$2.4M of that was client ad spend you passed through. Your bookkeeper called it revenue. It isn't, and now every number you run the business on is wrong.
We close your books by the 10th, book pass-through properly, and show you which clients actually make money.
Same business. Same $712K of profit. One version tells your bank, your buyer and your tax instalments a story that isn't true.
None of this is exotic. It's just not what a general-practice bookkeeper sees on a Tuesday, so it gets guessed at — and once it's been guessed at for six months, nobody wants to unpick it.
You put $200K of client ad spend on the company card this month. That's not revenue and it isn't your cost. Booked gross with no separation, it distorts every ratio you own and follows you into every conversation with a lender or a buyer.
Separated at the account level in your chart of accounts — not rebuilt in a spreadsheet at year end.
You invoice a 12-month retainer in January and it all lands in January. Your Q1 looks heroic, your Q2 looks like the business is dying, and your bank balance quietly disagrees with both.
A deferred revenue schedule that actually runs monthly, so the P&L matches the work.
Nine 1099s. Three offshore. Two on retainer, four per project, half of them paid through Wise. All coded to "Professional fees" as one lump, so delivery cost is unknowable and January is a scramble.
Contractors split delivery vs overhead, per client, with 1099 and W-8BEN tracked all year.
You bill US clients in USD and pay a Canadian team in CAD. Your gross margin swings four points and nobody can tell you whether that was pricing, delivery, or just the dollar moving.
Multi-currency at the transaction level, with realised and unrealised FX on its own line.
Once pass-through is separated and delivery cost is coded properly, allocating it against fee income per client is just arithmetic. We pull hours from your PM tool, map them to loaded cost, and hand it to you on one page every month.
| Client | Fee revenue | Hours | Delivery cost | Gross profit | Margin |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Northwind Labs | 186,000 | 612 | 91,800 | 94,200 | |
| Beacon Health | 240,000 | 948 | 142,200 | 97,800 | |
| Halcyon RetailUnderwater | 144,000 | 1,019 | 152,850 | (8,850) | |
| Ardent Software | 312,000 | 1,104 | 165,600 | 146,400 | |
| Peregrine Group | 96,000 | 410 | 61,500 | 34,500 | |
| Portfolio | 978,000 | 4,093 | 613,950 | 364,050 |
Illustrative numbers. The shape isn't. In almost every agency book we've opened, one or two accounts are running at or below break-even — and they're rarely the ones the owner would have guessed. Usually it's the oldest logo: priced in 2021, scoped by accretion, never repapered.
Drop in last year's numbers. If you've been running client spend through your own accounts, these two figures are going to be nowhere near each other.
Nothing leaves your browser. No email gate.
You're overstating revenue by $2,428,000. That's 57% of your reported top line — money that was never yours.
No new software to learn, no migration, no login you'll forget. You keep your ledger. We do the work inside it — with AI carrying the volume and a named human signing every close.
Bank and card feeds through Plaid, your ledger, payroll, the payment rails, and your PM tool for hours. Read-only wherever it can be. Half a day of your time, once.
One-time catch-up on whatever's outstanding, then we rebuild the chart of accounts on an agency structure: pass-through, delivery cost and overhead split at the account level, clients as classes. This is the part that makes everything after it possible.
Our matching runs the bank feed against invoices, bills and receipts and codes what it recognises. What it doesn't recognise goes to a human, not to a guess. Reconciliation is binary — it ties out or it doesn't — which is exactly why we can promise the 10th.
P&L, balance sheet, margin by client, deferred revenue and a 13-week cash view. One page you can act on, plus the full set your CPA needs at year end without a single follow-up email.
The machine does the 380 lines it's sure about. A person does the 32 it isn't. That ratio is the whole business model — and it's why this costs what it costs instead of what a full-time hire costs.
You should never get a surprise invoice from your bookkeeper. Tiers are transaction counts across every connected account.
Small shops and solo operators who just need the books right and on time.
The default. Retainers, a contractor bench, and client spend moving through your accounts.
$5M+ shops where the owner has stopped being able to hold cash in their head.
Catch-up work is quoted separately and billed once — most agencies who come to us are three to nine months behind, so assume there's some. No annual contract, 30 days' notice, and you leave with your ledger and every working paper.
Bookkeeping done extremely well for one industry is a real business. Bolting tax and advisory onto it is how firms end up mediocre at three things.
So we're narrow, and we say it before you have to ask. We hand your CPA a clean, closed set of books and the working papers behind them. Don't have one? We'll introduce you to a firm that already knows how agency books are structured — because we structured them.
No. We work inside QuickBooks Online or Xero, whichever you're already on. We're a bookkeeping firm that uses AI internally to go faster and catch more — not a software company trying to drag you onto a new ledger. Your accountant keeps their access, your data stays yours, and if you leave, there's nothing to migrate back.
It does the volume: matching bank feed lines against invoices, bills and receipts, applying coding rules it's learned from your history, and flagging anomalies. It gets no vote on judgement calls. A named bookkeeper reviews every exception and signs the close. Reconciliation has a right answer, which is exactly why it suits this — we can check the machine's work objectively, every single month.
It's most of our intake. Catch-up gets quoted as one piece of work up front, and we'd rather do it ourselves than inherit somebody else's guesswork. The re-chart happens as part of it, so you come out with a clean structure rather than a tidier version of the same mess.
Marketing, creative, digital, dev shops, PR, media buying, design studios and independent consultancies. The practical test: you bill on retainer or project, you run a contractor bench alongside staff, and client money moves through your accounts. Two of those three and your books have the problems we fix.
Because the P&L tells you the business made money and gives you nothing to do about it. Margin by client tells you which account to reprice, which to resource differently, and which to walk away from at renewal. It's the one report every agency owner has wanted and never been handed.
One named bookkeeper who knows your business, with a reviewer behind them. Not a shared inbox, not a rotating pool. You'll know their name before you sign anything.
The four things generic bookkeepers get wrong, explained properly. No gating, no email wall.
The most common error in agency books. Under ASC 606 and IFRS 15 most agencies are agents, not principals — here's the three-part test and what reporting gross actually costs you in a sale.
Read the guide
Five ways the data breaks, what it costs when the underwater account stays invisible, and the minimum standard that makes margin by client trustworthy.
Read the guide
Or see what bookkeeping for a marketing agency actually includes.
A free books review. We take your last three months, run them the way we'd run them, and come back with your real revenue, your real gross margin, and the two or three things your current setup is hiding. No deck. If your books are already clean, we'll say so and leave you alone.
About 40 minutes of your time. One week turnaround.