A thousand-dollar ticket that was mostly parts is not a thousand-dollar ticket.

Repair groups buy marketing centrally and deliver it into several local markets, each with its own competitors and its own mix of customers.

A channel that fills bays at one location can do nothing at another a few miles away, and a group-wide figure sits between them and describes neither.

Splitting every figure by shop turns one ambiguous number into a set of local decisions, which is how a group actually allocates.

It also shows which locations are carrying a channel's group-wide result, which is usually two or three of them.

Those are the shops where changing the spend changes something.

Two orders with the same total can be mostly labour or mostly parts, and the business keeps very different amounts from each.

Channels do not bring the same mix. A source producing heavy parts jobs can top a sales ranking and sit near the bottom of a profit one.

Where the export carries the cost of the order, the report ranks on the difference, which is the number the owner cares about.

Where it does not, the report ranks on sales and says so, rather than implying a precision the file does not contain.

A customer declines a recommendation today and comes back for it three months later. The second order often looks like a return visit with no marketing behind it.

It was produced by the first visit — and so by whatever brought the customer in the first time.

Summing by customer across a year, rather than judging each order alone, keeps that work attached to the channel that earned it.

It is also a measure of the shop: a channel whose customers come back for deferred work is producing customers who trust the shop, which is worth more than its first-visit figure suggests.

A shop can only sell the hours its technicians have. A channel bringing long, low-margin diagnostic work can fill the week and leave little behind it.

Where the export carries labour hours, the report shows gross profit per labour hour by channel, which is the fairest comparison for a shop at capacity.

For a shop with idle bays the ranking that matters is different, and the report shows both so the owner can choose.

Neither figure is visible in an advertising platform, which sees clicks and calls and never sees the bay.

For a group, the per-shop version of this is the useful one. A location running at capacity should be bought different work from a location with empty bays, and a single group-wide channel budget cannot do that.