A booking is a promise of work. A completed job is delivered work. A collected invoice is cash received. Owners need all three views to understand what advertising produces, especially when cancellations, estimates and return visits sit between the first inquiry and payment.
Choose The Unit Before Opening A Report
Define a completed job in the operating system. For a repair company, that may mean the agreed visit is finished and documented. For a remodeler, an initial estimate is not a completed construction job. Separate diagnostic visits, approved projects and follow-up work so one customer journey is not counted as three new acquisitions.
Choose whether the analysis concerns new customers or all paid-source jobs. A returning customer who clicks an ad can create a marketing cost without being a newly acquired customer. Keep that record, but label it. Comparing a new-customer source with a mixed source without this distinction can misdirect the next budget decision.
Keep Inquiry Cohorts Together
Group jobs by when their originating inquiry arrived, then allow enough time for that service class to mature. Report open estimates and scheduled work alongside completed work. Dividing today's advertising spend by jobs completed today mixes different cohorts and can make a slow installation cycle look like a sudden marketing failure.
Use a stable inquiry identifier, customer identifier and job identifier. Link duplicate calls and form submissions to the same underlying opportunity when the records support that conclusion. Preserve separate projects at the same address. Deduplication should prevent double counting without erasing real repeat work or assigning every household request to one sale.
Calculate Two Costs With Clear Labels
Illustrative cohort: $3,000 in media spend produces 40 inquiries, 24 bookings and 18 completed jobs. Media cost per inquiry is $75, per booking is $125, and per completed job is about $166.67. None of these is a universal target. They describe different stages of this invented cohort.
If the business also assigns $600 of campaign management and $300 of intake labor to that cohort, fully allocated acquisition cost is $3,900/18, or about $216.67 per completed job. Keep the media-only figure visible too. State which costs are included, and avoid counting the same receptionist expense again inside direct job labor.
Add Contribution And Collections
Suppose the 18 jobs produce $9,000 of revenue and $4,500 of contribution after the direct job costs chosen for this example. Subtracting $3,900 of acquisition cost leaves $600 before remaining overhead and taxes. That is a planning contribution calculation, not net profit or a forecast. It shows why a cheap booking is insufficient evidence of an attractive source.
Now inspect payment status separately. Completed work can be awaiting collection, refunded in part or disputed. Use actual collected amounts when assessing cash recovery, while retaining the invoiced view for reconciliation. Explain the date cut-off so a recently completed job is not labeled permanently unpaid just because its normal payment step is still open.
Use The Result To Change One Decision
Compare mature cohorts with similar service mix and coverage. A source that produces more installation inquiries may need a longer window than one producing routine repairs. Record cancellations by cause, including customer choice, unavailable parts, poor fit and business rescheduling. These require different fixes even when they all reduce completed jobs.
Choose the next action from the evidence: reduce an unserviceable area, fix intake, revise the advertised offer or change spend. Retain unattributed jobs in a visible category. Allocating them to whichever channel looks weakest creates tidy reports at the expense of a trustworthy operating decision.
Common Questions
Should Warranty Visits Count As New Jobs?
Track them as operational work and cost, but keep them out of new-customer acquisition counts unless there is a distinct new purchased service. Link them to the original job when possible.
What If We Cannot Match Every Invoice To An Inquiry?
Show the unmatched share and improve the record linkage. Use matched records for a clearly bounded analysis; do not present that subset as the complete business or invent attribution for the remainder.