A quote is not an instruction, and an instruction is not a completion.

In property work a prospective client usually asks several firms for a quote, instructs one, and then the transaction either completes or does not.

A report that counts quote requests measures interest. One that counts instructions measures the firm's pricing and response. Only completions measure revenue.

Exporting quote requests alongside billings shows both conversion rates per source: quote to instruction, and instruction to completion.

Sources differ on both, and they usually differ on the first for pricing reasons and on the second for reasons the firm cannot control.

Seeing which is which prevents a firm cutting a source because of a chain of transactions that fell through.

The quote-to-instruction rate is also the one the firm controls. It moves with price, with how quickly the quote goes out and with how it reads, and a source whose enquirers keep choosing somebody else is usually telling the firm something about the quote rather than about the source.

Estate agents, mortgage brokers and past clients send a large share of property work to the firms they trust.

Recorded as one source called referral, they hide the fact that a small number of relationships usually produce most of the completed fees.

Recording who referred each matter lets the report rank referrers on completed fees, not on how many quotes they passed on.

That list is the one a practice's relationship effort should follow, and it also shows referrers whose volume has quietly dropped.

Ranking them on completed fees rather than on quotes matters because some referrers pass on a great many enquiries from clients shopping purely on price. They look generous in a volume count and produce little, and the completion figure is the one that says so politely.

A transaction that falls through after instruction has already consumed work: searches ordered, enquiries raised, documents reviewed.

Whether any of that is billed depends on the firm's terms, and where it is not, an aborted matter is a cost with no revenue.

Abort rates differ by source — a referrer whose clients' chains keep collapsing is costing the firm more than their quote count suggests.

Keeping aborted matters in the file makes that cost visible per source, which a revenue-only report cannot do.

Somebody who bought through the firm often sells through it years later, and may need a will, a lease or a remortgage in between.

A report that looks only at the first matter credits the source for one transaction and misses the relationship it started.

Summing billings by client over a longer window, with the first matter kept apart from later ones, shows which sources produce clients who return.

That is usually the argument for the referral relationships, which produce clients who already trust the firm before they arrive.

It is also the argument for treating completion as the start of something rather than the end. A client who completes happily is the firm's cheapest future instruction, and the report is how a practice finds out which sources produce clients like that.