By the time your client opens the monthly report, it’s already history.
You pull the numbers on the 1st, the email lands, and somewhere around the 3rd they get round to reading it. The figures inside are true; they’re just true about a month that’s already gone. It’s a photograph. A nice photograph: branded, tidy, worth sending. But a photograph of a moment that passed before anyone looked at it.
That’s always sat a bit oddly with me. The whole point of a report is to answer “how’s my site doing?” — present tense — and the honest answer a monthly PDF gives is “well, here’s how it was doing in May.”
So we’ve been quietly building the other thing. A live client dashboard. Not a once-a-month snapshot: a window your clients can open whenever they fancy, with the numbers ticking along as they happen.
A few things I’m pleased about.
It’s white-labelled, properly. Your logo, your colours, your name on it. The client opens it and sees you — not a SendTidings dashboard with your details bolted on the side. As far as they’re concerned, you built it.
There’s no login. None. I’ve watched too many agencies stand up beautiful client portals that nobody ever signs into, because asking a busy client to make an account and remember a password is asking them never to come back. So we didn’t. They get in with a magic link straight from their report email, or a self-serve “email me my link” page if they’ve mislaid it. No accounts, no password resets, no “I’ve been locked out” on a Friday afternoon.
And it’s one place for the stuff that actually matters. Traffic and search, yes, but also uptime, site speed, the Lighthouse score, and the boring-but-critical health bits: SSL, domain expiry, WordPress updates. The questions a client never thinks to ask until something’s broken, sitting in one view before it is.
It’s quick on a phone, it’s got a dark mode for the people who insist, and if a client has five sites with you, they’re all in one place instead of five separate links.
That’s about as much as I’m giving away. It’s a teaser, and I’d rather show you than describe it. So here’s one look:
Here’s the honest status: it’s in private beta. We’re rolling it out to a handful of agencies first, knocking the rough edges off against real client lists before we open the doors properly. There’s nothing to sign up for: no waitlist, no form to fill in. It’s coming, and it’s coming soon. Watch this space.
The monthly report isn’t going anywhere; it’s still the thing that lands in the inbox and gets read. It’s just about to stop being the only way your clients see their site. The photograph’s getting a window to sit next to.
