A health score for your business, built from numbers you already have

A business can have a great month and be getting sicker. Sales up — because of discounts that gutted margin. Cash up — because you stopped buying stock you will desperately need in October. Any single number, taken alone, can be gamed by accident. Health is never one reading; it is the pattern across several.

The five vital signs

Cash cover. Weeks the business survives at current burn if revenue stopped. It is the blood pressure: the number that decides whether every other problem is a project or an emergency.

Margin trend. Not this month's margin — its direction over two quarters. Slow margin erosion is the most common way a healthy-looking business weakens: nobody decision caused it, so nobody notices.

Stock cover. Weeks of stock at current sell-through. Both directions are symptoms: rising means cash quietly freezing on shelves; falling means gaps coming to your best sellers.

Retention of regulars. Of the customers who bought from you regularly six months ago, how many still do? New-customer counts flatter; the regulars number tells the truth about whether the core is holding.

Forecast bias. The self-awareness reading: does the business systematically over-expect? A firm that always guesses high is always slightly over-bought, over-staffed and over-committed — a chronic low-grade fever.

Read together or not at all

The value is in the combinations. Sales up + margin down + stock cover down = a discount-fuelled sprint that borrows from next quarter. Sales flat + retention strong + bias shrinking = a business quietly getting fitter than its topline shows. One amber is a question; three ambers pointing the same way is a diagnosis.

Kauzio computes exactly this kind of multi-signal read continuously — it is what our cross-signal engine exists for: no single alarm, but three small drifts that corroborate each other into one honest warning. Score it monthly at minimum, on one page, every measure against its own six-month trend. You would not skip your own check-up for a year. The business deserves the same appointment.