Know Which Clients Actually Make You Money
Per-Client Margin Tracking is part of HubWho. Most agencies know their revenue but not their profit. You can see that a client pays you $2,000 a month, but you can't quickly say what's left after the wholesale cost of everything you resell to them — so the client who looks biggest on the invoice might be the one earning you the least. HubWho is built to track true per-client margin: what you bill minus the wholesale or product cost you enter yourself, pulled straight from your real invoice line items. HubWho is pre-launch and opening to a founding cohort of agencies — this describes how the margin tracking is being built to work.
The Problem: Revenue Looks Like Profit Until It Isn't
Agencies bill recurring clients for a stack of services — ad management, listings, review tools, reporting, the software you resell — and a lot of that stack has a real cost behind it. You pay a wholesale rate for the products you mark up and pass through to the client. But that cost lives in one place and the client's invoice lives in another, so the number you actually watch is revenue: the $1,500 or $3,000 they pay you every month.
Revenue is a vanity number. The client paying you the most might be on a thin markup, while a smaller client on services you barely pay for is quietly your best account. Without margin per client, you can't tell them apart — so you discount the wrong accounts, keep unprofitable ones too long, and have no real number when it's time to raise a price or fire a client.
Most agencies try to answer this in a spreadsheet once a quarter, by hand, after the fact. It's stale the moment it's built, it never matches the invoices exactly, and nobody trusts it enough to make a decision on it.
- Revenue is visible everywhere; true profit per client is visible nowhere
- Wholesale and product costs live apart from the invoices, so margin is never reconciled
- The biggest-billing client can be your thinnest-margin client — and you can't see it
- Pricing and discounting decisions get made on gut feel instead of a real number
- Quarterly margin spreadsheets are stale, manual, and never quite match what you billed
- No way to spot a client slipping below an acceptable margin until renewal
How Margin Tracking Works
The margin number starts with a cost you control. On the products and services you resell, you enter your own wholesale or product cost — what the item actually costs you before you mark it up. HubWho stores that cost on the line item, alongside the price you bill. Because the cost rides on the same invoice line as the revenue, every dollar of margin traces back to a specific charge on a specific client's invoice — not an estimate sitting in a separate sheet.
True margin is then simply what you bill minus your cost: the line's price, less your wholesale cost times the quantity. HubWho is built to roll that up per client — across a single invoice, a date window you choose, or the client's full lifetime — and express it both as dollars of margin and as a margin percentage, so a high-revenue, low-margin client and a small, high-margin one are easy to tell apart at a glance.
Margin is computed on demand, when you open the view — not by an overnight batch job. When you ask for top-margin clients this month, or open a client's profile, HubWho reads your live invoice and cost data at that moment and calculates the number fresh. There's no nightly sync to wait on and no risk of looking at yesterday's figures: the margin you see reflects the invoices and costs exactly as they stand right now.
- Enter your own wholesale or product cost on the items you resell — the cost is yours to set, not a third-party feed
- Cost is stored on the invoice line next to the price, so every margin figure traces to a real charge
- True margin = what you bill minus (your wholesale cost × quantity) on each line
- Per-client rollups in dollars and as a margin percentage, so big-revenue and thin-margin clients separate clearly
- Computed on demand from live data when you open the view — not a nightly or automatic batch
- Date-window margin (this month, a quarter, any range you pick) plus lifetime margin per client
What's Being Built In
Margin tracking is designed to sit on top of the same invoices and payments HubWho already runs, so there's nothing separate to maintain. Because billing, the costs you enter, and the margin math all live in one platform, the profit number is built from your real recurring revenue rather than re-keyed into a spreadsheet that drifts out of date. A top-margin-clients view is being built to rank your book by margin percentage over a window you choose, so the accounts quietly carrying your profit — and the ones quietly eroding it — surface on their own.
Each client's own profile is built to show lifetime revenue, lifetime cost, and lifetime margin together, so a renewal or a pricing conversation starts from the actual profit on that account. And because margin is part of the same revenue picture as MRR and churn, it's built to feed the agency dashboard rather than stand off to the side. As a founding-cohort agency you'd be helping shape exactly how these margin views read and roll up before HubWho's public launch.
- Margin built on your live invoices and the costs you enter — no separate spreadsheet to reconcile
- Top-margin-clients ranking over a date window you choose, sorted by margin percentage
- Per-client lifetime view of revenue, cost, and margin together for renewal and pricing calls
- Margin that reads from native subscriptions and the invoices HubWho already bills
- On-demand calculation, so figures are always current when you look
- Founding-cohort access to influence how the margin views and rollups work before public launch
Frequently asked questions
How does HubWho calculate true margin?
True margin is what you bill a client minus your own wholesale or product cost. On the items you resell, you enter the cost it actually costs you, and HubWho stores that cost on the same invoice line as the price you charge. For each line it computes price minus your wholesale cost times the quantity, then rolls that up per client as both dollars of margin and a margin percentage. Every figure traces back to a real charge on a real invoice, not a separate estimate.
Is margin updated nightly or on a schedule?
No. Margin is computed on demand, the moment you open the view — there is no nightly job or automatic batch. When you ask for top-margin clients this month or open a client's profile, HubWho reads your live invoice and cost data right then and calculates the number fresh, so what you see always reflects the invoices and costs exactly as they stand now.
Where does the wholesale cost come from?
You enter it yourself. The wholesale or product cost is a value you set on each item you resell — it's not pulled from any third-party feed. HubWho keeps that cost next to the price you bill so the margin math is built entirely from numbers you control and the invoices you've already issued. HubWho is pre-launch and opening to a founding cohort of agencies; questions go to info@roffik.com.