What white-label reporting actually means.

White-label reporting means reports and dashboards delivered under the agency's brand, with the platform that produces them out of sight. It comes in degrees, and the word is used for all of them.

• A logo on the export

  The agency's logo on a PDF or a slide. The lightest version, and the one most tools offer.

• A branded dashboard

  The agency's colours and logo on an interactive dashboard, usually still served from the vendor's address.

• A branded portal on your own domain

  Dashboards served from the agency's own address, under its name, with nothing in the link pointing anywhere else.

A report can be branded and still announce its vendor. Check each of these, because a client notices the one you missed.

• Addresses

  The link a client clicks, and the address an embedded dashboard loads from.

• Email

  Scheduled reports and notifications sent from the vendor's domain rather than yours.

• Login and help pages

  A sign-in screen or a help link carrying the vendor's name and colours.

• Exports

  File names, footers and metadata on downloaded reports.

The relationship is with the agency, and the report is the most regular thing a client receives from it. A report in the agency's name reads as the agency's work, which it is: the analysis and the advice are the agency's even when the plumbing is not.

It is presentation, not secrecy. Plenty of clients know their agency uses tools, and white-labelling does not need to pretend otherwise. What it avoids is the client's attention being drawn to the vendor rather than to the work.

Your brand on the report makes its mistakes yours as well. A wrong figure under your name is your error, whichever system produced it, so the checks behind a report matter more once your name is on it, not less.

It also does not settle who holds the data. If the history lives on the vendor's infrastructure, changing vendor means losing it, whatever name was on the dashboards.

Four, and the last is the one most often skipped.

• Whose domain

  Can dashboards be served from your own address, or only from the vendor's with your logo on top?

• How clients get in

  Can clients log in and see only their own data, can you share a dashboard without a login, and does either one cost a seat?

• Is each client kept separate

  Every report should be scoped to one client's data, so one client's figures can never appear in another client's report.

• What you keep when you leave

  Whether the history sits in your own warehouse or in the vendor's database decides whether it leaves with you.

Custom branding on your own domain is part of the Enterprise plan. On every plan, clients can log in to your portal or receive a shared dashboard, and either way each one sees only their own data.

The data itself sits in your own data warehouse, so the history stays yours whichever name is on the reports, and whichever tool you use next.