The tool, in your browser
The lead-source count
One row per place your work comes from. What you spent on it last year, how many leads it gave you, how many became jobs, and what those jobs were worth. The page does the division — cost per lead, cost per job, close rate by channel, revenue for every dollar in — so you are comparing channels on money instead of on how loud each one felt. Then it tells you the thing almost nobody in this trade can say out loud: how much of last year cost you nothing.
Free, and it asks for nothing. No email, no account, no sign-up. What you type stays in this browser on this device.
Read this first
This count only knows about this browser. Nothing you type is sent to us and nothing syncs, so the phone and the office computer each keep their own copy. Clearing your browsing data wipes it, and a new phone won’t bring it along. This one is worth keeping — it is a year of work to rebuild — so put the-lead-source-count.xlsx on the computer at the office once you’ve got it counted.
The count fills in right here in your browser. If this line stays put, JavaScript is off — the spreadsheet below does the same job.
The rule that makes the count worth anything
One row per source, and one source per job.
A job that came from a referral who then searched your name is a referral. The source is whatever first put that name in your hands. Splitting one job across two sources double-counts the revenue and makes both channels look better than they are.
And the leads column is leads, not jobs — every call, form, knock and message from that source, whether you ever got on the roof or not. If your phone log can’t tell you that number for a channel, type the closest honest count you can and write down that you made it up. A guessed lead number quietly wrecks the cost per lead and the close rate, and nothing in here can see it.
Before you turn a channel off
Four things this page does not know.
- Whether a wrong number is wrong. Type 40 leads where the phone log said 90 and everything recalculates happily and lies to you. It checks that your numbers hang together; it cannot check that they are true.
- Whether those jobs made money. Revenue is not profit — a channel can look rich here and still lose money once the roof gets built. The job’s report card grades the finished job.
- Whether the channel or the visit is the problem. Volume with no closes is priced wrong or aimed wrong; a good close rate with no volume needs more reach. Running the same visit every time is what separates the two.
- What a channel would do with more money in it. It tells you where last year came from. It does not forecast, and it will not tell you what doubling the ad budget buys.
How it gets used
- Pull a full year of closed jobs, not this month. A year, so the slow season is in there. Put one source on every job before you type anything in here.
- Type 0 for the channels that cost you nothing. Repeat customers, referrals, the sign in the yard. Zero is a real answer here and the page prints “free” rather than dividing — a blank box is treated as a number you haven’t typed yet, and the row stays out of the totals.
- Spend means the money you paid to make that phone ring. Ad spend, lead fees, printing and dropping the hangers. Not the cost of doing the work.
- Give the ones that went nowhere a row too. Door hangers, a mailer, the lead app you quit. A channel you delete is a channel you’ll buy again in three years.
- Then change one thing. Turn a channel up, turn one off, or give the free channel an owner — the roofs you already won is usually the cheapest job you’re not booking. Change two and you’ll never know which one moved.
- Then watch it week by week. This counts the year behind you; the number that tells you next month is the one that sees the drought coming.
Want it in a spreadsheet?
The same sheet as a spreadsheet
the-lead-source-count.xlsx is this count as a spreadsheet — same columns, same division, same verdict — for the computer at the office. Two differences in the page’s favour: the file stops at twenty rows and this doesn’t, and when a row doesn’t line up the file’s answer block prints one sentence instead of every figure, where here the row itself says what is wrong, drops out of the totals, and the rest still adds up. Two the other way: the file is a real file, so it survives a cleared browser and prints for a conversation with whoever buys your ads — and it comes with five example rows already filled in so you can watch it run before you trust it. Both refuse the same things: a source with a number missing, numbers on a row with no source, more jobs than leads, jobs closed with no revenue, revenue with no jobs. The sheets ask for your email once; this page never does.
The play behind it — M9-01 Count Where Last Year's Jobs Actually Came From — is where the counting rules come from, and the sheet notes spell out every column and formula.