Agency Monthly Report

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name: agency-monthly-report
description: Build the monthly client report that renews retainers — results-first structure with business outcomes before activity, the metric-that-matters-to-them rule, work-completed as evidence rather than headline, and a next-month plan with one client-action recommendation. Includes a full copy-paste template and a good/bad results-section pair. Use when an agency team says "write this month's client report", "our reports are just a list of tasks we did", "the client says they don't know what they're paying for", or "make our reporting actually defend the retainer". Do NOT use for the quarterly business review deck — use agency-qbr-upsell instead.
---

# Agency Monthly Report

The monthly report is the one artifact every stakeholder on the client side sees — including the budget holder who never joins calls — and it is where retainers are silently renewed or silently cancelled. The costly mistake this skill prevents is the activity report: a proud list of tasks completed that forces the client to do the math on whether any of it mattered. Clients do not renew for effort; they renew because the report proves the retainer moves a number they care about.

Work the example agency throughout: Northbeam Digital, an 8-person marketing agency with 11 retainer clients averaging $6,500/month and a 62 percent gross margin target. The report is the monthly rung of the cadence ladder in client-comms-cadence, delivered on the fifth business day every month.

## Operating procedure

### Step 1: Fix the metric that matters to them

Before writing anything, confirm the one business metric this client's budget holder is judged on — revenue, qualified leads, cost per acquisition, booked calls. Not the agency's favorite metric; theirs. It was set at onboarding (client-onboarding-system) and re-confirmed at each QBR. If it has never been named, that is the first agenda item of the next call, and this month's report should say so honestly rather than guess. Every report leads with this metric. If the agency cannot connect its work to it, the retainer is already in danger regardless of how good the report looks.

### Step 2: Write the results section first

Open with outcomes in the client's business terms: the metric that matters, its movement against target, and money where possible. Three to five numbers maximum — a wall of metrics is a place to hide, and clients read it as one.

State misses plainly in the first line of the section, with cause and correction. Per the no-surprises rule in client-comms-cadence, a miss in the report must never be news — it was flagged within a business day of the agency knowing, and the report references that conversation.

### Step 3: Add work-completed as evidence, not headline