How to Read Your Own Numbers
Trends, concentration, quality versus quantity, and the habit of looking early enough to still have options.
What this module is for
Turn a monthly look at your ledger into four specific questions with four specific answers — and one decision.
Work through the sections in order. Each one ends with something to write, and everything you write collects into the worksheet at the foot of the page. Use your own real numbers — an approximate figure you can defend beats a precise one you invented.
Where Aurygine already records a figure, the module points at it rather than asking you to retype it. Where it does not, write it down and close the gap.
Educational content only. Nothing in this track is tax, accounting, legal or investment advice. Use a qualified professional for formal reporting, filings and compliance.
A single month is an anecdote
Almost no useful conclusion can be drawn from one month. Direction over three is worth more than magnitude in one.
- Revenue trend — up, flat or down across the last three to six months, not against your best month.
- EBITDA trend — is the gap between what you make and what you spend closing or widening?
- Acquisition trend per channel — cost per activated customer rising is the earliest warning a channel is tiring.
- Retention trend — of the customers who arrived three months ago, how many are still here?
Write the direction down before you explain it. Founders are excellent at explaining a bad month and unusually slow at noticing a bad quarter.
Concentration is the risk you cannot feel
Dependence feels like success right up until the moment it ends. Measure it while it is still comfortable.
- One client producing most of your revenue is a risk, not a relationship. Know the percentage.
- One channel producing most of your customers is a dependency. It will reprice or change policy eventually.
- One product or offer dominating is not a problem — it is a signal to protect it, deepen it, and understand exactly why it works.
The response to concentration is rarely to abandon what works. It is to know the number, decide what percentage you are willing to carry, and start the second source before you need it.
Where the funnel tells you what is actually broken
Three patterns, three different fixes. Reading the wrong one costs a quarter.
- Many signups, few activated — a messaging or onboarding problem. The promise and the first session do not match.
- High activation, low repeat use — a product-value problem. It worked once, and once was enough.
- High repeat use, low willingness to pay — a pricing or positioning problem. The value is real and the framing is not.
Each pattern is visible from counts you already collect. None of them require a research project — they require looking at the same funnel two months in a row.
The monthly read
Five questions. If you cannot answer one of them, that is the work for this month.
Do not wait five years to find out whether it works. Use small experiments, look at contribution margin per offer or per client, and avoid locking into a model with structural negative EBITDA unless you are investing deliberately, with runway you have counted.
Early profitability is a habit, not an event
It is the habit of knowing the cost of every sale, the cost of every month, and the distance between them — early enough that changing course is still cheap.
The monthly read
Any question you cannot answer is this month's work.
What you concluded
One page you can keep. It saves on this device, and into your company memory when you are signed in.
Take it further
With a company in Aurygine, this worksheet becomes evidence in your Control Tower ledger, tasks on the Workboard, and context Aury reads in CFO mode.
Start your companyEducational content only. Nothing in this track is tax, accounting, legal or investment advice. Use a qualified professional for formal reporting, filings and compliance.
The rest of the track
Four modules that build on each other. Take them in any order; they were written to be read in this one.
- 16 minReading Your Business: Revenue, Profit, and EBITDAThe hierarchy of business numbers, from money invoiced to money kept — and why good revenue can still be a bad business.
- 12 minROI and Payback: Is This Worth It?Two calculations that decide whether a spend was an investment or a donation — and why payback matters more when nobody is funding you.
- 14 minCustomer Acquisition Is Not Just AdsFive kinds of acquisition, only one of which has a billing account — and how to measure any of them the same way.