They say
“Rocket Matter already reports revenue by matter.”
We say
It does, and it has no record of the advert or the referral that produced the enquiry, because that happened before the matter existed.
For Rocket Matter
You billed it. Whether you collected it depends on who sent the client.
Export collections from Rocket Matter, upload the leads behind them, and rank marketing on money received rather than hours recorded.
No API key Nothing to install in Rocket MatterNothing to install No card requiredNo card
CloseRev reads a Rocket Matter export of collections — the client's phone or email, the amount received and the date — and matches it against the calls, forms and referrals that produced the enquiry. For an hourly firm the distance between a signed client, a billed hour and a collected dollar is wide and varies by where the client came from. Collections with no traceable lead are reported as Direct / Unknown.
Last checked against Rocket Matter's own documentation on September 24, 2026.
The gap
Cost per signed client says one thing. The trust ledger and the ageing report say another, and nobody joins them up.
Rocket Matter sees
What was sold, to whom, and for how much.
no shared row
Your ad account sees
The click, the keyword, the call, and what each one cost.
The file
What the export needs in it.
Three things carry the match: who, how much, and when. Anything else is optional and only changes how the report can be sliced.
- Needed
Client phone or email
On the contact record from intake. Whichever detail the intake form captured is the key.
- Needed
Amount collected
Payments received, not hours billed and not work in progress. The gap between them is the point of this page.
- Needed
Payment date
When the money was received. Keep the matter open date too, so the report can group by when the client arrived.
- Optional
Practice area
Family, employment, estate, business. Realisation and collection rates differ sharply between them.
Step by step
Getting the file out of Rocket Matter.
Written for somebody with Rocket Matter open in the next tab. Report names vary by edition, so each step says what to look for.
-
Export collections
One row per payment with a client contact detail, the amount and the date received.
-
Do not use billed hours
Billed is an intention. A firm with excellent billing and poor collection looks identical to a healthy one until the money side is used.
-
Take at least a year
Matters run for months and payment plans run for longer. A quarter measures the retainer and nothing else.
-
Export your lead sources
Call tracking, paid search, directory listings, referral sources and any content or newsletter that produces enquiries.
-
Upload both
The join runs on the phone and the email, normalised, with the matter open date carried through.
What comes back
The page Rocket Matter cannot show you.
Revenue by channel, the count of sales behind each figure, and an honest bucket for the ones nobody could trace. Sample figures, from the worked example on the Law Firms page — not from a Rocket Matter account.
Traced to a channel$396,00066% of $600,000
Sales matched27 of 41high confidence only
Average sale$14,600per paid sale
| Channel | Share | Sales | Revenue |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Ads | 18 | $312,000 | |
| Meta Ads | 6 | $54,000 | |
| Email marketing | 3 | $30,000 | |
| Direct / Unknown | 14 | $204,000 |
Unmatched sales stay in Direct / Unknown. They are never spread across the paid channels to make the total look better.
The argument
What changes when the matter and the ad share a row.
Collection rate is a property of the client, and clients arrive from channels
Two matters with identical billings can end very differently: one pays on time, the other pays slowly, partially or not at all.
That difference is not random. It tracks how the client found the firm — price-shopping from a directory, referred by an existing client, or arriving from an advert promising a low initial fee.
Matching collections rather than billings back to the source measures the firm's actual outcome, and sources routinely reorder between the two views.
It is the single most useful thing an hourly firm can do with attribution, because writing off a bad debt is the most expensive way to discover a channel is poor.
The retainer is not the matter and neither is the signed client
A modest initial retainer can precede a matter worth many multiples of it, or it can be the entire relationship.
Cost per signed client treats those as the same event, which is why the metric survives despite being useless for deciding a budget.
Summing collections by client over a year gives the number the decision actually needs, and the report keeps the first payment separate from later ones so the shape of the relationship is visible.
For firms on payment plans this also prevents a single long-running matter being read as many small wins spread across whatever was advertised each month.
Practice areas behave so differently they should not share a ranking
A flat-fee estate plan, an hourly family matter and a business dispute have different values, different durations and very different collection profiles.
A channel weighted towards one is inevitably ranked as though it produced the mix, and a general firm reading a blended number is reading an average of things that share nothing.
Where the export carries a practice area, the report splits on it, and the split usually turns an unusable ranking into a decision.
It also makes the rejected enquiries visible as a cost: a source generating calls in an area the firm does not take is consuming intake time for nothing.
Referrals are the largest channel in most firms and nobody prices them
Existing clients, other lawyers and professional contacts produce a great deal of legal work, and because no invoice arrives they are treated as free.
That makes every paid channel look like a larger share of the practice than it is, and it hides the real question, which is what causes referrals in the first place.
Recording a referral source at intake puts them into the same comparison on the same collected money.
The follow-on finding is often the useful one: the paid channels producing clients who go on to refer are worth substantially more than their own collections suggest.
Fair questions
“Rocket Matter already does that.” Not quite.
They say
“We measure cost per signed client.”
We say
That treats a small flat fee and a two-year matter as the same event, which is why it cannot rank channels.
They say
“Our work is nearly all referral.”
We say
Then the report will show it, and knowing the true proportion is what tells you whether the paid spend is worth continuing.
No. It reads a file you exported, so your matters, documents and time entries are not reachable from here.
Collections with a client contact detail, the amount received and the date.
Billed is an intention. Collection rates differ by source, and that difference is exactly what this report exists to show.
A year at minimum, because matters and payment plans both run for months.
Yes, where the matter open date is included, and that is the grouping a marketing decision needs.
Yes, where the export carries one. A blended ranking across practice areas is rarely actionable.
Summed by client, so one long matter is not read as many small wins across different months.
They are a cost of the source that produced them, and the report keeps them visible rather than discarding them.
Where they are recorded at intake. Including them usually changes every paid channel's apparent share of the practice.
Any collection with no traceable lead. Its size is stated rather than distributed across the measurable channels.
A contact detail, an amount and a date, plus a practice area if you include one. No matter details, no documents, no time narratives, no trust balances. Encrypted in transit and at rest and deleted with the import.
Collected fees per source grouped by when the client arrived, split by practice area where available, first and subsequent payments apart, and everything unmatched kept visible.
By trade
Trades that run Rocket Matter.
What the report looks like once the export is in, written for each one.
Other systems
Also worth reading.
Running more than one system, or comparing? The method is the same and the columns are not.
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All 68 systems 
Rocket Matter and the other product names and logos on this page belong to their owners and are shown to identify the software a file comes from. CloseRev is not affiliated with or endorsed by them, and connects to none of them: it reads a file you export.
Start today
Two exports, and you will know.
Nothing to install in Rocket Matter, no API key, and no need to have been tracking anything until now. Last year works as well as this month.