Client Metrics: Unique, New, Attrition, Hours
These definitions are current as of March 2024 but are under review
Many of the most important metrics in the Mega Report and Practitioner report relate to clients.
While you might intrinsically understand the concepts like 'new clients' and 'attrition', it is important to understand the technical definition so that you are "reading" the numbers correctly.
Some of these definitions are options that can be adjusted per tenant, contact support for more information.
Unique Clients
This is how many clients have an invoiced attendance. The 'ghost' value shows how many clients have a non-cancelled appointment which is a great indicator of where the Unique Clients value will finish for the month. This is the only 'unique' row for this list of client metrics.
New Clients
The usual formula for New Clients is 'first visit to the company after at least 90 days of no attendance'.
This definition was chosen instead of 'absolutely first time, never seen them before' because if you haven't seen a client after 90 days, it is usually requires some sort of marketing effort to bring them back to the business (IE: email with an offer, a 'check in' call from a practitioner) and we want those efforts to be recognized.
Returning Clients
A client who visits the business after not attending for the previous month and hasn't been away from the business long enough to be considered a New Client.
EG: Visits in September, no visits in October, then visits in November.
Additional Clients
Additional Clients is simply New Clients + Returning Clients.
Attrition Clients
Unique clients in the previous period (EG: month / quarter) that aren't in the current period. EG: "Clients we saw last month who we aren't seeing this month".
Hours Per Client
This is the total of all the client time (IE: 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.
Unique Clients and Net Additional may not match.
Unique Clients and Net Additional Clients metrics should generally trend in the same direction (IE: a positive net additional clients metric would generally result in Unique Clients increasing over time.
This is because new clients are defined at a certain level of the business (EG: division), while other metrics like unique clients, attrition, returning clients are calculated based on the level of the report you are looking at (EG: whole company).
You should expect the Unique Clients to match Net Additional Clients if you are looking at a report at the "New Client Definition" level of the business (EG: Division) but the numbers won't match when looking at the data from other levels of the business because:
- Unique clients only counts each client once, but depending on your companies New Client Definition they could be counted as a new client multiple times in the same period, such as if they were to visit multiple divisions of your business
- They could be an ongoing client who visits another division (triggering new client for that division) but not causing a change in total unique clients.