How it works
Every booked job, traced back to the vendor that produced it.
Nothing here is magic, and none of it depends on a vendor telling the truth about their own performance. It runs on two things you already have: your books and your CRM.
What a vendor has to return just to break even, at a 35% gross margin. At 45% it is $2.22.
Every booked job is credited to exactly one lead, so the same revenue is never counted twice.
The shortest window we will put a verdict on. Below that, return is mostly noise.
Step one
What we connect
Spend comes from your accounting software, because that is the only record of what actually left your bank account. Leads and booked jobs come from your CRM. Anything that lives outside both — a vendor’s own spreadsheet, a mailer’s call log, the tracker someone keeps in Excel — gets added as its own source.
A table can take as many sources as you have. QuickBooks and a vendor’s spreadsheet can both feed spend without one overwriting the other.
Everything lands in three tables
Spend — date, payee, amount. Leads — date, source, phone. Jobs — date, phone, amount, and cost if you track it.
That is the whole data model. However a number arrives, it becomes a row in one of those three.
Step two
How a payment becomes a vendor
Your books call it ANGI LEADS. Your CRM calls it Angi. You call it “the lead site.” Tallybird holds every one of those names against a single vendor, so a payment and the leads it produced land in the same place.
When a payee shows up that nobody has seen before, it does not get guessed at. It goes into a review queue with the amount paid so far, and you answer one question: is this a marketing vendor, or is it the propane bill?
Why not just match the names?
Because they never match. Payee names come from whatever the vendor wrote on the invoice, and lead sources come from however the CRM was configured. The aliases are the product.
Step three
How a job gets traced to a lead
Leads and jobs are joined on phone number. When a job matches, the revenue is credited to the lead that produced it — and to exactly one lead, the most recent one before the job was booked.
That restraint matters more than it sounds. Home service customers come back: a roof in spring, gutters in the autumn. Credit the full lifetime revenue to every lead that person ever generated and the same money gets counted twice, three times, or paid out to two different vendors who each touched them once.
One job, one lead
In a test with two repeat customers and one job that had no matching lead, naive matching reported $36,000 of vendor-credited revenue against $23,000 that actually existed.
Step four
How the verdict is reached
Revenue is not profit, so the scorecard does not compare spend to revenue. It compares spend to the gross profit that revenue produced, using your real margin.
At a 35% margin, a dollar of revenue leaves 35 cents of gross profit. So a vendor has to return $2.86 for every $1 just to break even, and $5.71 to clear a 100% profit target and earn a Keep. Those thresholds move with your margin, and you can try other margins without saving them to see what would change.
The three stamps
Keep clears your profit target. Watch is profitable but under target. Cut lost money after marketing.
Step five
What happens when tracking is missing
A vendor you pay but never set up tracking for produces spend and zero leads. Run that through any return formula and it reads as a total loss — the worst performer you have.
It is not. It is a vendor nobody measured, and those are different things. Tallybird marks it Not measured, keeps it out of the verdict lanes entirely, and tells you how much spend is flowing somewhere invisible.
Never a verdict we cannot support
Untracked spend still counts as spend. It just never counts as a loss, because that is a claim the data cannot make.
Every month
What you actually get
One screen and one email. Every vendor with its spend, leads, booked jobs, cost per lead, return and verdict — for a single month, a quarter, the year to date, or everything at once.
Alongside it, a short queue of things only you can answer: a new payee to classify, a lead source nobody has assigned, a vendor still waiting on tracking. Each one takes a tap and the scorecard updates as you go.
Why a month is the floor
Spend arrives in lumps — a retainer is one payment on one day — and jobs close weeks after the lead. Over a month both even out. Over a week neither does.
Free vendor audit
Send us a quarter. We’ll send back a verdict.
Last quarter’s marketing spend and lead list is all we need. No call, no connection to anything, no obligation at the end of it.
- 01Every vendor ranked by profit after marketing, not by revenue
- 02Which of them currently cannot be measured at all, and what that spend adds up to
- 03What your real break-even return is at your margin