If you had a limited access to your financial information but could choose what data sets you receive daily, what are the numbers you would pick?  We would like to proffer the following statistics are all that you need to manage a golf course:

1)  Rounds
2)  Total annual expenses
3)  REVPATT (revenue per available tee time by green fees, cart, merchandise, food and beverage)
4)  Course utilization as a percentage of capacity.
5)  Customer spending segmented by quartile summarizing aggregate spending and dollars per visit.
6)  Customers acquired and defectors.
7)  Numbers of e-mail addresses acquired.
8)  Full-time and part-time workers by department.
9) Maintenance budget.

From the first three numbers you could ascertain your profitability.  From course utilization, you could ascertain the ability to increase rounds through dynamic yield management.  Customer spending, acquired and defectors you could target through email to drive rounds.   Employees and maintenance would give you benchmarks for controlling costs?

Sometimes, I wonder if it searching for the details of an operation, we miss the big picture?