Sistava

Capacity and Profitability by Client

AI for Agencies

Find out which client is actually losing you money

Most agencies know their overall margin and very few know it per client. The account everyone dreads is often the one quietly absorbing double the hours it was priced for.,Your employee pulls time, delivery, and fee data together per client so profitability stops being a feeling and becomes a number.,It also watches capacity forward, so the decision about whether to take the next project is made against real availability rather than optimism.

Benefits

How It Works

  1. Step 1:
  2. Step 2:
  3. Step 3:
  4. Step 4:

At a Glance

Per client
Margin, not just overall
Live
Scope creep while it happens
Forward
Capacity against commitments
Early
Before renewal, not at it

Overall Margin Hides the Problem Account

An agency running at a healthy blended margin can comfortably contain one account losing money, and usually does without knowing. The good clients subsidise it, the aggregate looks fine, and nobody investigates a number that is not alarming. Meanwhile the team knows exactly which account is painful, because they live it, and that knowledge never becomes a commercial decision because it is a feeling rather than a figure. Per-client profitability turns a widely held sentiment into something that can actually be acted on.

Scope Creep Is Made of Reasonable Requests

No client sets out to extract free work. Scope creep is built entirely from small, reasonable-sounding asks: a quick extra version, a small addition, one more round because something changed on their side. Each is easy to absorb and refusing any single one would seem petty. The problem is only visible in aggregate, months later, when an account priced for forty hours is consuming seventy. Catching it requires tracking the absorbed requests as they happen rather than reconstructing them afterwards, by which point the pattern is established and much harder to reset.

Capacity Decisions Made on Optimism

The question of whether to take on the next project is usually answered by how the pipeline feels rather than by what is actually committed. Agencies say yes because saying no to revenue is hard and because the delivery pain is in the future and abstract. Then the month arrives and the team is over capacity, quality slips across every account rather than just the new one, and the cost of the yes lands on clients who had nothing to do with it. A forward view of committed work against real availability does not make the decision, but it does make it an informed one.

FAQ

Do we need time tracking for this?

Some form of it, yes. If your team does not track time at all, the profitability half is guesswork and it will say so rather than producing a confident number from nothing. Even rough tracking is enough to surface the account that is dramatically off.

What if we do not want to be a time-tracking agency?

That is a legitimate position and plenty of good agencies hold it. The trade is that you give up per-client profitability as a measurable thing and manage it by judgement instead. Worth choosing deliberately rather than discovering later.

Can it tell us to fire a client?

It can show you that an account is unprofitable and by how much. Whether to fix the scope, raise the fee, or end the relationship depends on things a number does not capture: the referrals, the portfolio value, the relationship. That call is yours.

How early can scope creep be caught?

As soon as extra requests start being absorbed, which is typically long before anyone frames it as a problem. That is the useful moment, since a scope conversation in month two is routine and the same conversation at renewal feels like an accusation.