Strategic Business Reviews: the QBR, rebuilt on evidence

The quarterly business review most MSPs run is a night of copy-paste: export a ticket count, screenshot a chart, write a summary that says "we had a great quarter" because nobody has time to check. Current builds the review as a magazine instead — a thirteen-sheet, print-quality PDF assembled from the records you already keep, shaped by a short wizard that only asks the questions your systems can't answer. Every number on it traces to a live feed, and every risk carries evidence chips a customer could ask about.

You'll find it at Sales → Business Reviews (the page itself is titled Strategic Business Reviews). This article covers how a single review gets built and what lands on its pages. For running the program across a book of partners quarter after quarter — the library, filters, and starting the next one — see "Running your SBR program quarter to quarter."

A finished review reads like a magazine issue, not a slide dump: a cover, an agenda, and eleven chapters in a deliberate arc. The agenda numbers itself from what's actually present — when a chapter has nothing honest to show for this partner this period, it drops, and the agenda and page folios renumber as if it were never there.

• ＋Cover — your logo (with your favicon as a small mark beside it), the partner's name, the period, and two or three headline stats. Two, when only two qualify — the cover is never padded to three.
• ＋Agenda — each chapter's title with a one-line promise of what it answers.
• ＋The quarter on a page — the hero ticket total, split into the times their people asked for help and the issues your monitoring caught on its own, with an AI-written synthesis and up to four pull stats.
• ＋The value ledger — the quarter's invisible work priced in plain arithmetic: monitoring catches, quarantined phishing, and outage-class saves, converted to hours and dollars using constants your workspace controls (see below).
• ＋The partnership scorecard — four to six tiles, a satisfaction pull-quote you approved in the wizard, and a "how we work" band in your own words.
• ＋How you compare — service — the partner against anonymous peer medians from your own book, drawn as dot-plots: first response, after-hours share, critical-priority share, positive-survey rate.
• ＋How you compare — fleet & AI — the same treatment for the fleet measures and Copilot adoption.
• ＋Security posture — coverage, detections, and identity hygiene, including the MFA coverage figure you confirmed in the wizard when no feed could read it.
• ＋Fleet health — led by the device-maturity gauge: a 300–850 score, read like a credit score, over a fleet-age histogram whose buckets always sum to the real endpoint count.
• ＋Backup & continuity — the proof strip: up to six real, dated boot-verification screenshots of recovered systems (with no screenshots it falls back to the verification log — never stock imagery), plus the recovery drill you recorded and cloud seats protected.
• ＋What we're watching, priced — exactly three risks when the record offers them, each with evidence chips and a price column, over the warranty runway for the next eight quarters.
• ＋The road ahead — an 18-month budgetable table with one-time and per-year totals summed separately, and an AI-opportunity box that appears only when the ticket record genuinely supports it.
• ＋Your team + next steps — the people behind the account and the next review on the calendar. The one chapter that can never drop.

The ledger chapter turns invisible work into dollars — and the conversion factors are yours, not ours. In Settings → Branding, your workspace sets the minutes returned per monitoring catch, per quarantined phishing email, and per outage-class save, plus your published downtime cost per hour. Sensible defaults ship out of the box so a day-one pack works, and every dollar line prints its factors — the count, the minutes, the rate — so a customer can redo the arithmetic on a napkin.

The downtime line carries one more honesty rule. If you record the customer's own cost of downtime in the wizard, that figure is used and labeled as theirs. If you don't, the pack uses half your published default — and states the halving on the page — rather than quietly valuing their downtime at a number nobody agreed to.

The two comparison pages answer the question every partner asks — "is that normal?" — from your own client book. With five or more similar-sized customers, you get a true peer comparison: dot-plots of the partner against the anonymous cohort median. No peer is ever named, each measure states how many peers reported it, and a measure too few peers have data for stays off the page.

With a smaller book, the pages neither fake a cohort nor silently vanish. They switch to an honest fallback: the partner against their own last quarter — the same measures, trending — optionally alongside a clearly labeled industry framing written as general context, never dressed up as a measurement from their record. Any external figure these pages cite carries its named source, printed with the number.

Building a review is nine short steps. The rule the wizard lives by: it never asks you to re-type something a system already knows, and every skip tells you exactly what falls off the page.

1. 1
   1. Preflight — what the systems can actually see

   A feed wall shows the seven data themes behind the pack — service desk, satisfaction, lifecycle, security, fleet & network, backup, and the peer book — each with its live record count or the exact consequence of its absence ("no surveys — the CSAT tile and pull-quote drop"). The only hard stop is a window with zero tickets; everything else builds honestly from what exists.
2. 2
   2. Customer & period

   Confirm the window, the descriptor line under the customer's name on the cover (leave it blank and the line drops — no placeholder), and the seat anchor the pack states its per-seat numbers against.
3. 3
   3. Fill the gaps

   The one step that asks for human knowledge: pick the quarter's timeline moments from seven auto-ranked candidates (the top five come preselected), record the customer's own cost of downtime if you know it, log a recovery drill if you ran one, confirm MFA coverage when no security feed could read it, and put the backup proof strip in the order you want it told.
4. 4
   4. Headline stats

   Choose the cover's stats from the qualified list only — a stat that didn't clear its qualification bar is never offered. The cover carries two or three; it is never padded to three.
5. 5
   5. Risks, priced

   Exactly three risks when the record offers them. Each card requires at least one evidence chip pointing at a real ticket or asset — an unevidenced risk can't be saved. A price from a real quote wears a QUOTED chip; anything else reads "By quote" or "Included" — the wizard will not print a made-up dollar figure. With no risk candidates at all, the chapter drops and the step says so plainly instead of dead-ending you.
6. 6
   6. Road ahead

   Curate the 18-month table from your lifecycle plan and open recommendations — each row carries its status: from your plan, needs approval, or let's discuss.
7. 7
   7. Their words

   Pick the satisfaction verbatims worth quoting. By default a quote is attributed to the survey, never to a person — naming someone requires you to confirm their consent, quote by quote.
8. 8
   8. Decisions

   Record the decisions you're asking the room for and schedule the next review — pre-filled when an upcoming meeting is already on the calendar.
9. 9
   9. Preview & export

   A full preview of the real sheets, run through a layout lint — character budgets, the footer reserve, sheet overflow, colliding text, type below the legibility floor. The lint gates the export, so a pack that would print broken never leaves the building.

Print / PDF produces the thirteen-sheet magazine, and Live mode presents the very same thing: a full-screen deck for the conference-room TV where every chapter in the pack is one slide, drawn from the same numbers the PDF prints — one source of truth, so the deck can never disagree with the document you leave behind. The stage is dark, in your brand colors, and the honesty rules hold on screen exactly as they do on paper: a chapter with no data has no slide, and the deck renumbers as if it were never there. Move with the arrow keys or by clicking either side of the screen; a chapter rail along the bottom shows where you are, and clicking any chapter jumps straight to it. Reviews built before the magazine redesign present in the same deck — there is no old format left to fall back to.

A built pack stays click-to-edit sentence by sentence — the figures stay computed from the record and can't be typed over, so the pack can never contradict its own numbers — and because Live reads the same edited pack, a sentence you polish before the meeting shows on stage too.