Our leadership team prefers tracking ratios and percentages on our Scorecard, like gross margin percentage or percentage of tickets closed, but these smooth over raw operational swings. Should our 5 to 15 Scorecard metrics be raw numbers or calculated percentages?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Percentages and ratios are designed to summarize and smooth data, which is useful on a monthly financial statement but dangerous on a weekly Scorecard. The purpose of a Scorecard is to expose operational friction early, not hide it behind mathematical smoothing.

Ratios mask volume and severity. For example, if your target is closing ninety percent of support tickets within twenty-four hours, that looks green whether you closed nine out of ten tickets or ninety out of one hundred. But the ten unresolved tickets in the second scenario represent ten angry customers who may be enterprise accounts.

Follow these guidelines when structuring your 5 to 15 Scorecard metrics:
- Use absolute raw counts whenever tracking human activity or volume: Track qualified leads booked, proposals delivered, invoices issued past thirty days, or projects kicked off. Raw counts expose capacity limits and momentum shifts immediately.
- If you must track a ratio, track the absolute numerator and denominator as separate numbers: Instead of tracking billable utilization percentage, track total billable hours delivered against total target delivery hours. This reveals whether a missed utilization goal was caused by a drop in client work or an unbudgeted increase in bench overhead.
- Use raw dollars for liquidity and aging: Track cash balance, accounts receivable past forty-five days, and billable work in progress in raw dollar amounts.

Raw numbers trigger emotional clarity. A team will debate whether an eighty-nine percent SLA is close enough to green, but nobody argues when forty client tickets sit unresolved on Friday afternoon.