Case Study: How a Business Audit and Analytics Implementation Helped a Novosibirsk Law Firm See Its Real Numbers and Regain Control of the Business

Most companies believe they run their business on data.

They have:

• reports;
• spreadsheets;
• graphs;
• KPIs;
• weekly standups.

Everything looks very systematic from the outside.

But in practice, a different situation often arises.

The business isn't running on data.

It's running on reports.

And when reports don't match reality, wrong decisions eventually start being made.

This was the exact challenge brought to us by a law firm from Novosibirsk specializing in personal bankruptcy.

One of the owners' first requests was a deep business audit and the implementation of an analytics system that would show them the real picture of what was happening.

In other words, the owners didn't understand which metrics actually contained their money.

At the time, the company was actively growing.

In operation were:

• a marketing department;
• a sales department;
• a call center;
• a CRM;
• several paid, organic, and referral channels;
• vendors;
• internal management reporting.

But as the company grew, a problem emerged.

Leadership stopped understanding which numbers actually reflected profitability.

Where the Work Began

The owners had a perfectly reasonable question:

We invest large budgets in marketing every month. But can we 100% trust the numbers we see in our reports?

To answer that question, we launched a comprehensive audit of:

• marketing;
• sales;
• CRM;
• financial reporting;
• ad accounts;
• management metrics.

Our task was simple.

Not to find who was to blame.

Not to check on employees.

Not to hunt for errors for the sake of it.

We needed to create a single business management system built on reliable data.

That's when the first questions about the numbers started surfacing.

The deeper we went into the analytics, the more often we encountered situations where the same metrics didn't match across different reports.

At first it looked like ordinary technical discrepancies.

But it soon became clear that the problem was systemic.

Problem #1. Marketing Spend Was Being Understated

The first thing we did was cross-reference:

• the marketing department's reports;
• actual ad accounts;
• the company's accounting records.

And we found systemic discrepancies almost immediately.

Monthly expenses in the marketing reports were significantly lower than the business's actual costs.

In some months, the difference exceeded:

• ₽1,000,000;
• and in some cases reached ₽2,000,000.

The result: owners were making decisions based on data that didn't reflect actual company expenses.

The real cost of client acquisition was significantly higher than what internal reports showed.

Which meant marketing effectiveness looked better than it actually was.

Problem #2. Contract Counts Didn't Match the CRM

The next step was checking sales.

Here the situation was equally striking.

The marketing reports showed one contract count.

The joint marketing-and-sales report showed another.

When we opened Bitrix and started cross-checking actual client statuses, more discrepancies emerged.

Some contracts existed in the reports.

But were absent from the CRM.

Some clients were stuck at intermediate stages.

Some never made it to a signed contract at all.

The result: leadership was evaluating marketing effectiveness using numbers that didn't match actual sales.

Problem #3. The Primary Marketing KPI Was Disconnected from the Business

During the audit, we discovered a metric that was considered one of the marketing department's key KPIs.

It was called:

Lead Relevance.

The logic was simple.

The higher the relevance, the better marketing is performing.

On paper, it sounded reasonable.

But we decided to test it against reality.

We took several advertising sources where relevance in the reports was reaching:

• 90%;
• 95%;
• 100%.

Looking only at the reports, these appeared to be the company's best traffic sources.

But then we opened Bitrix.

And manually checked the fate of every lead and source.

The picture was completely different.

For some sources with 100% relevance scores, we found:

• zero qualified leads;
• zero appointments;
• zero contracts;
• zero sales;
• virtually all inquiries were in statuses like:
• "Junk";
• "Non-target";
• "Error."

In effect, the best-performing source by report turned out to be one of the worst for the business. And advertising was being optimized specifically around this metric.

This is when it became clear:

the company was evaluating marketing by a metric that had no direct connection to money.

The metric looked great.

But it didn't answer the core question:

Is this source generating profit for the company or not?

The Most Dangerous Finding of the Audit

During the data cross-check, we decided to calculate the business economics not from internal reports, but from actual expenses and actual contracts.

As an example, we took one of the company's working months.

December 2025.

Based on internal marketing reports, the picture looked reasonably positive.

Leadership could see that the cost per signed contract was around ₽42,000.

For the personal bankruptcy market, that registers as high but acceptable.

Based on this data, one could draw a logical conclusion:

Marketing is working effectively. We can increase budgets and scale further.

But after cross-referencing:

• ad spend;
• accounting records;
• CRM;
• actual contracts,

the picture changed completely.

We arrived at an entirely different number.

The actual cost per signed contract was over ₽150,000.

Meaning the real client acquisition cost was more than 3.5x higher than the reported figure.

In one of the marketing channels, we identified a monthly budget drain of ₽300,000 over 10 consecutive months with zero contracts to show for it.

