether the business is good. It is whether you can show what it is, in a form somebody outside it can read, and how many weeks that takes.

⚠️ What this page cannot tell you

⛔ What the business is worth, how a sale or investment should be structured, what any of it means for tax, and what you must disclose are questions for your accountant, your solicitor and your adviser.

⛔ This page is about none of that. ⭕ Take advice before you talk to anybody, not after.

⭕ What follows is the operational half: which records exist, in what form, and how long they would take to produce — a question you can answer this week without involving anybody.

Why this is worth doing with nobody asking

Four reasons, and selling is only one of them.

The same list is what you should be running on

⇒ ⭕ Everything a buyer asks for is something you would benefit from having weekly. That is why this exercise is useful even if you never sell anything.

⇒ The Report You Open Every Monday

Preparing under time pressure is where mistakes happen

⚠️ ⭕ Numbers assembled in a fortnight, from memory, to answer somebody waiting are how errors get into a document that people then rely on.

The gaps take months to fix, not days

⭕ You cannot produce two years of something you never recorded. ⚠️ If a record has to exist by next year, it has to start now — this is the whole argument for doing it early.

And a landlord or lender may ask with no warning

⇒ ⭕ A renewal, a facility, an insurance review. ⛔ What you must provide is a question for your adviser — but being asked at short notice is normal.

⇒ The Lease You Have Not Read Since You Signed It

What gets asked for

Five groups. ⛔ This is a general picture, not a checklist for any particular situation — your adviser will tell you what applies to yours.

Trade, broken down and over time

⭕ Not one annual figure. By month, by night, by category — and long enough to show a pattern rather than a moment.

⇒ The Year Has A Shape

Costs, separated into fixed and variable

⚠️ ⭕ Most venues can produce a total and not the split. The split is what tells somebody what happens at a different level of trade, which is the thing they are actually trying to work out.

⇒ The Wage Bill That Only Looks Fixed

Anything that depends on a person rather than the business

⇒ ⭕ Relationships, arrangements, the regulars who come for one member of staff. ⚠️ This is examined closely, because it is the part that may not survive a change of ownership.

⇒ How Many Regulars Do You Actually Have

The agreements the business runs on

⛔ ⚠️ Lease, licence, supplier terms, anything you are committed to. What matters legally here is entirely a question for your solicitor — operationally, the failure is not being able to find them.

⇒ The Licence Conditions Nobody Reads

And what the business actually holds

⭕ Stock, equipment, cash, deposits taken, vouchers sold and not redeemed. ⚠️ The last two are commonly forgotten and are obligations, not assets.

⇒ The Stocktake That Never Balances

What usually cannot be produced

Four gaps, and they are the same four almost everywhere.

Anything guest-level

⚠️ ⭕ How many people came, how often, and what happened to them over time. Most venues have transactions and no guests, which means every retention question is unanswerable.

⇒ The Data You Cannot Take With You

Costs at the level decisions are made

⇒ ⭕ Per shift, per night, per room. ⭕ A monthly total cannot be interrogated, and the first question anybody asks is about a specific night.

Anything that lives in one person's head

⛔ ⚠️ The arrangement with a supplier, why a rule exists, which guests matter. ⭕ If it is undocumented it is not transferable, and that has consequences in this context that it does not have day to day.

And a consistent definition over time

⚠️ ⭕ A figure that meant one thing last year and another this year is worse than not having it, because the trend it appears to show is not real.

⇒ Two Venues, One Owner, and No Comparable Numbers

The test

⭕ Pick one week from eighteen months ago and reconstruct it.

Trade for that week, by night

⇒ ⭕ If this takes more than an hour, that is the finding. Not a criticism — a measurement of how far the records are from usable.

What it cost to run

⚠️ ⭕ Wages, stock consumed, the fixed share. ⭕ Most operators can do the first, sometimes the second, rarely the third.

Who came

⭕ How many people, how many were returning. ⚠️ This is where most attempts stop entirely, and it is the group that takes longest to start recording.

And what you had committed to

⇒ ⭕ Which agreements were live that week. ⛔ Whether any of it still binds you is a question for your solicitor.

What to fix first

⭕ In order of how long it takes to become useful.

One: start recording guests, whatever else you do

⚠️ ⭕ This is the longest lead time on the page. A guest record started today is worth something in a year and worth nothing today, which is exactly why it never gets started.

Two: get costs to the shift level

⇒ ⭕ You almost certainly have the components already, just not next to each other.

⇒ The Cash Room: Reconciliation That Actually Reconciles

Three: write down the definitions

⭕ What counts as a visit, a regular, a covered night. ⚠️ Undefined figures drift, and the drift is invisible until somebody compares two years.

Four: put the agreements in one place

⛔ ⚠️ Copies, dates, and what each one commits you to. ⭕ Ask your adviser what to keep and for how long — operationally, they just need to be findable.

Five: make it a weekly habit, not a project

⇒ The Weekly Number Your Staff Never See

What this changes even if nobody ever asks

Three things, and they are the reason to do it.

You find out what you cannot answer

⭕ Most operators discover two or three questions about their own business they simply cannot answer, and none of them is exotic.

The conversations with your accountant get shorter

⇒ The Numbers Your Accountant Sees First

And decisions stop being arguments

⚠️ ⭕ A disagreement about whether to keep a night open is a disagreement about a number. With the number, it takes five minutes; without it, it takes months and gets decided by whoever is most confident.

What good looks like

The eighteen-month test

Reconstruct one week from eighteen months ago. ⇒ Under an hour means the records work. A day means they do not, and now you know by how much.

The definition test

⚠️ Ask two people what counts as a regular. Different answers mean the figure has been drifting for as long as you have been tracking it.

The person test

Working     — the arrangements are written down and somebody else could run them
Not working — the important ones live in one person's head, including yours

Three to hold

1  The question is never whether the business is good — it is whether you can show it
2  Guest-level records have the longest lead time, so they must start first
3  Everything on the list is what you should be running on anyway

Where the record has to sit

Trade by night, costs at the level decisions are made, guests over time, and the agreements the business runs on — in one place, defined the same way each year, and findable by somebody who is not you. ⛔ Take advice before you show any of it to anybody. Kept there, you can answer in a week what would otherwise take a quarter, and you spend that quarter running the business instead of reconstructing it. Kept nowhere, the first serious question anybody asks about the business is one you have to go and find out the answer to.