The Weekly Accounting Glossary is a collection of terms used in 📝Weekly Accounting, John's practice of reading a business's numbers every week. It gives operators and bookkeepers a shared vocabulary for instrumenting, forecasting, and reviewing a company weekly.
Glossary
A
- 📝App Stack — the set of applications used to run a business, drawn as the map a company's systems are built on.
B
- 📝Balance Sheet Clean Up — preparing a company's books for Weekly Accounting by simplifying accounts and fixing entries at their source so the books can be kept current every week.
- 📝BigQuery — Google Cloud's serverless data warehouse, where the CFO System gathers data from every business application to feed weekly metrics and the forecast.
- 📝Boundary Conditions — the range of financial limits a board agrees on with a CEO before setting a budget, such as target revenue growth and cash runway.
C
- 📝CFO System — an integrated set of processes and tools that collects business data and transforms it into actionable metrics to drive better, more reliable results.
- 📝ChangeFactor - Limiter Equation — an IFM formula that improves a metric a little each period until it reaches a goal.
- 📝Configure don't code — the build principle of assembling a company's systems by configuring existing software rather than writing custom code.
- 📝Cross portfolio sampling frequency — the number of datapoints per period of time that a portfolio owner receives about the companies in its portfolio.
D
- 📝DBSrc — the Database Source tab of an IFM, holding transaction detail summarized by metric and time unit.
- 📝Double Click — to dig one level deeper into the data, from a summarized number to the accounts or transactions behind it.
E
- 📝eCommerce Vital Signs — the minimal weekly metrics that forecast an eCommerce business: ad spend, web traffic, conversion rate, average order value, repeat purchase rate, and product and gross margin.
- 📝Effortless Downloaded Transaction Entry — recording bank-feed transaction downloads by building on QuickBooks Rules, so every correction trains the system.
- 📝Exceptions Accounting — monitoring the general ledger and bank connections for flagged anomalies, like new vendors, unnamed transactions, or unreconciled balances, so attention goes where something changed.
F
- 📝Financial Organization Responsibility Matrix — FORM, a framework that breaks a finance and accounting department into skill sets and functions rather than job titles.
- 📝Fundamental Units — tasks small enough to explain in a short video, managed as a queue of repeatable units of work.
G
- 📝GL Accounting Integrity Report (GLAIR) — the report that flags general ledger accounts with old unreconciled, old uncleared, or unnamed transactions for weekly review.
I
- 📝Instrument — to build a dashboard of metrics that works like the instruments on an airplane, so an operator can see what is happening at each step of a process.
- 📝Instrumentation Pyramid — a three-level hierarchy of metrics, from the Vital Signs that forecast the business at the top down to detailed operating and transaction metrics, repeated for each department.
- 📝Integrated Financial Model (IFM) — a model that collects data from every system that runs a business to forecast it weekly and align day-to-day activity with long-term goals.
L
- 📝Level 1 Metrics — another name for Vital Signs, the minimal set of metrics needed to forecast the business, such as churn rate.
- 📝Level 2 Marketing Metrics — the channel-by-channel breakdown of marketing performance on the Instrumentation Pyramid, among the most complex metrics to collect and instrument.
- 📝Level 3 Metrics — the base of the Instrumentation Pyramid, measuring a business's basic integrity: mutual trust among its people and customers who rarely return products and buy again.
M
- 📝Metrics Maturity Matrix — an assessment that rates a company's processes, systems, and data flows as Troubled, Functional, Integrated, or World Class so teams can set improvement goals.
- 📝Monday Morning Metrics (MMM) — a weekly report that integrates data from every business system into the key metrics of the revenue engine and presents them to the team each Monday.
- 📝Month End Close — the traditional monthly process of invoicing customers and performing 📝Accrual Accounting, which Weekly Accounting Practices replace with a weekly cadence.
- 📝Monthly Manual — a process performed by a person once per month; the opposite of Automated Transactional.
N
- 📝New Vendor Approval Process — the workflow triggered by a payment to a new vendor that collects W-9 information and the client's confirmation of the vendor.
P
- 📝The Process — the CFO System's weekly feedback loop: commit to the process, build a model on the Vital Signs, do the work, let the data lead, and improve every week, applied like a fractal down the organization.
R
- 📝Roll-Forward — the recognition that a starting balance plus or minus the period's changes equals the ending balance, the basis of a balance sheet forecast.
S
- 📝Sampling Frequency — the rate at which measurements of a signal are taken, where a higher rate reconstructs the original signal more faithfully.
- 📝Signal and Noise — the principle that every business data set is part signal and part noise, so reading metrics means separating what predicts the business from what merely moves.
- 📝Summary IFM — a business model in a Google Sheet capturing the key metrics, revenue, and expenses of a business or revenue stream.
- 📝Systems Diagram — a drawing of how all the systems a rapidly growing company uses connect, the map a business is instrumented against.
T
- 📝Too much of the wrong detail — accounting detail that is technically correct but immaterial and operationally irrelevant, adding weekly work without improving decisions.
- 📝Transaction Engine — the transactional core that sits at the center of every business process.
V
- 📝Vital Signs — the minimal set of metrics needed to forecast the business, read like a doctor reads blood pressure and temperature.
W
- 📝Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly Charts (WMQ) — charts that show each key business metric at weekly, monthly, and quarterly sampling frequencies so a team can read this week's signal against the longer trend.
- 📝Weekly Accounting Full Implementation — the complete form of Weekly Accounting, which eliminates the monthly close in favor of weekly financials and quarterly roll-ups.
- 📝Weekly Accounting Practices — the weekly replacement for the monthly close: the Weekly Bookkeeping Checklist, a 13-week cash forecast, and weekly key metrics reporting.
- 📝Weekly Bookkeeping Checklist — five weekly bookkeeping steps, from accepting downloaded bank transactions and reconciling balances to updating the 13-week cash forecast.
- 📝Weekly Philosophy — the belief that if you're not managing your business weekly, you're managing it weakly, because a team that understands its metrics weekly improves a process fastest.
Z
- 📝Z Axis Labeling — tagging transactional data with end-of-week, end-of-month, and similar time labels, treating time as the Z axis as in digital signal processing.
- 📝ZAAP — short for Z Accepted Accounting Principles, the accounting principles 📝BrightZen Systems considers reasonable for startups.