Advertising agency project management: a buyer's guide

Key takeaways

• An agency tool has five jobs: show what needs attention across every client, move client approvals along, track retainers, collect billable hours, and turn those hours into invoices and profit figures.
• Score each tool out of 100 on five weighted criteria. Any score above 3 out of 5 needs evidence from a trial, not a demo.
• Two tools can score the same total for different reasons. Read the scores against the job that stalls your work most.
• Run the trial with one real client and one live retainer. A clumsy experience for the client sinks adoption whatever the internal features are.
• A tool has failed when hours, follow-ups or profit figures live in a spreadsheet beside it.

What should an agency’s project management tool handle?

For an agency of two to twenty people working for several clients at once, the tool has five jobs. It shows you what needs attention across every client. It gets client approvals moving without you chasing them. It tracks each retainer against its scope. It collects the hours people work. And it turns those hours into invoices and tells you which projects made money. Miss one, and that job moves into your inbox and a spreadsheet.

Generic task tools handle the first job well and leave the money jobs to something else. Agency tools such as Productive, Teamwork.com, Scoro and Accelo sell time tracking and billing alongside their project views. Pricing for all of them depends on plan and headcount, so check each vendor’s own pricing page when you shortlist.

How is agency work different from other project work?

The person who unblocks the work is often the client

Generic tools assume everybody with a say sits on your team. In client work, the person who can unblock a task is often outside it. Approvals, feedback rounds and follow-ups end up in email threads instead of on the task, and the owner holds it all together by memory. The tool has to make that waiting visible, or it is not tracking the work that actually stalls.

Retainers do not end

Generic tools treat a project as something with an end date. A retainer has none. Its hours reset each month, and the work done against them has to be counted every month. Without that, you cannot see which clients pay for themselves and which quietly use up more of the team than they buy.

What matters for client approvals and feedback?

Approvals are where agency work waits longest, so test them hardest. Look for three things: a clear approval state on each deliverable, a dated record of who approved what, and some way of seeing which clients have gone quiet.

What the client sees

Some tools give clients a read-only view of progress. Others give them a login, so they comment on the work itself instead of replying to an email. Either way, prefer a tool where you decide what each client sees, so internal notes and costs stay internal.

Feedback tied to a version

Feedback has to point at a specific draft, or “which version did you mean?” threads multiply. Check that comments attach to the file or task, that earlier versions keep their history, and that a sign-off is recorded somewhere you can find later.

How do you test a tool against retainers and billable hours?

Most agencies live on retainers, so test that first. Set up a retainer with a fixed number of hours a month and check whether the tool shows how much of it is used: hours logged this month, hours left, and what happens when they run out. If you need a spreadsheet beside the tool to see that, it has failed the test.

What happens at the limit

Ask what the tool does when somebody logs time on a retainer that is already used up. Does it warn the person before they log it? Does it tell you? Some tools block the time outright, which sounds safe and usually means the hours get logged somewhere wrong instead. A warning that lets the person carry on, and tells you, keeps the record honest.

From timesheet to invoice without retyping

Run one full cycle. Log two hours of client work, review them, and turn them into an invoice line. If the hours have to be typed again into your invoicing tool, the tool fails this test. Profit per project depends on that chain staying intact, because the same hours are the cost on one side and the revenue on the other. Our guide to calculating billable hours covers what to bill and how to price it.

A 100-point rubric for agency tools

The five criteria and their weights

Weight each criterion by how much it decides whether client work ships and gets paid. These weights suit an agency whose work mostly waits on clients. Change them if yours does not, but agree them before you look at any tool.

How to score

Score each criterion from 0 to 5. A 0 means the feature is missing. A 3 means it exists but needs workarounds. A 5 means it works the way your team would use it every day. Multiply each score by its weight, divide by 5, and add the five results. A tool that scores 5 on everything gets 100.

Any score above 3 needs evidence from a trial, not a demo. Run one real retainer client and one fixed-fee project through the tool for two weeks before you write it down.

A worked example: two tools, one total

Both tools score 72, and they are not the same tool. Tool A is stronger on hours and profit. Tool B is stronger on approvals and retainers. If your work stalls waiting on clients, Tool B is the better pick. If your hours never make it to an invoice, Tool A is. The total narrows the list. The shape of the scores decides.

Where does Projectous fit?

Apply the same rubric to us. Here is what Projectous does against each criterion, so you know what to test in a trial.

