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SOP — Reconcile the numbers

Who: Account Manager · When: after checking completeness, before drafting the report Time: 5 minutes per client

What this is for

The portal's numbers come from the Meta API every three hours. Ads Manager may show a slightly different figure — rounding, attribution windows, and timezone boundaries all create small gaps. This step catches those gaps before the client does.

A number the client can check against their own Ads Manager and find wrong costs more trust than the number is worth. Five of the first five reporting faults had this shape: arithmetically correct, and wrong in a way the source would have caught.

Steps

  1. Open Ads Manager for the client. Set the date range to match the reporting period.
  2. Compare total spend. The portal shows spend in cents; Ads Manager shows it in dollars. A gap under 1% is rounding. A gap over 1% means a campaign was included or excluded differently — check the purpose breakdown.
  3. Compare total conversions. The portal uses the same conversion event the account optimises for. If the client optimises for leads, compare leads. If purchases, compare purchases. The portal's outcome model (purchase or lead) is shown on the Performance tab.
  4. If there is a gap, state it. Write the source, the portal figure, the Ads Manager figure, and which you are reporting. A stated gap is honest; an unexplained discrepancy the client finds is a credibility problem.
  5. If there is no gap, say that too. "Reconciled against Ads Manager" in one line tells the founder reviewer that this step was done, not skipped.

What good looks like

The report carries a one-line reconciliation note. The founder sees it during review and does not need to check the numbers themselves. The client never finds a number they can contradict.