True client profitability
Separate pass-through costs from agency revenue to see the margin you actually keep.
Accounting for Agencies
Accounting for agencies, with profit you can actually trust
An agency can look profitable and still lose money on its best clients. Media buys, production, and freelancers often land in revenue. The fee you earned is what’s left. If that split isn’t in front of you every month, you’re pricing and staffing on a guess. Monthly bookkeeping keeps the fee and the pass-through in different accounts. Before you reprice a retainer, look at client profit and cash. Check the months when payroll left the bank before the invoice was paid.
Per-client
Profitability
Pass-through
Cost clarity
Forecasted
Cash flow
How do you track agency revenue and profit?
Revenue tracking for an agency starts when you stop treating pass-through as income. A media buy you place and recharge can sit on the P&L and make the top line look like money you earned. Production invoices do the same thing. So do freelancers you bill through at cost. The number that matters is the fee. Usually a retainer or a project fee. Sometimes a commission. You should be able to tell them apart before anyone talks about margin. Everything else is a clearing item, even when it hits the bank.
Profit is what remains after the people who did the work. Load salary onto the client. Add freelancers. Add the tools you bought for that account. A firm-wide margin will hide the client who keeps everyone busy and still loses money. If the books are months behind, start with a cleanup. You can’t track profit on accounts that don’t reconcile.
OnNumbers keeps this in the books. We don’t score which concept performed, and we don’t replace the project tool your producers already live in. Tie the month back to these numbers. You’ll know which client paid for the team, including months when payroll went out first.
What gets in the way
The problems we see most
- ✕Pass-through media costs distort revenue and hide real margin.
- ✕Client profitability is unclear until a relationship is already underwater.
- ✕Payroll-heavy cost structure makes cash timing hard to predict.
- ✕Reporting is backward-looking, so problems surface too late.
How OnNumbers helps
What changes when you work with us
Project-level visibility
Track cost and profit by client and project, so pricing and staffing decisions are grounded in data.
Cash flow you can see
Live cash visibility, with budgeting and forecasting tuned for payroll-heavy, lumpy agency revenue.
Reporting that drives decisions
Current numbers, delivered on a predictable cadence, so you act early instead of explaining late.
Every plan includes the full platform and core bookkeeping. See exactly what’s included at each plan →
The OnNumbers platform
What changes when the work is visible
The same software your accountants work in is the software you watch. Below is what each part of it actually does for your week, with the capability behind it named underneath.
Live work trackingActive now
- M60%
Mary
Reconciling bank accounts
- JCompleted
John
Reviewing AP
- SOn you
Sarah
Waiting for client invoice
See the work, not just the result.
Log in and watch your accounting team work in real time: who is on what, how far along they are, and what is waiting on you. The end-of-month report stops being a surprise, because you have followed every step to get there.
Month-end stops being a surprise. You can see the close is on track before it’s late, instead of chasing somebody for a status update.
Follow month-end step by step, with a live progress bar covering bank recon, AP, AR, accruals, and sales tax.
Financial Close
Problems surface the day they appear rather than six weeks later, while they’re still cheap to fix.
Structured daily analysis of revenue, cash, runway, and anomalies. You see it the same day, well before month-end.
AI Pulse
Nobody rebuilds the same spreadsheet every month, and you know which numbers moved without having to ask anyone.
Live KPI and KRA dashboards and scorecards, so you can track performance without rebuilding spreadsheets.
KPI Engine
You know today whether your books can be trusted, rather than finding out halfway through a diligence process.
An AI-maintained account health score with open problems and prioritized recommendations.
Review Account
A board or lender request takes minutes. You’re not assembling a deck the night before the meeting.
P&L, balance sheet, cash flow, and trial balance with branded PDF and Excel export.
Reporting Engine
Runway becomes a number you can act on, instead of a spreadsheet cell somebody last touched two months ago.
Budget vs. actual and rolling forecasts tied to your books, so runway decisions use current numbers.
Budget & Forecast
You get the answer without commissioning a report and waiting a week to read it.
AI-powered insight packs for AR, AP, revenue, expenses, and cash. Answers without building reports.
AI Financial Insights
A finance question takes about thirty seconds, rather than three days of email with your bookkeeper.
Ask questions in natural language. AI returns charts, tables, and answers grounded in your data.
Ask AI
You stop paying the same invoice twice. Duplicate payments and unusual vendor activity get flagged the day they land, well before a year-end review would find them.
AI-powered checks for duplicate payments, unusual vendor activity, and risk, surfaced early.
Vendor Compliance
You can see what you actually spend and with whom, instead of four spellings of the same vendor scattered across the ledger.
AI-assisted vendor dedup, enrichment, and risk scoring, with spend visibility and ledger write-back.
Vendor Expense Management
Miscoded and out-of-policy spend gets caught as it lands, so year-end is a close rather than a cleanup project. Every line carries a control on it, and an audit trail behind it.
AI classification suggestions, policy rules, risk scoring, and approvals on GL transactions.
Transaction Assurance
You can answer “how are we doing” on any day of the month, without waiting for the next scheduled report.
On-demand AI-written read of your financial position, key trends, and what to watch. Run it when you need it.
AI Assessment
Essentials, Growth, and Enterprise include every capability above, at no additional cost. See how the platform works →
Ready to see your agency’s numbers clearly?
Show us your current setup and we’ll map out what real visibility would look like for a firm like yours.