How do you track true per-client margin at a marketing agency?

Track per-client margin by recording what you bill each client minus your own wholesale or product cost on every service, computed on demand from your real invoices — so your highest-revenue client and your highest-margin client stop looking the same.

Agency revenue is a vanity number. A client paying you $3,000 a month can be your thinnest-margin account if most of it is wholesale cost you pass through, while a smaller client on services you barely pay for is quietly your most profitable. Tracking margin per client — what you bill minus your own cost — is the only way to tell them apart.

Why the answer is what it is

Put your wholesale cost on the line item

For every service you resell, record the wholesale or product cost it actually costs you, stored next to the price you bill. Margin then traces to a real charge on a real invoice, not an estimate in a separate sheet.

Compute it on demand, not quarterly

Margin should be calculated the moment you open the view, from live invoice and cost data — not a nightly batch or a spreadsheet you rebuild every quarter. What you see reflects the invoices exactly as they stand now.

Roll it up per client, in dollars and percent

See margin per client as both dollars and a margin percentage, so a high-revenue low-margin client and a small high-margin one separate clearly.

Surface the accounts eroding your profit

A top-margin-clients view ranks your book by margin, so the relationships quietly carrying — or draining — your profit show up on their own before renewal.

One system, not a side spreadsheet

When billing, the costs you enter, and the margin math live in one platform, the number is built from your real recurring revenue instead of re-keyed into a sheet that drifts out of date.

What to look for

  • A wholesale/product cost field on every service you resell — a value you set, not a third-party feed
  • Cost stored on the invoice line next to the price, so margin traces to a real charge
  • Per-client margin in both dollars and percentage
  • On-demand calculation from live invoices — no nightly batch, no quarterly spreadsheet
  • A top-margin-clients ranking over a date window you choose
  • Lifetime revenue, cost, and margin per client for renewal and pricing calls

Related questions

Is per-client margin the same as revenue?

No. Revenue is what a client pays you; margin is what you keep after your own wholesale or product cost. Two clients paying the same retainer can have very different margins depending on how much is pass-through cost.

Is margin updated nightly or in real time?

Neither — it is computed on demand, the moment you open the view, from your live invoice and cost data. There is no nightly job to wait on, so the figure always reflects the invoices exactly as they stand now.

Where does the cost number come from?

You enter it. The wholesale or product cost is a value you set on each service you resell — not pulled from any third-party feed — so the margin math is built entirely from numbers you control. HubWho is built to track this per client; questions go to info@roffik.com.

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.

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