A Report Your Accountant Would Accept

The standard that applies

An accountant reading a set of figures asks three things: what exactly is being counted, is it counted the same way as last time, and what is not included.

Most marketing reports fail all three.

They present a number without saying what it counts, change definitions between periods, and omit the parts that were not measured.

Applying the same standard to a marketing report produces something considerably more useful and considerably shorter.

The five numbers

• Enquiries, total, from all sources including phone.
• Enquiries by source, as reported by the people themselves.
• Jobs won from those enquiries.
• Sessions, as context rather than as a headline.
• Spend, on anything that produced any of it.

Those five answer whether the business is getting work, where from, whether it converts, and what it cost.

Everything else on a standard analytics dashboard is a supporting detail for one of those, and belongs in the investigation rather than the report.

Stating the definitions

The part that makes it trustworthy, and it only has to be written once.

What counts as an enquiry: a phone call about work, a form submission, an email. Not a supplier call, not somebody asking for directions.

How source is determined: by asking, recorded at the time.

What a job won means, and at what point it is counted: quoted and accepted, or completed, or invoiced.

Those definitions go at the bottom of the report and stay identical, because a figure whose definition drifts is not a series.

What is not included

The section most reports omit and the one an accountant would insist on.

Phone calls where nobody asked how they found you. Enquiries that arrived while somebody was on holiday and were not recorded. Anything from a source not being tracked.

Stating those plainly does two things: it prevents the figures being read as more precise than they are, and it identifies what to improve in the recording.

A report saying that roughly one enquiry in five has no recorded source is more useful than one silently attributing them all.

A worked example

A business receiving a monthly report of fourteen charts from a supplier.

Nobody read it. The owner could not have said what any of the figures meant, and no decision had ever been made from it.

They replaced it with a single page: the five numbers, the same five each month, a paragraph on what changed, and definitions at the bottom.

It took a fraction of the time to produce and was read every month.

Within a quarter it produced two actual decisions: stopping one advertising spend that had produced nothing measurable, and adding a second service page after the source data showed where enquiries came from.

Neither decision had been possible from fourteen charts, because nothing in them connected to money.

What changed and what you did

Two short paragraphs that turn numbers into a record.

What changed: enquiries up, one source down, nothing else notable. Two sentences.

What you did about it, or decided not to: added a page, cancelled a listing, left it alone pending another month.

That second paragraph is what makes the report useful a year later, because it explains the numbers rather than only recording them.

Without it, a chart showing a rise in March is uninterpretable by anybody, including whoever produced it.

The counter-case

Where a fuller report is warranted.

A business spending substantially on advertising, where the detail behind the spend genuinely affects decisions week to week.

An online shop, where the funnel has several measurable stages and each is worth watching separately.

And anywhere somebody is being paid to manage this and needs to demonstrate what they did, provided the detail supports the summary rather than replacing it.

Even then, the five numbers belong on the front page and the detail behind them, because the person deciding rarely reads past the first page.

What to leave out

Worth naming, because the temptation is always to add.

Bounce rate, which needs a paragraph of explanation to mean anything and produces wrong conclusions without one.

Time on page, which is unreliable enough that including it invites decisions based on an artefact.

Rankings for individual search terms, which move constantly, differ by location and device, and correlate poorly with enquiries.

Social followers, unless something measurable comes from them.

And any figure nobody would act on differently at ten percent higher or lower, which is the general test.

If a number could double and nothing about the business would change, it is not a management figure and it belongs in the working detail rather than the report.

How often

Monthly is the usual answer and quarterly is frequently better for a small business.

Monthly figures on small numbers move for reasons that are not real, and a monthly report invites reaction to noise.

Quarterly gives enough data for a change to mean something, and it is often enough to catch anything genuinely wrong.

The exception is the breakage check, which should be more frequent and is not a report: a glance at whether traffic and enquiries are roughly normal, once a week, taking a minute.

Those two together, a weekly glance and a quarterly report, cover what a small business actually needs.

Who it is for

Worth deciding, because it changes what belongs in it.

If it is for the owner, it should be short and end with a decision or an explicit decision not to act.

If it is for a supplier to demonstrate their work, it needs the same five numbers plus what they did and what it cost, and the owner still only reads the first page.

If it is for a lender, a partner or anybody assessing the business, the definitions and exclusions matter more than the figures.

What does not work is a report written for nobody in particular, which is what most marketing reports are, and which is why they go unread.

Producing it

1. Take the five numbers from the enquiry record and analytics.
2. Write two sentences on what changed.
3. Write two sentences on what you did.
4. Keep the definitions identical at the bottom.
5. State what is not included.
6. Keep every one, so the series exists.

That is twenty minutes a quarter, and after two years it becomes the single most useful document the business has about where its work actually comes from.

The record it draws on is covered in counting enquiries instead of visits.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.