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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 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.

The 'New Client' gap defaults to 90 days but can be adjusted per tenant, contact support for more information. 

These metrics compare Invoiced Appointments in the locations you have selected at the top of the Mega Report. 


 Previous Period (EG: "Last Month") Current Period (EG: "This Period")
New
Invoiced Appt (with gap of at least 90 days since previous appt)
Additional No Invoiced Appointment Invoiced Appointment
Returning No Invoiced Appointment Additional Clients *excluding* New Clients
Attrition Invoiced Appointment No Invoiced Appointment
Unique
Invoiced Appointment

For the breakdowns (dropdowns):

  • Attrition: use the categories of the last appointment in that period
  • New/Additional/Returning/Unique: use the categories of the first appointment in that period.

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. 

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 recognised.

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 New Client. 

EG: Visits in September, no visits in October, then visits in November.

Additional Clients

Clients not invoiced in period period and invoiced in current period. So this includes both New Clients and 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.

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