How to Build and Maintain a QBR Archive for Every Client

Each quarterly business review (QBR) you perform summarizes the performance of your managed service provider (MSP), its effectiveness, and the status of your ongoing relationship with your client. A QBR archive allows you to revisit the documents from these reviews, compare them to ensure continued growth and success, and guide future decisions.

This guide explains how to build and maintain a QBR archive for your clients, and technologies that can enable this.

Why you need a QBR archive

QBRs are one of the most important things you can do to improve and maintain client relationships. A QBR is a three-monthly review of your business relationship and the activity undertaken by your MSP in the period. It effectively distills the events and progress of the previous period, making it a practical summary of the value you’ve provided, and where you can improve.

Rather than treating QBRs as once-off events, maintaining a QBR archive takes this distilled information and stores it for long-term use. This is instead of sifting through historical information each time you need to assess the long-term performance of the MSP you operate. A QBR archive creates a reliable knowledge base that highlights what’s important to your client, and makes sure insights, accountability, and deferred tasks are not lost between meetings.

What’s in a QBR archive, and what you need to build one

A QBR archive provides a centralized, long-term record of the promises and commitments you as an MSP have made to your clients, the progress of goals set during previous QBRs, and evidence of compliance and audit-readiness. It will help you identify trends in client needs and usage, and whether your service is meeting them. The systematic archiving of QBR documents turns these once-off meetings into the foundation for a strategic, forward-thinking governance framework.

To implement a QBR document archive, you’ll need:

• Standardized QBR agenda template (including service metrics, project updates, roadmap items, and budget planning)
• A centralized repository (SharePoint, IT Glue, Confluence, NinjaOne Docs, or CRM)
• Defined QBR cadence (quarterly or semiannual, depending on client agreement)
• Tagging or indexing system for easy retrieval (client name, quarter, or year)

Step 1: Standardize the QBR document template

A standardized QBR document format will ensure that different factors and metrics can be directly compared across your historical archive. Include things such as:

• Executive summary: Key wins, challenges, next priorities
• Metrics overview: Ticket volume, SLA performance, device growth
• Projects and roadmap: Delivered vs. planned initiatives
• Risks and issues: Compliance gaps, refresh needs, security posture
• Action items: Assigned responsibilities and timelines

Your template should be tailored per-client to address what matters to their unique IT requirements and business outcomes. The templates should not be too rigid, and leave room for addressing and documenting once-off or unexpected issues. These templates can also be evolved over time.

Step 2: Choose a QBR document archive system

Choose a platform for storing QBR archives that is accessible to both internal staff and client-facing account managers. Options include:

• Documentation system (for example, IT Glue, Confluence, or NinjaOne Docs)
• Client-specific folders in SharePoint or Google Drive
• CRM-based QBR records linked to client profiles

Role-based access control should be implemented for QBR documents that contain sensitive information.

Step 3: Automate collection of QBR inputs

Filling out a QBR can be assisted with automation by pulling ticket data, SLA metrics, and endpoint status and automatically populating fields in documents. Files containing additional detailed information and context, such as log files or raw data, can also be attached.

Prefilling QBR document drafts will reduce preparation time before meetings, and ensure accuracy and consistency.

Step 4: Build a cross-quarter timeline

Establish continuity between documents in your QBR archive by carrying forward unresolved action items and tracking project milestones across quarters. Use your QBR archive to identify trends and include them in the current report.

Consider adding a section to your QBR template to record insights when comparing previous reports. An effective format for this is a timeline for significant metrics that can be presented to your client.

Step 5: Include client feedback and sign-off

You should also make sure that your QBR document template includes room for valuable client feedback and sign-off, including summaries of verbal feedback or meeting minutes, and optional surveys where quantified answers are given.

Topics to cover can include objections to plans, budget constraints, and deferred initiatives.

Step 6: Review and audit the archive annually

Review your QBR archive (at least) annually for all of your MSPs clients. This allows you to identify recurring risks and patterns across your entire client base that may not be visible when analysing the QBR history of a single client. Compile a summary report and use your findings to improve QBR templates, governance processes, and your overall MSP strategy.

NinjaOne provides tools that strengthen MSP/Client relationships

NinjaOne Documentation provides a secure platform for creating, storing, and sharing documents with clients. It can act as an internal knowledgebase for technical information about your clients IT systems, as well as an external resource for documents that enables transparency and enhances client communication.

This robust documentation comes as part of a comprehensive MSP platform that also includes ticket desk, flexible automation, asset management, monitoring and remote access, and endpoint protection integration – everything your MSP needs to provide best-in-class ITSM for any industry.