Master Dictionary of Business and Strategic Consulting Metrics

A technical working reference to diagnose companies, execute due diligence processes, audit operational efficiency, build executive dashboards, or structure value creation plans.

There is no universal, closed list of all business metrics: each sector develops its own indicators and many companies use different definitions for the same acronym. This dictionary brings together the main metric families, common abbreviations, their formulas, and their uses in decision-making.

The idea is that you can use it to diagnose a business, conduct due diligence, detect inefficiencies, build an executive dashboard, or prepare a business transformation plan. Below are two interactive mind maps: one with connections between metrics and another with the entire dictionary.

General Category Map

Reading by Functional Areas

In addition to the five blocks, the dictionary can be read by company areas:

It also includes investment, valuation, customers, supply chain, projects, innovation, corporate governance, and sector metrics.

Interactive Mind Maps

Both maps can be navigated with your mouse or finger: drag to move, use the scroll wheel or pinch gesture to zoom, and click on a node to expand or collapse it.

Metrics Connection Map

It shows how the main metrics relate to each other: the ROIC tree, formulas that use other metrics, and the chain from the practical case in Section 18. Each arrow indicates the relationship and is explained in the corresponding formula or example in the text.

Complete dictionary map

It brings together all the metrics in the dictionary, grouped by block and by section. It starts collapsed: open a block to see its sections and a section to see its metrics.

1. Finance, Accounting, and Profitability

Allows determining whether the company is growing healthily, generating profits from its core operations, converting those profits into cash, and exceeding its cost of capital.

1.1 Income Statement (P&L) and Margins

1.2 Cost Structure, Budgeting, and Financial Operating Efficiency

1.3 Return on Capital and Value Creation

Complementary metrics for this category

2. Liquidity, Treasury, and Working Capital

A company that is profitable on its income statement can go bankrupt due to a lack of liquidity if its operating cycle absorbs more cash than it generates.

Complementary metrics in this category

3. Debt, Financing, and Capital Structure

Evaluates the level of leverage, insolvency risk, and the combined cost of financing operations.

Complementary metrics in this category

4. Investments, Valuation, and Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A)

Metrics used by Private Equity funds, investment banking, and corporate development teams to allocate capital and buy or sell companies.

Complementary metrics in this category

5. Strategy, Growth, and Market

Metrics to answer strategic management questions: opportunity size, competitive position, growth sources, and risk concentration.

Complementary metrics in this category

6. Sales, Marketing, and Commercial Effectiveness

Evaluates the efficiency of the demand generation engine, sales funnel performance, and pricing capture.

Complementary metrics in this category

7. Customers, Retention, and Subscription Models

Essential metrics for recurring businesses (SaaS, contract-based B2B, telecommunications, memberships) and commerce with frequent repeat purchases.

Complementary metrics in this category

8. Operations, Productivity, and Quality

Evaluates the ability to transform inputs into finished products or services with the lowest possible cost, time, and error rate.

Complementary metrics in this category

9. Procurement, Suppliers, and Supply Chain

Evaluates efficiency in procurement, inventory management, and logistics performance.

Complementary metrics in this category

10. Human Resources, Talent, and Organization

Measures the productivity of human capital, the efficiency of organizational structure, and talent retention.

Complementary metrics in this category

11. Project Management and Enterprise Transformation

Metrics used by project management offices (PMO) and transformation offices (TMO) to monitor schedules, budgets, and actual benefits realization.

Complementary metrics in this category

12. Risk, Internal Audit, and Controls

Combines the quantification of operational and financial risks with monitoring the effectiveness of the internal control system.

A rigorous audit combines quantitative indicators with transaction testing, document inspection, interviews, and control evaluation. Not all risk can be summarized in a single metric.

Complementary metrics in this category

13. Technology, Data, Cybersecurity and Artificial Intelligence

Software engineering metrics (DORA standard), cloud economics (FinOps), data quality, and return on AI implementations.

Complementary metrics in this category

14. Innovation, Product and Development

Evaluates the return on R&D investment, product-market fit, and effectiveness when launching new solutions.

Complementary metrics in this category

15. Corporate Governance, ESG and Sustainability

Environmental, social, and governance indicators required by regulators, institutional investors, and global value chains.

Complementary metrics in this category

16. Specialized Sector Metrics Table

Each industry has a unique operating economy where certain specific metrics explain value creation far better than generic indicators.

17. Cross-Functional Acronyms in Executive Reports and Consulting

Abbreviations of time periods, methodological frameworks, and financial concepts in daily use in board presentations and Corporate Finance reports.

These acronyms are not always metrics themselves: some are analysis methods, management systems, or report types that allow metrics to be interpreted.

17.1 Time and Comparison Conventions

17.2 Management Frameworks, Systems, and Analysis

18. How to Connect Metrics: The Diagnostic Tree (ROIC Tree)

A consulting firm or a CFO does not analyze isolated indicators: they structure them into a Value Driver Tree where each second- or third-line operational metric mathematically explains a top-tier financial metric.

