You find out a project lost money once it is too late to act.
Hours live in one tool and the fee lives in another, so profitability is a month-end discovery rather than a working number. By the time anyone compares them the project is delivered and the lesson has no project left to apply to.
What changes for agencies and consultancies
- Project margin visible during the project, not after it
- Retainer overruns caught in week two rather than at month end
- Client sign-off with a name and a timestamp against it
- Time logged as work happens instead of reconstructed
What goes wrong in agencies and consultancies
An agency's tool stack accumulates sensibly — a tracker, a timesheet, a chat tool, a drive, an invoicing app — and every one of them is a reasonable choice. What none of them holds is the relationship between effort and fee, which is the only number that determines whether the agency is a business or a hobby. It gets assembled by hand, quarterly, by someone senior.
Retainers are the sharpest version. Remaining hours are worked out on request, so scope creep is discovered at month end instead of in week two, when the conversation would have been easy. And because approvals live in chat threads, a disputed deliverable becomes an argument about memory rather than a look at a record.
What this usually runs on today
- Trello, Asana or a spreadsheet for projects
- A separate timesheet nobody fills in daily
- Slack or WhatsApp for approvals and sign-off
- Drive folders for deliverables
- An invoicing app with numbers copied in by hand
Recognise most of that list? It is the usual starting point.
What we build for agencies and consultancies
The pieces specific to this pairing. Each is quoted separately, so you can start with one and see whether it earned its cost before committing to the next.
- 01
Margin visible while the project is running
Logged time and cost joined to the fee on one screen, updating as work happens. The point is not the report at the end; it is being able to change course in week three.
- 02
Retainer burn-down, including the client's view
Hours used against hours bought, live, and shown to the client in their own login. Scope conversations happen early and with a number in front of both parties, which is what makes them survivable.
- 03
Approvals with a name and a timestamp
Deliverables go out for review with a real approve action rather than a thumbs-up in a thread. The audit trail exists because the workflow produced it, not because somebody kept screenshots.
- 04
Time capture that people actually complete
Logging against the project you are already looking at, in seconds, on a phone. A timesheet filled in on Friday for the whole week is fiction, and fiction is what the margin numbers are currently built on.
Questions we get asked about this
We like our project tool. Do we have to give it up?
Often not, and that is usually the cheaper answer — see the integration version of this page. Building makes sense when the thing you need is the join between time, fee and approval, and no combination of your tools will hold it. If your stack is fine and only the gaps hurt, connect them instead.
Our team resists timesheets. How is this different?
It is different only if logging takes seconds and happens where the work already is. Resistance to timesheets is almost always resistance to a separate tool and a weekly reconstruction, not to the idea of recording time. If a system needs discipline to produce accurate numbers, it will not produce accurate numbers.
Can clients see our internal notes and costs?
No. Cost, margin and internal commentary sit on the agency side of a boundary the system enforces; the client sees status, deliverables, approvals and their retainer position. Nothing about what the work costs you is one mis-click away from being visible.
Zoom out
Want to know what this would involve for your agency?
Forty-five minutes on how your operation actually runs, then a written summary of what we would fix first. Free, and yours to keep.