Essential monthly brief

Why this template#

The Monthly performance brief is the comprehensive option — four KPIs, dedicated "what worked" and "what didn't" sections, hours-used transparency. This template is what you reach for when that's too much.

The Essential brief is for the agency-client relationship where:

• The retainer is small enough that a six-page report would feel performative
• The account manager runs many clients and can't spend an hour-per-brief on prose
• The client already trusts the relationship and wants signal-not-substance

It's the same structure as the rendered brief on the SendBriefs homepage — intentionally. The marketing demo and this template are the same shape so what visitors see and what they'd actually ship are visually identical.

What's inside#

1. Three-KPI hero strip. Revenue, retention, CAC by default — but you can swap any of the three for whatever your client cares about. Each cell carries a delta vs. the prior period.
2. What we did this month. Three to five short narrative lines. Not a transcript, not a play-by-play — the things that materially moved the business this period.
3. Plan for next month. Two to four lines. What's queued, in priority order. One of them can be an open question to the client.
4. Engagement metadata. Inline pills on the rendered brief tell you when the brief was opened, by whom, for how long, and what they commented on. The pills are part of the page — not a separate dashboard.

Why three KPIs (not four, not five)#

A brief that opens with three numbers reads as confident. A brief that opens with five numbers reads as defensive — like the author wasn't sure which one mattered so put them all up. If you can't decide which three KPIs matter most, that's the conversation to have before you ship the brief, not inside it.

The other tradeoff: three KPIs fit comfortably across a phone screen in landscape or a desktop without crowding. Four KPIs (the Monthly performance brief configuration) is wider and benefits from being read at a desk.

When to graduate#

Most retainers start here and stay. The ones that should graduate to the full Monthly performance brief are:

• Engagements above ~$8K/month, where the client expects more analytical depth
• Multi-stakeholder accounts where the brief gets forwarded to a CFO or board
• Retainers with hours-used transparency clauses in the SOW

When that's the case, the migration is one click — the templates share the same data sources, so cloning forward keeps everything wired.

Live-data tokens used#

• revenue.mom — revenue, month-over-month
• retention.mom_pp — retention delta in percentage points
• cac.mom — customer acquisition cost, month-over-month
• engagement.opens — opens on the prior brief
• engagement.comments — inline comments left on the prior brief
• engagement.avg_read_minutes — average read time on the prior brief

All six resolve from GA4 / HubSpot / Stripe on render. No copy-paste from spreadsheets.