The most common reporting tool in this industry is still a spreadsheet.
Pricing and features checked 15 August 2026 · Sources listed at the foot of the page
The short answer
When a spreadsheet is the right call, and when it is not
There is no vendor on the other side of this comparison, which means there is nothing to be unfair about and no reason to overstate it.
Stay on a spreadsheet if
- You report on three or four clients. The build cost of any tool is real, and at that size the spreadsheet genuinely wins.
- Your reporting is unusual enough that no connector would reach it, and the work is in the analysis rather than the assembly.
- Your clients want a specific artefact — a deck in their template, a board pack — and the layout matters more than the refresh.
- One person does all of it and they are fast at it. A process with a single expert operator has less to gain from automation than it looks.
- Cash is the binding constraint this quarter. A spreadsheet costs nothing and we cost something.
Move to Reports if
- You have crossed about eight clients and the last week of every month has a shape you recognise.
- More than one person builds reports, and their files have quietly stopped agreeing about what cost per lead means.
- A client has asked to look at their numbers between reports, and the honest answer was “I'll send you something”.
- Your clients run Local Services Ads and it is being pasted in by hand, or not at all.
- You want to walk into the meeting with where the quarter lands rather than what last month was.
Side by side
What each one is actually good at
The first block of rows goes to the spreadsheet, and it is not a courtesy — those are real advantages that no reporting platform, ours included, gets back.
| Capability | Reports | Spreadsheets and slides |
|---|---|---|
| What a spreadsheet is genuinely better at | ||
| Cost of the software | $39.95 per client report a month, falling to $19.95 at twenty-five. | Nothing beyond the office software you already pay for. |
| Control over the page | Twenty-one widget types on a twelve-column grid. Flexible, but not a blank canvas. | Absolute. If you can draw it, you can put it in front of a client. |
| Reporting on something unusual | Fifteen native connectors and a bridge, plus CSV, Google Sheets and manual entry for everything else. | If you can export it, you can report it. Nothing is out of scope. |
| Nobody has to learn anything | Somebody has to build the first report. Budget an afternoon. | Everyone in the building already knows how. |
| It keeps working if you stop paying | It is a subscription. Cancel and the live reports stop. | The file is yours. It will open in ten years. |
| What happens every month | ||
| Getting this month's numbers in | Connected accounts refresh on their own schedule. Nobody re-exports anything. | Somebody signs into each platform, exports, and pastes. |
| Getting it to the client | Scheduled email in the client's timezone, with a written summary of the period. | Somebody remembers, attaches it, and writes the covering note. |
| The client looking between reports | A live link — password protected, expiring, revocable, and no account needed to open it. | A shared file, with whatever permissions somebody set on it. |
| Doing it for the twelfth client | Save a finished report as a template; the next client is minutes. | Copy last month's file and change the numbers, which is where the mistakes live. |
| What the report can say | ||
| Where the quarter lands against goal | Projected from a configured funnel, with modelled figures badged as modelled. | Possible, by hand, and rebuilt from scratch every month. |
| The same metric meaning the same thing on every client | Formulas are defined per client and computed identically in every report that uses them. | Every copy of the file is free to drift, and copies multiply. |
| A record of who changed what | Significant changes are written to an audit log. | Whoever had the file open last. |
| Local Services Ads, counted in the same total as paid search | Native, straight from the Google Ads API. | Exportable by hand, which works until the month somebody is away. |
The number we will not print
We went looking for “agencies spend N hours a month on reporting”. There isn’t one.
Every page like this one opens with that statistic. We tried to source ours and could not, so here is what we found instead.
Every figure traces back to a seller
The most-cited number in this category — roughly an hour and a half per client, thirty hours a month at twenty clients — comes from a reporting-software vendor’s blog, attributed to their own customer data, with no sample size and no method. It is cited below so you can weigh it yourself. We are not going to repeat it as though it were research.
