Your largest client is the one to check first.
Retainer revenue is stable and the team is busy, so nothing looks wrong. Whether the work is profitable depends on hours against fee per client - a number most agencies calculate once a year, after it has already cost them a good quarter.
Three questions an agency rarely gets a straight answer to.
All three need time, scope and invoices to be read as one thing.
What is our real hourly rate per client?
Fee divided by the hours actually spent, including the unlogged ones. Not the rate on the proposal.
Where did scope creep in?
It never arrives as a change request. It arrives as three extra rounds and a standing call nobody scheduled deliberately.
Are we winning the work we are good at?
Which engagement types deliver margin and retention, and which ones you keep saying yes to out of habit.
Revenue flat. Everybody busy. Margin gone.
Three readings from three tools, none of which is alarming by itself.
Illustrative example
- Time tracking
Hours on the largest retainer up 34% over two quarters
Looks like a growing relationship.
- Invoicing
Fee unchanged for eleven months
Looks like a stable client.
- Delivery
Average rounds of revision up from two to five
Looks like a demanding stakeholder.
Your effective rate on that account has fallen from $95 to $71 an hour, below the point where it covers delivery cost. The cause is not the client being difficult - it is an approval step that moved from one stakeholder to three without the fee changing. Reset the round limit in the scope, or reprice, before the next renewal.
Each system was right. Only the three read together turn "our biggest client" into "the account funded by the others".
What Aptic reads in an agency.
Read-only by default, and nothing changes in any of them without your approval.
- Time tracking and project tools: hours, tasks, delivery stages
- Invoicing and accounting: fees, payment timing, cost of delivery
- CRM and pipeline: what you win, what you lose, and how long it takes
- Client communication volume as a signal of scope, not as content to read
Who looks at what first.
All six offices read your business. In agencies and service businesses, these three set the agenda.
Finance
Effective rate per client and per engagement type, and which accounts are subsidising which.
Operations
Where hours actually go, which delivery stages overrun, and what causes rework.
Strategy
Which work to sell more of, which to reprice, and which to stop taking.
What the first thirty days produce.
- 01
An effective rate for every client
Fee against hours actually delivered, ranked. The bottom of that list is normally the surprise.
- 02
A scope-drift report per account
Where the work grew without the fee moving, with the specific stage it started at.
- 03
A repricing or scope-reset plan for the worst two
What to change, what to say, and a check two weeks after the conversation to see whether the hours actually came down.
Find out which accounts are paying for the others.
Aptic is in private beta. Tell us how you deliver and what you have connected, and we will tell you honestly whether it is a fit.