A firm-wide cost per client describes none of your practice groups.

A volume conveyancing group and a commercial litigation group differ in matter value, cycle length, close rate and write-off by an order of magnitude on every axis.

A firm-wide cost per client is the average of those, which describes no group and cannot justify moving a pound from one to another.

Splitting the report by group turns it into a set of decisions a managing partner can actually make: this source for property, that one for family, neither for commercial.

It also stops one group's large matters flattering a channel that only ever produced work for a different group.

Where the export carries the group, this is automatic; where it does not, getting it added is worth more than anything else on this page.

Time recorded and not billed, and amounts billed and not collected, vary enormously between practice areas and between the kinds of client a source produces.

Ranking on billed value therefore rewards the group and the channel that bills most optimistically rather than the one that collects most.

Using collections consistently removes that, and where both figures exist the gap per source is worth measuring once.

The channels that show the widest gap are usually the price-led ones, which is a finding that survives across the whole catalogue.

Whichever basis you choose, the report states it, because a number whose basis is unstated cannot be argued with.

Conveyancing completes in weeks. A commercial dispute runs for years. Measured in one window, one of them is always being misrepresented.

Setting the window per group, stated in the report, is legitimate and necessary — what is not legitimate is one window chosen to make a favoured channel look good.

Grouping revenue by when the enquiry arrived rather than when it was billed makes the groups comparable with their own history, which is the comparison that matters.

The report also produces the cycle length per group and source, which tells the firm how far ahead of a quiet quarter it needs to be spending.

For a firm planning fee-earner capacity, that number has a use beyond marketing.

Estate agents refer conveyancing. Accountants refer commercial. Past clients refer family work. These are entirely different relationships that a single 'referral' label collapses into one line.

Recording who referred, not merely that it was a referral, turns the largest source in most firms into something that can be managed rather than merely appreciated.

Ranked by group on collected fees, it usually shows a small number of relationships producing a large share of the work.

That is a partner-level finding, and it changes where the firm's relationship effort goes far more than any advertising decision would. It also shows which relationships have quietly stopped producing, which is the half nobody notices until a year has gone by.