What it does

• Retainers. A retainer contract has hours per month or per week. The contracts list and each timer show how much is used. Logging time on a contract that is already over asks the person to confirm, and the admins are told. It does not chart a retainer’s use over the month.
• Billable hours. Each time entry is billable or not, time can be reviewed before it is billed, and invoices are built from the tracked hours. The billed time can differ from the time worked, so a write-off is visible.
• Profit per project. The Profitability report shows each project’s invoiced revenue, minus the cost of the hours worked on it, minus its expenses.
• Visibility. Home shows, across every client, what is overdue, what is blocked, who is waiting on you, which clients’ hours have dropped, and which invoices are overdue.
• Follow-ups. Overdue invoice reminders can email the client at 7, 14 and 30 days past due. A connected mailbox tells you when a client has not answered a question you sent.

Where it falls short

Approvals are the gap. You can invite somebody at the client as a guest on a project. They see only that project, talk to you in the client’s own room on each task, and never see money or your team’s internal discussion. But there is no approval state on a deliverable and no record of who signed off on what. If your process depends on formal sign-off stages, Projectous will need a workaround, and you should score it that way.

It is also lighter on reporting than the bigger suites, and it is built for teams of two to ten. At twenty people or more, with dedicated operations staff, it will feel light.

When a bigger tool is more than you need

Productive, Teamwork.com, Scoro and Accelo cover more of the rubric. The cost is setup: modules, onboarding and admin work that a five-person studio may never earn back. If you are comparing, our comparisons set Projectous against each of them.

What should you test in a trial?

Run every trial through the same three tasks, so the results compare.

1. Recreate one live client project, with real tasks, real deadlines, and the people who will actually work on it. A demo project built from made-up data hides exactly the friction you are looking for.
2. Log hours for two people across a full week. Check that billable hours add up per project, that reviewing them saves work rather than adding it, and that they reach an invoice line without anybody retyping them.
3. Leave something waiting on the client, and an invoice past due, and see whether the tool brings them to you without you going looking.

Write down how many minutes each step takes. If a step takes longer in the tool than it did before, the tool failed that step.

Bring in one client

Invite one real client into the trial and push one piece of work through to their approval. Watch how their feedback arrives, whether revisions cause confusion, and whether the tool removes emails or adds them. If the client finds it clumsy, they will go back to email, and the tool fails however good it is inside.

When does a generic tool stop working for an agency?

When it tracks tasks but not client work. If you can see what is due today but not which client is unprofitable, which retainer is nearly used up, or which invoice is three weeks overdue, the tool has stopped matching the business.

The spreadsheet beside the tool

The surest sign is a spreadsheet kept next to the tool, for who has paid, who needs a reminder, and how many retainer hours are left. If hours, follow-ups and profit figures live outside the tool, you’re paying for software that does half the job. Chasing overdue invoices by hand is usually the first half to move out.

How do you run the evaluation with your team?

A two-week timeline

• Days 1 to 3: pick two tools and set up the same live client project in each, with a retainer, tracked hours and one approval pending.
• Days 4 to 11: run real work through both, including one invoice built from that week’s hours and one follow-up to the client.
• Days 12 to 14: score both tools against the rubric, with the people who will use them every day.

Weigh adoption over features

A tool your team ignores is worse than a simpler one they open every morning. Also test what happens when you stop paying attention. Does stalled work come to you on its own, or only when you check a dashboard? If the owner is still the one holding it all together, the tool has not solved the problem.

Questions people ask

Do I need separate tools for time tracking and invoicing?

Not for a small agency, and one tool is usually better. The point is that tracked hours become invoice lines without retyping, so profit per project stays accurate. If you do use two tools, check that the hours move between them on their own. Our guide to time tracking tools has a test for that handoff.

How much should a small agency spend per person?

There is no fixed number, and prices change, so check each vendor’s current pricing page. Judge the price against the jobs the tool does. A cheaper tool that leaves billing to a spreadsheet can cost more in unpaid admin than a dearer one that handles the whole chain. Our prices are on the pricing page.

How do I get clients to use the tool instead of email?

Make it the easiest way to reply. Show clients only what concerns them, invite one during the trial, and watch how they respond. If replying in the tool takes more steps than replying to an email, they will use email.

Should a retainer stop work when its hours run out?

Usually not without a conversation. Agree in the contract what happens at the limit: extra hours at the same rate, a top-up, or work rolling into next month. Then make sure the tool tells you before the limit, so you have that conversation early rather than at invoice time.