The arithmetic is not always arithmetic
One product in this category currently advertises “750% less time spent building reports”. A reduction cannot exceed one hundred per cent. We mention it not to score a point off a rival but because it is a fair sample of the rigour behind the whole category of claim, and we are in that category too.
What we would accept as evidence
A survey with a stated sample size, a described method, and the questions published. If we ever run one, the number will appear here with our name on it and you can hold us to it. Until then this page argues from the steps that stop happening, which you can count in your own process this month.
The honest way to size this for yourself: open last month’s reporting week, count the exports, and multiply by what an hour of that person’s time is worth to you. Your number will be better than ours.
What changes
The steps that simply stop
Not a faster version of the same process — a shorter one, with the manual steps removed rather than accelerated.
The export and the paste
Copying last month's file
The covering email
“Can you send me an update?”
Rebuilding the same page for every client
What does not stop
From both sides of the report
The monthly rebuild, and what replaced it
One agency on the assembly, one client on what now arrives instead of a meeting request.
The monthly rebuild
We were rebuilding the same four dashboards every month and still getting asked where the Local Services leads had gone. Now the report is already standing when we walk into the meeting, and the lead count is the whole lead count.
Scheduled delivery
One email at the start of the month with the whole picture and a paragraph telling me what it means. I have stopped asking for the call.
Straight answers
Questions people ask before they switch
Including the two questions where the honest answer is that we do not know.
- How many hours will this save me a month?
- We do not know, and neither does anyone else quoting you a figure. We went looking for a defensible number and could not find one that was not published by a company selling reporting software. What we can tell you is what stops happening: the export, the paste, the copy of last month’s file, and the covering email. Price your own hour and count those steps.
- Can I still use my spreadsheet for the parts nothing connects to?
- Yes, and most agencies do. A Google Sheet can be a data source in its own right, alongside CSV upload and manual entry, so jobs sold, revenue, close rates and anything the ad platforms will never know can sit in the same report as the spend. The sheet needs link sharing on, not publishing.
- What about the deck? Clients like the deck.
- Then keep making it, and stop rebuilding the numbers underneath it. Most agencies who move find the deck was carrying the commentary rather than the data — and the commentary is what a written summary and a prose widget are for. A report page prints cleanly if you still want paper.
- Is a spreadsheet really wrong that often?
- We are not going to quote you a percentage, because the widely-repeated one is relayed second-hand from a paper whose original is no longer online. The honest version is narrower and you can check it against your own files: a report built by copying last month’s copy inherits every error in it, and nothing in the process is designed to catch one.
Sources
Everything on this page you can check yourself
Competitor pricing and feature lists move. Each entry records the page we read and the day we read it, so you can see how old a claim is before you act on it.
- 1From Google Sheets to Automated Reporting Software (vendor estimate)
agencyanalytics.com · checked August 15, 2026
Published 5 December 2022. States that agencies with 20 clients spend around 30 hours a month on manual client reporting, attributed only to “customer data” with no sample size or method given. It is a marketing-reporting vendor's own estimate, not an independent study, and it is the best-sourced figure we could find anywhere. We cite it so you can judge it, not because we think it settles anything.
Other comparisons
Weighing up more than one
Most agencies shortlist three or four. Here is the same treatment for the rest of them.
- Reports vs Data StudioGoogle renamed it back to Data Studio in April 2026. Still free, still everywhere, and still carrying a watermark you are not allowed to remove.
- Reports vs AgencyAnalyticsThe best-known per-client reporting platform for agencies. One rate, white label included, and the largest connector catalogue in the set.
- Reports vs DashThisStraightforward dashboard reporting priced by how many dashboards you keep, with white label included at every tier.
- Reports vs SwydoThe cheapest credible entry point in the category: one flat fee, unlimited clients, priced by connected data source.
- Reports vs DataboxA metrics and goal-tracking product with a free tier and a separate agency price list, aimed as much at in-house teams as at agencies.
Rebuild one client's report once more, and then never again.
Still weighing the alternatives? Most agencies leaving spreadsheets try Looker Studio first, which is free and solves about half of this. That comparison is worth reading before you decide.