Why This Was Critical

The company's average contract value was around ₽200,000.

Now look at the math.

On paper, the business looked like a high-margin operation.

In reality, the company was operating on the edge of breakeven for a significant portion of its paid lead-generation channels.

And some channels were already running at a loss or producing no results at all.

What Would Have Happened Without the Audit

The most dangerous part was that leadership was planning to scale marketing further.

Meaning the company could have increased budgets, believing every additional ruble invested was generating profit.

In practice, the opposite was happening.

Every budget increase in certain channels would have increased losses.

And the owners wouldn't even have seen the problem.

Because the reports kept showing a beautiful cost per engagement of ₽42,000.

This is when it became definitively clear:

the company's primary problem wasn't in the advertising.

The primary problem was in the analytics.

Because it's impossible to effectively manage marketing and business processes when the actual cost per engagement is more than three times higher than what reports show.

Problem #4. Every Department Had Its Own Version of Reality

The most surprising part wasn't even the discrepancies.

The most surprising part was that nobody could answer a simple question:

Which number is correct?

Marketing counted by its own spreadsheets.

Sales by its own.

Finance by its own.

The CRM lived a separate life and nobody knew how — or wanted — to pull numbers from it.

Every department was convinced that its own report was the correct one.

The result: owners weren't managing a system.

They were managing a collection of different versions of reality.

Why This Is Dangerous for a Business

When analytics doesn't match reality, the business starts making wrong decisions.

For example:

• it shuts off profitable channels;
• it scales unprofitable ones;
• it miscalculates ROMI;
• it misjudges employees;
• it allocates budget incorrectly;
• it builds plans based on false data.

The most dangerous part is that everything looks fine on the surface.

There are reports.

There are graphs.

There are KPIs.

There is no actual management.

What We Did

Our task wasn't to produce yet another report.

We needed to create a single system where the numbers actually match reality.

1. Conducted a Full Data Audit

We reviewed:

• CRM;
• ad accounts;
• accounting data;
• internal spreadsheets;
• department reports;
• the sales funnel.

2. Established a Single Source of Truth

We defined the authoritative source for:

• expenses;
• leads;
• appointments;
• contracts;
• payments;
• revenue.

After that, every number had a specific, traceable origin.

3. Set Up End-to-End Analytics

We connected:

• marketing;
• sales;
• CRM;
• financial metrics.

Now the client path looks like this:

Spend → Lead → Qualification → Appointment → Contract → Payment → Revenue

4. Eliminated KPIs for KPIs' Sake

After the audit, we stopped using lead relevance as the primary marketing performance metric.

Instead, we started evaluating channels by metrics that directly affect profitability:

• qualified leads;
• appointments;
• show rates;
• contracts;
• funnel stage conversion rates;
• cost per engagement;
• revenue;
• profit.

After that, many advertising channels looked completely different.

Some sources that were previously considered the best turned out to be unprofitable.

And some undervalued channels were actually delivering strong results.

5. Rebuilt Management Reporting

Instead of dozens of disconnected spreadsheets, we implemented a unified metrics system.

Now leadership can see in minutes:

• how much was spent;
• how many leads were received;
• how many appointments were held;
• how many contracts were signed;
• what the cost per engagement is;
• what the profitability of each channel is.

Results

After implementing the new analytics system, the company got a real picture of the business for the first time.

The owners started seeing:

• real expenses;
• real contracts;
• real marketing metrics;
• real sales metrics;
• the real profitability of each channel.

Reporting discrepancies worth over ₽1–2 million per month were eliminated.

Marketing, sales, and leadership started working from the same numbers.

And for the first time, marketing was evaluated not by impressive-looking report metrics, but by its actual impact on company revenue. In the 4th month after implementing real analytics, the company reached an actual cost per engagement of ₽36,000 against marketing spend.

The Most Important Result

For us, the primary result of this project isn't in the analytics.

It's in the manageability of the business.

Before our work, leadership was making decisions based on data that frequently didn't match reality.

After implementing the new system, the owners gained the ability to make decisions based on facts and actually influence profitability.

This is what enabled the company to see its real growth levers, abandon flawed management decisions, and start evaluating marketing through the lens of profit — not metrics disconnected from money.

Takeaway

Many companies believe they have analytics.

In practice, they have a collection of spreadsheets.

Those are different things.

In this project, we didn't just configure reports.

We helped a Novosibirsk law firm build a unified management system in which:

• expenses match accounting records;
• contracts match CRM data;
• sales match finance;
• marketing is evaluated by profit, not by pretty KPIs;
• leadership makes decisions based on facts, not assumptions.

Because you can't effectively grow a business when nobody knows the real numbers.

If you're making decisions based on reports but aren't confident in the numbers, reach out to IGM. We'll help turn your data into a tool for managing profitability and growing your business.