The paperwork was signed in May. The assets arrived in June. The first fee was billed in October.

An advisory firm's CRM holds relationships: prospects, households, notes, meetings. The fee — a percentage of assets, billed quarterly — is calculated somewhere else.

That separation is sensible, and it means no report inside the CRM can say which source produced revenue, because the revenue is not there.

Joining the CRM's contacts to the billing records on the contact detail brings the two together without either system knowing about the other.

The result is fee revenue by source, which is the number a firm's marketing should be judged on.

Where only new-asset figures are available, the report ranks on those and says so, since assets are what fees are charged on and they arrive a quarter sooner.

Between a signed agreement and money under management sit the account transfers, which take weeks and sometimes arrive only in part.

Then the first fee is billed, often at the end of the following quarter and in arrears.

A report built on signed agreements counts clients whose assets never fully arrived; a report built on billing alone looks a quarter behind every campaign.

Carrying the prospect's first-seen date through lets the report group revenue by when the household arrived, whatever the transfer and billing timetable.

It also shows how much of what was signed actually arrived, per source, which is a useful number of its own.

Advisers serve households: a couple, sometimes a family, often with several accounts under different names.

The person who enquired is frequently not the account holder, and a match that looks only for the enquirer's details misses the household entirely.

Matching on any contact detail in the household, and summing assets and fees at the household level, keeps the client whole.

It also stops one household being counted as two wins when both partners' details appear in the lead file, which in a firm growing through couples' referrals happens more than anyone expects.

A large share of new assets at many firms arrives as retirement plan rollovers, when somebody changes jobs or retires.

Those clients often arrive through different routes from ordinary referrals — an employer relationship, a workshop, a search at a specific moment in life — and they bring larger balances.

Where the firm can mark rollover households, the report splits on it, and the sources feeding rollovers are usually a short and specific list.

Knowing that list lets a firm put its effort where the largest single decisions are made.

It also stops a single large rollover from deciding a source's ranking. Balances vary enormously between households, so the report shows the median beside the total, and a source carried by one exceptional household is visible as exactly that.