Some matters bill well and consume a fortnight nobody charged for.

Most firms can tell you what a matter billed. A firm capturing time automatically can also tell you what it consumed, without relying on anybody remembering to write it down.

Put a lead source beside that and the question changes from which channel produces revenue to which channel produces work worth doing.

The two rankings differ, sometimes sharply: a source producing high-value matters that each consume triple the hours can be the least profitable in the firm.

Nothing else in this catalogue can support that comparison reliably, because in most systems the time data is too incomplete to trust.

Where the recorded time is exported, the report gives revenue per recorded hour by source, which is as close to a profitability ranking as a marketing report gets.

A great deal of small-firm work is fixed fee — conveyancing, wills, straightforward applications — where the price is set and the effort is not.

On a revenue-only view every fixed-fee matter from every source looks identical, which conceals the entire question.

With recorded time, the sources separate immediately into the ones sending clean matters and the ones sending complicated clients at the same price.

That is usually the single most useful output for a firm doing volume fixed-fee work, and it is invisible in any platform report.

It also tells you where a price increase is justified, which is a commercial decision the marketing report can actually inform.

Intake time is real: somebody takes the call, opens a file, assesses whether the firm can act, and frequently concludes it cannot.

A source producing a stream of enquiries outside the firm's practice areas has a genuine cost that never appears in a cost-per-client figure.

Keeping declined enquiries in the lead file makes that cost visible against the revenue the source did produce.

For a small firm where the person doing intake is also fee-earning, that cost is measured in billable hours rather than in admin time.

This is the reason a cheap lead source can be the most expensive thing a small firm buys.

Existing clients, other firms and local professionals produce most of the work in most small practices, and none of it arrives with an invoice attached.

That absence makes every paid channel look like a larger share of the firm than it is, and it hides the question of what actually causes referrals.

Recording the referral source at intake puts them into the same comparison on the same collected money.

The follow-on finding is usually the valuable one: which paid channels produce clients who go on to refer others, which makes those channels worth more than their own billings suggest.