How do you bill clients for ad spend pass-through with a markup?

Roll the resold ad spend plus your markup into a single packaged line item the client buys as one charge, set that markup once so it bills the same amount every month, and keep your true wholesale cost in a separate field so margin is tracked without ever being shown to the client. HubWho — a billing and client-operations platform for marketing agencies, currently pre-launch — is built to do exactly this with package pricing, a per-line wholesale cost field, and recurring auto-draft billing.

Passing ad spend through to clients with a markup is one of the messiest parts of agency billing: you front (or relay) the platform spend, add your management margin, and somehow have to invoice cleanly without either exposing your cost or eating the difference when a budget runs hot. The clean way is to stop treating "ad spend" and "your markup" as two separate things on the invoice and instead bill a single packaged price, while keeping your real cost in a private column for margin math. HubWho is a standalone billing and client-operations platform for marketing agencies, built around exactly this workflow. Note: HubWho is pre-launch (waitlist) from Roffik — everything below is what it is designed to do at launch, not a live customer track record.

Why the answer is what it is

Bill it as one packaged line item, not a spend-plus-fee breakdown

HubWho's package catalog lets you bundle the services you resell — including ad management with its spend — into agency-priced packages your clients buy as one line item. Instead of itemizing "$2,000 Google spend + $400 management," the client sees a single clean charge, which is both simpler for them and protective of your pricing.

Set the markup once and bill it on a recurring schedule

The package model is "set the markup once, bill monthly." Define the packaged price a single time, then HubWho's recurring subscriptions auto-draft that amount on schedule via ACH (Plaid bank-link), card, or Apple Pay — no manual billing run each month, no re-keying the markup.

Keep your true cost in a private wholesale-cost field

Every invoice line item carries a wholesale cost field that tracks your margin without exposing it to the client — your real cost in one column, what you bill in another. That is the mechanism that makes pass-through-with-markup honest internally and invisible externally.

Define the resold service once with price, cost, and margin

Products and packages are defined once with price, wholesale cost, and margin, then reused across quotes, invoices, and recurring subscriptions. You configure the marked-up ad-management offering a single time and apply it to every client who buys it, rather than rebuilding the math per invoice.

Check whether the markup is actually holding, per client

Per-client margin tracking compares your own wholesale cost against what you bill — per client, per service, on demand — so you can spot a relationship where rising spend has quietly eroded your markup. (On demand means you pull it when you want it, not a real-time or nightly feed.) That's how you catch an underpriced ad-management package before it costs you a year.

Watch the spend that drives the bill before month-end

Because the markup rides on real ad spend, pacing matters. HubWho tracks each client's spend across Google, Meta, Microsoft, Yelp, LinkedIn, and TikTok against per-platform budgets and flags who's projected to overspend before month-end, and the AI daily brief surfaces budget-runs-hot and overspend signals each morning with a next action. AutoPilot surfaces rebalance recommendations you review and apply — HubWho never touches your ad accounts.

What to look for

• Bundle resold ad management + spend into one agency-priced package, not a spend-plus-fee breakdown
• Set the markup once on the package, then bill it monthly
• Enter your real platform cost in the per-line wholesale cost field so the client never sees it
• Define the offering once with price, wholesale cost, and margin and reuse it across clients
• Put recurring billing on auto-draft (ACH via Plaid, card, or Apple Pay) so the marked-up amount collects itself
• Pull per-client margin on demand to confirm the markup is holding as spend changes
• Track spend vs. per-platform budgets and watch pacing flags so overspend doesn't quietly eat your margin
• Review the AI daily brief each morning for budget-runs-hot signals tied to a next action

Related questions

Will the client see my actual ad-spend cost or my markup?

No. HubWho keeps your real cost in a per-line wholesale cost field that tracks margin without exposing it to the client, and the package catalog lets the client buy the marked-up service as a single line item — so they see one price, not your cost-plus math.

Do I have to re-enter the markup every month?

No. The package model is set-once, bill-monthly: you define the marked-up package a single time and recurring subscriptions auto-draft that amount on schedule via ACH (Plaid bank-link), card, or Apple Pay, with no manual billing run.

How do I know my markup is still profitable as a client's spend grows?

HubWho's per-client margin tracking compares your wholesale cost against what you bill, per client and per service, on demand. Paired with spend pacing that flags projected overspend before month-end, you can catch a package whose markup has eroded before it costs you.

How Roffik addresses this

Billing, ACH and card payments, recurring subscriptions, per-client margin tracking, and branded client portals for marketing agencies — built on Midnight + cyan. Learn more about HubWho.