Flagship commission
Weekly trading dashboard
A one-page Monday view and Friday narrative for ops directors running several UK shops, built from till and labour extracts you already produce.
From £4,800 for the initial commission (up to twelve sites)
Most multi-site retailers already have the numbers. They live in a Monday email, a labour file, and a conversation that starts “the North is down but the weather was grim.” The weekly trading dashboard is the practice of pinning those pieces to one page the board will actually finish.
Utilitycraftline does not sell a product you log into. We commission a view: which figures belong on Monday, which comments belong on Friday, and which shop-level lines should stay off the estate page so a refit in one unit does not drown eight others.
The work starts with how you trade. A jeweller with three concessions inside department stores does not share a calendar with a garden-centre group that lives on bank-holiday weekends. We take the 4-4-5 period, the calendar month, or the house week you already close, and we refuse to “tidy” it into a generic month that your store managers do not recognise.
Like-for-like is treated as a definition, not a slogan. If you opened a retail-park unit in week 18, or closed a high-street shop for a roof, that unit is marked on the tree so the estate total does not pretend otherwise. Conversion is counted from the door counter you actually have, not from a hoped-for one. Where a shop has no reliable traffic count, we leave conversion off that site rather than borrow a neighbour’s rate.
Labour enters as hours and wage cost against sales, with overtime and training hours visible so a quiet Tuesday is not praised for a wage percentage that came from sending people home. Waste and shrink sit on the Friday pack with a short cause note — delivery window, fridge failure, till error — instead of a single estate percentage that cannot be acted on.
Delivery is deliberately plain. The Monday page is an A4 PDF. The working file is the spreadsheet your finance partner already emails. If a later steward is needed, that is a separate arrangement: we produce the week, you still own the meeting.
Who it is for
Operations directors, finance partners, and regional managers of multi-site high-street, retail-park, and concession businesses in the United Kingdom, typically between four and forty shops.
What you leave with
A stable KPI tree the board recognises from week to week, with like-for-like sales, conversion, average transaction, wage percentage, waste, shrink, and late-open minutes in one place, plus a short written reading of what moved.
Scope
Discovery on the trading calendar you actually use (including 4-4-5 where that is the house method), mapping of extract files, agreement of definitions, a three-week shadow period, then a live Monday page and Friday pack.
Included
- Agreed definitions for like-for-like, conversion, and wage percentage, written down so a new area manager can read them
- Monday one-page flash for the estate and a ranked site list
- Friday pack with exceptions, weather or event notes, and a half-page narrative
- Shadow comparison against the previous method for three trading weeks
- A short briefing for the ops director on how to walk the page in a call
Not included
- EPOS installation, till hardware, or staff rostering software
- Statutory accounts or VAT returns
- Mystery shopping or photographic store audits
- Ongoing Monday production unless a stewardship arrangement is agreed
How the work runs
Extract walk
We sit with whoever currently compiles the week — often a finance assistant — and list every column that already exists, including the awkward ones.
KPI tree
You choose no more than nine estate-level figures. Everything else lives on a site annex so the board page stays readable at A4.
Shadow weeks
Both methods run in parallel. Disagreements are logged (refit dates, concession rents, click-and-collect double counts) and settled in writing.
Handover
The Friday pack template, the definition sheet, and a recorded walkthrough of one live week remain with your team.
Time and place
Three to five weeks to first live Monday, then optional monthly stewardship.
Print-ready PDF and a workbook in the spreadsheet the finance team already opens. Work is prepared from Eshott with visits to your head office or a flagship shop as needed.
Who prepares it
Prepared by Utilitycraftline’s trading editors in Eshott, with one named contact through the shadow weeks.
What we need from you
Thirteen weeks of weekly till summaries, labour hours by site, known closures and refits, and a list of events that distort a week (weather, local festivals, landlord works).
Limits we will not cross
We do not replace your EPOS supplier or host a login product. Figures remain yours. If extracts arrive late on a Monday, the flash waits — we will not invent a number to keep a timetable.
Next step
Send a sample week (redacted if you prefer) via the enquiry form. We reply with whether the extracts are enough to start, or what is still missing.