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A monthly marketing review should take under an hour and end with a short list of things you are actually going to change. Too often it becomes either a skipped diary entry or a long scroll through dashboards that nobody quite understands. The fix is not more data. It is fewer numbers, recorded in the same way each month, with a plain-English note about what caused the movement. Here is how to build that report for a small UK business, using tools you already have.

Start with the decisions, not the data

Before you open anything, write down the three or four decisions you make most often. Typical ones for a small business include: how much to spend on advertising next month, which service or product to push, whether to take on another member of staff, and whether a particular channel is worth carrying on with. A report is only useful if it helps you answer one of those questions. Anything that does not feed a decision is clutter, however interesting it looks.

Pick five numbers and stick to them

Aim for one number in each of four areas: how many people found you, how many got in touch, how many bought, and what it cost to win that business. In practice, five measures will cover most small firms:

• Reach: website sessions, profile views, or enquiries from your local listing, depending on where your customers actually find you.
• Enquiries: the total number of phone calls, form fills, messages and walk-ins that asked about a job.
• Conversion rate: enquiries that turned into paid work, expressed as a percentage.
• Average order value: total revenue divided by the number of jobs or sales, so you can see whether you are winning better work or just more work.
• Cost or time invested: pounds spent on promotion, plus an honest note of the hours you put in. A channel that brings in work but eats two days a month is not the bargain it first appears.

Five is the limit. If you cannot explain a number to a colleague in one sentence, it does not belong on the page.

Record it in the same place, on the same day

Build one simple spreadsheet: months down the side, your five numbers across the top, and a wide notes column on the right. Fill it in on the first working day of each month, at roughly the same time, using a full calendar month rather than "the last 30 days". Rolling windows drift, and a drifting comparison will have you chasing a fall that never happened. A calendar month also matches your bookkeeping, which makes the figures easier to check.

Keep the source of each number written in a comment or a second tab, so that anyone covering for you can find it. Ten minutes of tidying now saves an hour of confusion in six months.

Where the numbers come from

Most of what you need is already sitting in accounts you log into every week:

• Your website analytics for sessions, top pages and which channel sent the visitor.
• Your social and listing insights for reach, profile views and messages started.
• Your email tool for list size, open rate and clicks, if you send a regular newsletter.
• Your enquiry log — even a shared inbox folder or a notebook will do — for calls and form fills.
• Your invoicing or accounting software for jobs won and total revenue.

If a figure takes more than ten minutes to dig out, replace it with one you can grab quickly. A rough number you collect every month beats a perfect number you collect twice a year.

The notes column is where the value sits

Numbers tell you what happened. Notes tell you why, and the why is what you act on. Keep them short, dated and factual: "Half-term week — enquiries down about a third." "New signage on the van from 12 March." "Raised prices on 1 April." "Ran the local paper advert for the first time." Do not write essays and do not edit yourself. Two or three lines a month is plenty, and after a year you will have a record of your own marketing that no dashboard can give you.

End with two actions, not ten

Finish every review by choosing a maximum of two changes: one thing to keep doing because it is working, and one thing to test next month. Write them at the bottom of the page with an owner and a date. "Ask every new customer how they heard about us — starts Monday." "Pause the paid social spend for four weeks and see whether enquiries hold up." Two actions a month is twenty-four improvements a year, which is far more than most small businesses manage.

Keep the whole thing to one page. Print it if that helps it get read. The point is not to become a marketing analyst — it is to notice what changed, understand roughly why, and make one or two better decisions with the time and money you have.