Why does my mid-year marketing report understate what I spent?

Why is a mid-year cost of marketing figure always too low?

Because the CRM records marketing cost when the invoice is entered, not when the money was committed, and broadcast, radio and aggregator invoices post weeks after the month they cover. At the eight-figure Toledo exteriors company where I direct marketing, full-year 2025 spend read $2.33M, then $2.46M, then $2.48M across three pulls, and every mid-year percentage is low by whatever has not posted yet.

Where does the spend number come from?

Lead Perfection, our CRM, has a cost-of-marketing report that divides what was spent on each source by the net revenue attributed to it. The spend side of that report is fed by invoices being keyed in as they arrive. A television flight that runs in August is invoiced in September and keyed in October. An aggregator bills on its own cycle. Wages post monthly and on time. So on any given day the report holds every dollar of revenue the sales team has booked and some fraction of the marketing dollars that produced it. The fraction gets smaller the closer the pull is to today.

Nobody designed it that way on purpose. It is just what a report looks like when one side of it is fed by the sales calendar and the other side by accounts payable.

Why did our 2025 spend have three values?

The first figure for 2025 came from an earlier trend workbook and read $2,333,115. A second pull in May 2026 read $2,464,659. The Cost of Marketing report pulled in September 2026, with the year long closed, reads $2,482,040. Same year, same company, a spread of $149,000, and the direction was up every time, because each pull caught invoices the previous one had missed. Against $12.8M of net revenue that is the difference between 18.3% and 19.4% cost of marketing. In a leadership meeting that is the difference between “inside the band, roughly” and “outside it.”

The lines that post late are the ones anyone would guess: TV, radio and the aggregators, the vendors who bill after the fact. The lines that post on time are wages, which run on payroll, and the digital platforms that charge the card the day the money is spent.

Which decisions does this break?

Two. The first is the mid-year channel cut, where a channel gets judged in July on a percentage that will be several points worse by October once its invoices land. A cut that looked wrong in July looks right in October, or the other way around. The second is the year-over-year comparison pulled at different points in the cycle, where this year’s June is compared to last year’s December and this year looks better than it is for no reason except that last year had six more months of invoices in it.

I have made both of those mistakes, and the second one is the sneakier, because the comparison is technically the same report.

Where this is wrong

For a shop that pays media in advance or on a card at the moment of spend, the lag runs the other way and the mid-year figure is high, not low, because the money is in before the revenue it buys. And for a shop whose marketing is mostly wages and digital, the lag is small enough to ignore. The rule is only that the pull date has to be on the report and the comparison has to be same-window. How much it matters depends on how much of the budget is invoiced after the fact.

What to do

• Tonight: print the pull date on every cost-of-marketing figure that leaves the office, and add a line naming which vendors have not been invoiced for the last sixty days.
• This quarter: compare each channel to the same window last year, not to last month, and hold any channel cut until its invoices are at least sixty days caught up.
• Ongoing: re-pull the prior year’s cost of marketing in March and treat that as the number of record. Ours moved $149,000 between the first pull and the last.

Sources: Lead Perfection “Cost of Marketing by Source,” Toledo, 2025 full year, pulled September 2026 ($2,482,040); the same year’s figure from the marketing trend workbook ($2,333,115) and the May 2026 historic-picture workbook ($2,464,659), all first party.

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