                                       ┌─── Net realized price (ASP, Discounts)
                          ┌── Revenue ─┼─── Volume (Traffic/Leads × Conversion, Retention/NRR)
                          │             └─── Product / channel mix
               ┌── NOPAT ─┤
               │          │             ┌─── COGS (Purchasing PPV, OEE, Scrap, Staff utilization)
               │          └── Costs ────┼─── Commercial variable costs (Logistics, Gateways, Commissions)
┌── ROIC (%) ─┤          │             └─── OPEX (CAC/MER, Labor cost/FTE, IT spend, Rent)
│             │          └── Taxes (Effective tax rate)
│             │
│             │                        ┌─── Accounts Receivable (DSO, Delinquency)
│             │          ┌── ONWC ─────┼─── Inventories (DIO, Stockouts, Obsolescence)
│             └── Cap. ──┤             └─── Accounts Payable (DPO)
│                 Inv.   └── Fixed and Intangible Assets (CAPEX, Capacity utilization)
│
└── WACC (%) ──── Cost of Debt (Kd, Spread, Tax shield) + Cost of Equity (Ke, Risk)

Practical case of cross-diagnosis: The "Value-Destroying Growth" trap

Suppose a company celebrates having grown +25% in Revenue this year, but its bank account is overdrawn and it needs to take out emergency loans. Crossing the dictionary metrics reveals the root cause:

1. Commercial erosion (Section 5 and 6): To achieve the +25% in sales, the sales team overused discounts (Price Realization dropped 8 points) and primarily sold the lower-margin product line (negative Mix Effect). Gross Margin (CM1) dropped from 45% to 36%.
2. Acquisition inefficiency (Section 6 and 7):CAC rose 40% because advertising channels became saturated (MER and POAS fell), while Churn among new customers rose because a lower-quality segment was attracted. CAC Payback went from 9 to 22 months.
3. Working capital absorption (Section 2): In addition to giving discounts, payment terms for customers were relaxed: DSO increased from 45 to 75 days, and due to poor forecasting (high WAPE), DIO rose from 60 to 90 days. The Cash Conversion Cycle (CCC) lengthened by an additional 60 days.
4. Economic value destruction (Section 1 and 3): Operating profit after tax (NOPAT) barely grew, but Invested Capital skyrocketed due to accounts receivable and inventory. ROIC dropped to 7%, falling below the company's WACC (11%).

Executive diagnosis: The company is experiencing toxic growth. Each additional sale requires tying up more cash in working capital and customer acquisition than the operating margin can return. The prescription is not to sell more under current conditions, but to eliminate discounts that yield no return, prune low-turnover SKUs, collect overdue receivables, and adjust commercial spending until ROIC once again exceeds WACC.

Four-step working method

A consulting firm does not typically analyze all metrics at once. It selects the ones that explain the problem and connects them into a diagnostic system.

1. Diagnosis: compare revenue, margins, costs, productivity, cash, and performance against history, budget, and comparable benchmarks.
2. Cause identification: break down variances by price, volume, mix, efficiency, capacity, customers, suppliers, and cost structure.
3. Impact quantification: estimate profit, savings, investment, cash impact, risk, and payback period.
4. Performance management: assign owners, objectives, deadlines, alerts, and tracking mechanisms for each initiative.

Additional example of connecting metrics

A company can increase its revenue by 15% and, at the same time, destroy value. Analysis might reveal that:

• Gross margin has fallen due to discounts and higher material costs.
• CAC has increased faster than customer lifetime value.
• DSO has worsened, absorbing additional cash.
• CAPEX has grown without an equivalent improvement in productive capacity.
• ROIC has fallen below WACC.

The conclusion would not simply be "sales are growing." It would be that growth is consuming capital and may not be creating economic value.

19. Technical Data Sheet Standard for Data Governance (Data Dictionary)

To implement these metrics on a dashboard (in Looker Studio, Power BI, Tableau, or the ERP) and prevent each department from presenting a different number in leadership meetings, each chosen indicator must be documented with these 10 mandatory fields:

Summary version of the sheet

For this dictionary to become an audit system or an executive dashboard, each metric should have a technical data sheet with:

1. Name and acronym: for example, EBITDA Margin.
2. Exact definition: what it includes and what it excludes.
3. Formula: numerator, denominator, units, and period.
4. Data source: ERP, CRM, accounting, payroll, or other systems.
5. Frequency: daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual.
6. Owner: who produces, validates, and explains the indicator.
7. Segmentation: company, business unit, product, region, or customer.
8. Reference: budget, prior period, target, or comparable benchmark.
9. Alert threshold: criterion to investigate a deviation.
10. Corrective action: what decision is made when the indicator deviates.

Important: acronyms may have different definitions across industries and companies. For example, MTTR can refer to mean time to repair or mean time to resolution. As for FISEX, it is not a universally standardized financial classification; it is advisable to validate what it means in the context of the analyzed company.

This dictionary is a broad reference base, not a literally exhaustive catalog of all existing metrics. To turn it into a professional tool, the next step would be to structure it into a master metrics matrix, with categories, standardized formulas, data sources, benchmarks, alerts, and owners, and adapt it to the company's specific sector.