Six numbers that tell you how the yard is doing

Ask most operators how business is and you get an accurate answer — busy, quiet, or worrying. The trade develops a good feel for it, and that feel is usually right about direction.

What it is not good at is cause. Knowing that last month was down does not tell you whether you delivered fewer skips, delivered the same number for less money, or delivered more and failed to invoice some of them. Those three have completely different responses, and by the time the accounts arrive the month is long gone.

Six numbers cover it. None require a spreadsheet exercise if the underlying work is being recorded properly — which is the real point of the list.

1. Skips on hire, right now

How many containers are out at this moment, against how many you own.

This is the closest thing skip hire has to a live pulse. It tells you whether you can accept tomorrow's order, whether you are about to be short of 8-yarders, and whether that quote for four more containers is genuinely needed or just a response to one bad week.

Most yards discover, on first measuring it, that utilisation is lower than they assumed and that the shortage they keep hitting is a distribution problem rather than a fleet size problem — the skips exist, they are just sitting on driveways.

2. Average hire duration

How long a skip is out, from delivery to collection, against the hire period you sell.

If you sell a fortnight and average nineteen days, every container in your fleet is doing about a quarter less work than your pricing assumes. That gap is the single most common hidden constraint in a skip hire business, and it shows up as needing more skips.

It also has a direct commercial reading: those extra days are either revenue you should be charging for or capacity you are giving away. Usually both, in proportions that nobody has measured.

3. Overdue collections

The count of hires past their end date, and how far past.

Related to the number above, but sharper, because it is actionable today. Each line is a container earning nothing and a customer who may be surprised by an extended hire charge if you leave it much longer.

A yard that reviews this list weekly and works the worst offenders into the run recovers capacity without spending anything. A yard that does not review it discovers the six-week-old skip by accident.

Nearly every yard that thinks it needs more skips is actually running a collections list it has never looked at.

4. Lifts per vehicle per day

Total movements — deliveries, collections, exchanges — divided by vehicle days worked.

This is the productivity number, and it is the one that responds to better sequencing. Watch the trend rather than the absolute figure: patch density, tip distance and job mix vary so much between operators that comparing yourself to someone else's number tells you nothing.

Watch it by vehicle and by day of week, too. A vehicle consistently below the others is either working the awkward half of the patch or has a problem worth understanding, and Monday being different from Thursday tells you something about how work is being spread.

5. Average revenue per lift

Total invoiced, divided by movements.

The number that catches the leaks. If lifts are flat and revenue per lift is drifting down, you are not losing customers — you are losing charges. Zone pricing applied loosely, surcharges not applied, extended hire not billed, exchanges billed as single lifts.

Track it monthly. It moves slowly and it moves for reasons you can find, which makes it the most diagnostic number on this list.

6. Days from completion to payment

Not just debtor days — split it in two. Days from job completion to invoice raised, then days from invoice to cash.

The split matters because the two halves have completely different fixes. The first is entirely yours: it is a process problem, it is usually several days long, and it can be closed to one without asking anybody's permission. The second is credit control.

Most operators assume their cash problem is customers paying late. Measure the split and a surprising share of it turns out to be invoices leaving the building slowly.

What to do with them

Look at all six once a month and two of them weekly: overdue collections, because it is actionable now, and skips on hire, because it governs what you can promise.

Resist adding to the list. Every extra measure dilutes attention, and a dashboard nobody reads is worse than three numbers somebody acts on. The test for any addition is whether you would do something differently depending on the answer. If not, it is decoration.

And be wary of comparing your figures with another operator's. Patch density, mix of trade and household work, tip distance and whether you run your own transfer station move these numbers so much that cross-yard comparison is close to meaningless. Your figure last quarter is the only benchmark worth having.

Start with two

If this reads as more than you want to take on, start with overdue collections and revenue per lift. The first gives you capacity back within a fortnight. The second tells you whether the money you thought you were earning is arriving.

Everything else can wait until those two are habits.

SkipHub reports these from the work itself — no exports, no spreadsheet. If you want to see it against your own operation, the demo is half an hour with your skip sizes and a real address, and the features pages cover what sits behind the numbers.