ALL REPORTS HAVING ANYTHING TO DO WITH CLOSING RATIOS (THE NUMBER OF ESTIMATES PRESENTED, DIVIDED BY THE NUMBER OF THOSE ESTIMATES THAT TURNED INTO A SALE) ARE HIGHLY INACCURATE.

Your current report formulas correctly count all the estimates presented within the specified date-range, BUT, and this is the crux of the matter: it only counts jobs which were signed-up or became jobs during that same date-range, and ignores the jobs that were signed-up after the specified date-range of the report, even though they were originally estimated within the specified date-range of the report.

Most contractors, including my company, do a consultative sale, meaning: we do our estimate and present it to the customer, and the actual sale usually happens 1 to 4 weeks later when the customer calls back to let us know they have chosen us to do their project and are ready to move forward. Sometimes these "go-aheads" happen 6 months or even a year later.

For your closing-ratio reports to be accurate, they must ignore the DATE that an estimate became a sale. For example: Lets say a company's sales force does 100 estimate presentations in the month of April. Of those 100 estimates, 20 of them turn into sold-jobs within the month of April, and 20 more of those same 100 estimates turn into sold-jobs within the month of May, for a total of 40 jobs sold out of those 100 estimates that were presented in April, which is a very respectable 40% closing ratio. However, if immediately at the end of April, you look at the closing ratio for April, it would only be 20% because it would miss the 20 additional estimate-to-sale conversions that were yet to come in May. So if you wait till the end of May to run April's report, the report should show the true closing ratio of 40%, which is the ratio that I think we will all agree is the correct ratio in the above described scenario. I am sure we also agree that 40% is the number to use when evaluating the effectiveness of your company's sales-people and sales-process, for determining your marketing ROI, and for budget planning.

However, 40% is NOT the April closing ratio that the JobNimbus report displays when you run the report in May, or if you run the report 6 months or a year from now. The report will always show a ratio of 20% because it only counts those 20 jobs that happened to be signed-up in the month of April and ignores the other 20 conversions that happened in May even though they were estimated in April.

Currently, to get an accurate closing ratio report, I would have to:
1) Create two separate reports within JobNimbus.
2) Create and formulate an Excel spreadsheet.
3) Export both of the JobNimbus reports.
4) Copy both reports onto the Excel spreadsheet.
5) Merge the two sets of data.
6) Filter the data.
7) Sort the data.
8) Calculate the totals of all the data-sets.
9) Calculate the closing ratio(s).

Closing ratios are one of the most basic and important KPI's for any business, and are critical for analyzing and planning. Can you fix this?

Greg Flury
ABC Roofing, Inc.
Greensboro, NC