A digital agency bills two ways at once: a monthly retainer that should never need chasing, and project work that has to be scoped, tracked and invoiced. Invoice Crowd runs both from one account, with the ledger underneath.
What is inside
Retainer income should arrive without anyone raising it. Project income has to be quoted, staffed and tracked. The same account handles both, and the books keep up with each.
Set the schedule once, then stop touching it
Set a recurring profile per client, with its own amount, currency, cycle and start date, and the invoice goes out on schedule whether or not anyone remembers it. Reminders chase what is unpaid and late fees apply on the terms you set, so a retainer that slips is caught before it becomes a quarter.
Most agency retainers are a fixed bundle: so many hours of strategy, a content run, a reporting call. Save that bundle as a package and it drops into a proposal or an invoice as one line with the parts still underneath, priced the same way for every client on the same tier.
From the pitch to the last hour logged
New project work starts as a proposal: scope, phases, price and terms, signed in the browser rather than printed. What the client accepts is what carries into the invoice, so the number on the first bill matches the number they agreed to.
Projects hold the work and the timesheet holds the hours. Team members log time against the project they are on, so when a client asks what the retainer actually covered last month there is a record rather than a reconstruction from calendars and memory.
Who can open what, and what it all adds up to
Bring account managers, designers and a bookkeeper into the same account and give each of them a role that limits what they can open and change. TEAM includes two members and BUSINESS three, and anyone beyond that is five dollars a month.
Under the invoicing sits a double-entry ledger with a chart of 165 accounts already built. Contractor bills, software subscriptions and studio costs post into it alongside the revenue, so profit and loss shows the agency's real position rather than a sum of what was billed.
Why agencies consolidate
Agencies usually end up with a proposal tool, an invoicing tool and a bookkeeping tool, plus somebody whose afternoon goes on moving numbers between them.
The document you pitched with, the invoice it became and the ledger entry behind it are three views of one record, not three exports to reconcile.
Business profiles keep separate branding, customers and books under one subscription: one profile on SOLO, two on PRO, five on TEAM and ten on BUSINESS.
PayPal, Stripe, Razorpay, Square, Payoneer, Braintree, Authorize.net, Airwallex, GoCardless, PayFast, PayTabs, Telr, PhonePe and M-Pesa, with split and partial payments when a project is billed in stages.
Bill an overseas client in their currency and still read the agency's revenue in yours, because the ledger holds base-currency values.
Also included
The parts of agency admin that usually end up in a spreadsheet, a shared drive or somebody's inbox.
Clients approve proposals, download invoices and pay in one place instead of a mail thread.
Approve an estimate and the invoice writes itself from the same lines, taxes included.
10+ gateways so the client pays on the invoice rather than through a bank transfer form.
Bill a project in stages: deposit up front, balance on delivery, both against one invoice.
Chase an overdue retainer automatically and apply the late fee your contract already allows.
Log contractor invoices and software costs with the receipt attached to the transaction.
Record what freelancers and suppliers charge you against the projects they worked on.
Push agency data into the 5,000+ apps Zapier reaches, or automate through Pabbly Connect.
Aged debt, income, expense and GST filing, on screen or emailed on a schedule.
One record per client holds the contacts, currency, terms and every document ever raised against them.
Set a spend budget per ledger account, then read it against what the agency actually posted.
A content library keeps reusable sections, and 40+ proposal templates give the document a starting shape.
Questions
Yes. A recurring profile holds the client, the amount, the currency and the cycle, and raises the invoice on that schedule without anyone opening the app. Reminders go out if it is unpaid, and late fees apply on the terms you set.
SOLO and PRO include no extra team members, TEAM includes two and BUSINESS three, with further members at five dollars a month each. Everyone you add gets a role, so you decide who can open the ledger and who only sees their own work.
Yes. Projects and a timesheet are part of the same account, so hours are logged against the project they belong to rather than in a separate tracker. That leaves you a record of what a retainer month actually contained when a client asks.
Yes. Invoice in the client's currency and report in your base currency, because the ledger stores base-currency values and the statements follow them. GST-enabled invoices and a GST filing report are there for the jurisdictions that need them.
Yes, through business profiles. Each profile keeps its own branding, customers and books, and you switch between them from a single login without paying for a second subscription. SOLO includes one profile, PRO two, TEAM five and BUSINESS ten.
Thirty days, with no credit card. That is long enough to run a full retainer cycle: raise the recurring invoices, send a proposal, log some hours and see what the reports look like at month end. Plans start at ten dollars a month.
Set the recurring profiles up once, scope the project work in a proposal, and let the ledger keep pace with both.
