The short version
- Finance wants four things at month end: attendance, desk utilisation, cost per desk and a clean visitor log
- Trends matter more than snapshots, so report the same numbers the same way every month
- An export from your workplace system beats a hand-built spreadsheet every time, because it is repeatable and nobody argues with it
- The pack should take an hour, not a day
Month end arrives and somebody senior asks how the office is doing. Not how it feels. How it is doing, in numbers. If your answer involves opening six browser tabs and rebuilding a spreadsheet from memory, this one is for you.
A good month-end pack is boring in the best way. Same four sections, same definitions, every month. The value is in the trend line, not the individual figure, and trend lines only exist when the measurement is consistent.
What goes in the pack
1. Attendance
How many people came in, on which days, and how that compares to last month. Finance does not care about individual names here. They care whether the office is being used enough to justify what it costs, and whether the pattern is stable. Peak days matter too: if Tuesday to Thursday are rammed and Monday and Friday are deserted, that shapes everything from catering to cleaning contracts.
2. Desk utilisation
Desk utilisation is the percentage of available desk-days actually used. It is the number that answers the question behind most property conversations: do we have the right amount of space? Across offices generally, around 40% of desk capacity goes unused on average, so do not be shocked if your first honest reading is lower than the office feels. Report bookings and check-ins separately if you can, because the gap between them is your no-show rate, and that is a fixable problem.
3. Cost per desk
Cost per desk is where attendance and property costs meet. Take your total occupancy cost for the month, divide by desks, and then, more usefully, divide by desks actually used. The second number is the one that changes behaviour upstairs. A desk that costs a set amount on paper costs double in practice if it sits empty half the time.
4. Visitor log
A clean visitor log is partly a courtesy figure, showing how busy reception was, and partly a compliance document. Who was on site, when, signed in by whom. When an auditor, an insurer or a fire officer asks, this is the section that has to be right, and it is the hardest one to reconstruct after the fact.
What finance actually does with it
| Your number | Their question | Decision it feeds |
|---|
| Attendance by day | Is the office earning its keep? | Lease renewals, opening days |
| Desk utilisation | Do we have too much space? | Floor consolidation, growth planning |
| Cost per used desk | What does presence really cost? | Budgets, hybrid policy |
| Visitor volume | Are we compliant and covered? | Insurance, front-of-house staffing |
Export, do not rebuild
The difference between an hour and a day at month end is whether the numbers already exist somewhere. If desk bookings, check-ins and visitors all run through one system, the pack is an export with a short commentary on top. If they live in a booking tool, a paper visitor book and a shared calendar, you are the integration layer, and the pack costs you a day of copy-paste plus the credibility risk of a manual error.
This is exactly what HybridHero’s reporting and analytics is built for: attendance, utilisation and visitor data pulled from the same place your team already books desks, exportable in a form you can drop straight into the month-end email.
Pick a cadence and defend it
Send the pack the same day every month, whether or not anyone asked. The first working day after month end works well, while the numbers are fresh and before finance builds their own version from worse data. Consistency is what turns your pack from a curiosity into the accepted source of truth, and the accepted source of truth is a very good thing to own.
Anyone can attach a CSV. The office manager’s edge is the two sentences above it. Utilisation dipped because of half term. Tuesday demand now exceeds capacity, so we are trialling staggered team days. Visitor numbers doubled because of the sales offsite. That context is what turns a report into a decision, and it is the part only you can write.
Build the pack once, template it, and month end becomes an hour of your time. There is more on making the numbers work for you on our office managers page.