Client Metrics: Unique, New, Attrition, Hours
Many of the most important metrics in the Mega Report and Practitioner report relate to clients.
While you might instinctively understand concepts like 'new clients' and 'attrition', a precise definition of who counts as a new client is muddied by the exact time periods you're considering. Does a client who your business last interacted with five years ago count as a new client? Likely, earning that client's patronage has the same impact on business as gaining a brand new client.
The BOS calculates Additional clients and splits them into New, Brand New and Returning clients based on the time interval being reported on. For example, in Weekly view, additional clients are clients with appointments in this week that had no appointments last week.
The below table gives a short description of the client metrics
| Clients with: | But, | |
| Unique | Invoiced appointment in this period | |
| Additional | Invoiced appointment in this period | No invoiced appointment in the previous period |
| Brand New | Invoiced appointment in this period | No previous appointment, ever |
| New | Invoiced appointment in this period | There is a gap of at least 90* days since previous appointment |
| Returning | Additional Clients *excluding* New and Brand New clients | No invoiced appointment in the previous period, and does not count as New or Brand New |
| Attrition | Invoiced appointment in the previous period | No invoiced appointment in this period |
| Net | Difference between this period Unique clients and previous period Unique Clients |
The 'New Client' gap defaults to 90 days but can be adjusted per tenant, contact support for more information.
For breakdowns (dropdowns):
- Attrition uses the categories of the client's last appointment
- New, Additional, Returning and Unique clients use the categories of the client's 'first' appointment.
Unique Clients
Unique clients is a count of clients that have an invoiced attendance within the current period. The 'ghost' value shows how many clients have a non-cancelled appointment, which is a great indicator of where the Unique Clients value could end up at the end of the month.
Additional Clients
Additional clients is a count of clients that are invoiced in current period but were not invoiced in period period. This includes both New and Returning clients.
Brand New Clients
Brand New clients are clients whose very first appointment is within the current period.
New Clients
New clients is a count of invoiced clients who have not had an appointment for a configurable span of days, but do not count as Brand New clients. The default gap is 90 days, and can be configured in Company Settings by the tenant owner. This definition was chosen to accompany Brand New clients because if you haven't seen a client for 90 days then it usually requires marketing effort to bring them back to the business (IE: email with an offer, a 'check in' call from a practitioner) and the New clients metric reflects those efforts.
When viewing the Mega Report with intervals larger than the new client gap, the New clients metric is not calculated, as the Returning clients metric includes these clients.
The 'New Clients' metric won't appear for intervals that are larger than the New Client gap
Returning Clients
A client who visits the business after not attending for the previous period and hasn't been away from the business long enough to be considered a Brand New or New client. When viewing the Mega Report with intervals larger than the new client gap only Brand New clients are excluded. This is because in these intervals, any client who has no appointments in the previous period (e.g. last year) has also not had an appointment for the New client gap (default 90 days).
For example, a client would count as returning in November of the Monthly view if they had visits in September, no visits in October, then visits in November.
Attrition Clients
Unique clients in the previous period that aren't in the current period. For example, clients seen last month who have no appointments this month.
Hours Per Client
This is the total of all the client time (e.g. class time is counted per-client) divided by the unique clients.
This means that if a client visits multiple locations they will have low hours-per-client for each location but a higher hours-per-client for the company as a whole.
Why don't my 'unique' numbers add up?
.. or "when does 2 + 2 not equal 4"
Most metrics in the BOS are "totals". For example: if you have two locations then the total revenue for the company is just the sum of the revenue for both locations, as you would expect.
With "unique" metrics each client is only counted once. For example: if you have two unique clients in each of your two locations then you would expect the total unique clients to be 4. However, if one of those patients is the same patient visiting both locations then she would be counted once for each location, but only counted once in the total.
This would cause the behavior where you would see Unique Clients for the business of 3, and when you dropdown by location you would get 2 + 2;
This can also happen with other types of dropdowns. For example if you dropdown Unique Clients by profession and a client sees you for both Physiotherapy and Massage then they can be counted in each of those rows while only contributing once to the total.