Which channels produced clients who actually started care?

Private-duty agency software holds a lead with a referral source and a phone number, and holds visits with a charge rate. What it usually does not do is report revenue by referral source, which leaves a manual export as the standing workaround.

That is the whole job here. Two exports from systems you already pay for, reconciled on the family's contact detail, produce the number the agency has been assembling by hand in a spreadsheet each quarter.

A hospital discharge planner's referral converts at something like a third to a half. A digital enquiry converts at under a tenth. That is ten to twenty enquiries per started client from paid search, against two or three from a referral relationship.

Judge both on leads and paid search looks productive. Judge both on billed revenue and the picture can invert, or confirm, but either way it is answerable. The agency is then deciding where to put its community liaison's time on evidence.

Roughly a third of home care revenue arrives through Medicaid waiver, VA or managed care, and a waiver assignment is not a conversion. Leaving it in the denominator makes every channel look worse than it is.

A payer column separates it, so the return is calculated against the private-pay book the advertising is actually competing for.

A typical private-pay case begins small. Four hours twice a week so a daughter can get back to work, which becomes daily visits after a fall, which becomes twelve-hour days and then live-in cover over the following year. The revenue a client represents in month one is a fraction of what they represent in month nine, and the growth happens without any further marketing at all. Nobody markets to that client again; the family simply asks for more hours because the situation changed. The channel that produced them is never told about any of it.

The ending is abrupt in a way that no other recurring revenue business quite matches. A hospitalisation, a move into a facility, or a death closes the case with a week's notice. Median tenure is short, distribution is skewed, and a handful of long cases carry a disproportionate share of the year's revenue. Two agencies with identical signed-client counts can therefore report very different revenue, and the difference is decided by which clients stayed rather than by how many arrived. An average client value hides all of it.

Because every billed week credits the channel that produced the original enquiry, the report captures both halves. A source producing clients whose hours ramp and persist ranks above one producing clients who take six hours a week for two months, even where both cost the same per signed client. That is the comparison most agencies have assembled by hand in a spreadsheet, once, and never repeated. Running it from exports means it can be repeated every quarter without anybody rebuilding the spreadsheet from scratch, which is usually what stopped it from happening twice.

In a franchised network the advertising arrives from two directions. The brand runs national search and awareness paid for out of a marketing fund, and the franchisee runs local campaigns out of their own pocket. Enquiries from both land in the same inbox, get logged by the same scheduler, and become indistinguishable within a day. By the time the case is scheduled, nobody in the office could say which advertisement the family saw, and the franchisee pays into the fund either way. The question does not go away.

The franchisee is then asked to judge whether the fund is earning its keep, with no way to separate the two streams. It is an uncomfortable question in most networks, and it is usually settled by assertion rather than evidence, because the data needed to settle it sits in two organisations that do not share systems. The fund is contributed to monthly, it is not optional, and the evidence usually offered for its value is a network-wide figure that says nothing about any particular territory. That is not something a franchisee can act on.

Uploading the brand's enquiry export and the local campaigns as separate sources puts both on one ranking, against billed revenue in that territory. The answer is specific to the territory and will not generalise, which is precisely the point: a national fund can be excellent in one market and irrelevant in another, and the franchisee only needs to know about theirs. It also gives the franchisee something to take to a network meeting that is not an opinion, which changes the tone of that conversation considerably. Either result is worth having.