Revenue is a lagging indicator. By the time it drops, the cause is three months old and the students are gone.
These five take about ten minutes to read and every one of them moves before revenue does.
1. Net enrollment change this week
Not total students. The change: how many started, how many stopped.
A school with 400 students that gains 12 and loses 14 looks stable on a headcount report and is quietly shrinking. Track the two numbers separately and always in the same period, or you will average away the signal you needed.
A flat total is the most convincing disguise a decline ever wears.
2. Attendance rate, by class rather than overall
Overall attendance is close to useless — it is dominated by your biggest classes and it moves slowly. Per class, it is the most reliable early warning you have.
A class that drops from 92% to 78% over three weeks is telling you something specific: a teacher problem, a timetable clash with a school exam period, or a group that has stopped enjoying it. All three are fixable in week three and unfixable in week ten, when the withdrawal requests arrive.
3. Money owed, split by age
One total for receivables hides everything. Split it:
- 0–15 days. Normal. This is just the billing cycle.
- 16–45 days. Someone needs to make a phone call.
- Over 45 days. Treat as unlikely to be collected without an awkward conversation, and budget accordingly.
The number that matters is not the total. It is whether the third bucket grew this week. That bucket is where schools discover they have been financing their parents' cash flow for a term.
4. Trial-to-enrollment conversion, and the follow-up gap
Two numbers. What share of trial students enrolled, and how many trials from the last fortnight have had no contact since.
The second one is where the money is. Most schools do not lose trials because the lesson was bad. They lose them because nobody called on Thursday. That gap is invisible in every revenue report and obvious the moment you list it.
5. Teacher load and contract expiry
Hours per teacher this week, next to the date their contract ends.
Two failures live in this number. The first is burnout — the teacher carrying 28 contact hours who is going to resign in the middle of a term. The second is administrative and entirely avoidable: a contract that lapses while the teacher is still teaching, which in most jurisdictions is a problem you cannot fix retroactively.
Making them arrive without being asked
The reason most owners do not track these is not disagreement. It is that assembling them takes an hour, and an hour every Monday does not survive a busy month.
Any of these you have to build will eventually stop being built. Whatever system you run, the test is whether these five appear without anyone assembling them. If they do not, they will be reviewed enthusiastically for three weeks and then never again.