What should you be dealing with first?
Fourteen questions, most of them one tap, about three minutes. As you answer you'll see what each one rules in and rules out — and at the end, the decisions worth your attention right now, in the order they're costing you.
Free, and no card. The thing to deal with first shows at the end in full — an email is only asked for after that. Answer “I don't know” wherever it's true; that tells us as much as a number would.
Informational only — not audit, attest, legal, tax, or investment advice. This tool describes decisions and the questions behind them; it does not tell you what to decide.
The decisions you are not making are the expensive ones
Most owners do not arrive at a financial problem with the problem already named. They arrive with a feeling: revenue looks fine and the bank balance does not, or a tax bill landed that nobody had reserved for, or a month went badly and it is not obvious which lever caused it. The hard part is rarely the arithmetic on any single decision — it is working out which decision is the one worth an afternoon. This diagnostic asks twelve banded questions, takes about five minutes, and returns up to three decisions ranked by what each is costing while it sits.
The ranking follows three rules. Anything you say is already in front of you goes first, because a twelve-question form has no business telling someone about to sign a lease that their real problem is something else. Then come the decisions with a date attached — a thin cash buffer, an unreserved tax bill, a contractor arrangement that would not survive a reclassification — because those cost nothing until they cost everything. Then the ones that compound: prices that have not moved in years while costs did, spend on acquiring customers that nobody is measuring, invoices aging past thirty days. One-off corrections come last, because they cost the same next quarter as this one.
One decision here carries a dollar range: prices that have not moved, sized from your revenue band against the published rise in the Consumer Price Index since your last increase. The rest are ranked and explicitly not priced, and each says what it would need to be. That is deliberate. A number that looks precise and rests on a guessed margin or a confused denominator is worse than no number, because it gets believed. The arithmetic runs in your browser, and your figures are not kept anywhere unless you sign in and press save. The decision that comes first is free and complete. The rest of the list asks for an email address — that is the whole of it, and it is how we know which of these is worth building more of.
Frequently asked questions
What does the diagnostic actually return?
Up to three decisions you should be making and are not, ranked by what each one costs while it waits. It returns fewer than three when fewer than three clear the bar, and it says so — it never pads the list to fill the page.
Why do most of the results not have a dollar figure on them?
Because twelve banded questions do not close the arithmetic for most decisions. Sizing an unreserved tax bill needs profit, and sizing overdue invoices needs the receivable balance — neither is asked here. Where a number cannot be right, the tool says what it would need instead of printing an estimate that looks precise and is not.
Which answer changes the result most?
How long cash on hand would cover payroll and fixed costs. Under one month, the diagnostic returns a single card, because ranking a pricing decision alongside running out of money in four weeks is noise rather than triage.
What happens if I answer that I do not know?
It is treated as an answer, not a blank, and it is often the finding itself — not knowing your gross margin or your cash buffer is a result worth acting on. What the tool will not do is turn an unanswered question into a zero: leave questions blank and it refuses to run and names the ones it needs.
Do I need an account?
Not for the answer. The decision that comes first renders in full without signing in — the figure, the reason and what to do about it. The rest of the list asks for an email address: free, no password, no card. The arithmetic runs in your browser either way, and your figures are not kept anywhere unless you sign in and press save.