Receivable days from 18 to 5, and margin visible per project
A project-based studio, engaged January 2025A weekly reporting rhythm, a written follow-up process for late invoices, and per-project margin built from tracked time rather than estimates.
Percentages, multiples, counts and timeframes only. Client revenue, profit and cash figures stay private.
The situation
The studio is project-based, which makes it a harder reporting problem than a retainer shop. Revenue arrives in lumps. Delivery cost is hours, spread across contractors. Whether a given engagement made money is a real question, not a rhetorical one.
The books had been a do-it-yourself job for a long time, then handed to someone else. That arrangement wasn't working. Emails went days without a reply, and the reporting that was supposed to come with it didn't arrive on any rhythm you could plan around.
What they wanted was specific and reasonable: weekly reporting they could count on, and a forecast far enough ahead to see a gap before it arrived. Underneath that, the real goal was simpler. Stop wondering whether something had been forgotten.
We started in January 2025 and took the books over in February.
What we built
A weekly expense and income report
Income, cost of goods sold, total expenses and net income, laid out across four discrete weeks with a four-week total and a four-week average beside three trailing monthly columns. Underneath that, 15 itemised expense lines, from operating payroll and retirement down to continuing education.
The four-week average is the part that earns its place. A single week in a project business is noise. Four weeks with a running average is a signal.
A weekly receivables snapshot, plus the procedure for acting on it
A full accounts receivable aging report gets generated once a week. A simplified snapshot goes straight to the team member who owns follow-up, showing which customers have open invoices, the invoice numbers, the amounts, and how many days past due each one is.
Then the written part, which is what makes it work. Any invoice 10 or more days past its due date triggers a professional reminder email. Every attempt gets logged. Non-responses and disputes escalate to the owner and to us. A Loom walkthrough explains how to read the report, so the process survives the person currently running it.
Not us. Accounts receivable management is excluded from every agreement we write, and deliberately so. We build the report that says who's late and by how much. The studio's own team sends the emails, because a bookkeeper inside your client relationships creates more friction than it removes.
Per-project margin, because they asked for it
In August 2025 the studio told us the single profitability number on the dashboard was "too vague." Fair. It answered whether the business made money and said nothing about which work made it.
we need to know how profitable our contractors are to us.
Owner, project studio
What they wanted was margin per project after contractor hours, rates and tax, and margin per contractor. The reason was specific and a little uncomfortable: a contractor billed as full-time turned out to be working roughly half those hours at the same pay, which made his effective hourly cost far higher than his nominal rate. Nothing in the reporting would have surfaced that.
The mechanism is time tracking. Contractors log hours in Clockify, that feeds into QuickBooks against the right project and customer, and margin gets built from measured time rather than estimates. The finished report carries hours, time cost, fixed cost, invoiced amount, margin and margin percent for every engagement.
A second grid shows margin by client by month across the year, so an engagement going bad shows up in the month it turns rather than at year end.
A monthly performance report over the top
Revenue against target and against the rolling average, operating profit margin, break-even and margin of safety, top ten expense accounts, a three-month expense comparison, operating cash flow, and a combined cash, receivables and receivable-days chart. The operating margin series runs back several years, so the current month has context.
What they wanted from it
Two things from the first call have shaped every deliverable since. One was a design brief, and it is the reason none of these reports is clever: the simpler the system, the easier it is to follow and keep up with.
The other was the actual goal, and it was never a number. It was peace of mind across all the accounts. Everything above is in service of that, which is why the receivables work mattered more than the margin reporting did.
On how the reporting should land, once it existed:
I want it emailed monthly and then I also want access too.
Owner, project studio
What this maps to
- Service: the agency KPI dashboard, and the monthly close underneath it
- OS module: Implementation Checklist, for turning reports into a working cadence
- OS module: Agency Profit Engine, for reading a margin number against a benchmark
Questions
The ones people actually ask on the first callHow do you cut receivable days from 18 to 5?
A weekly aging snapshot plus a written rule about when to act. Any invoice 10 or more days past due triggers a reminder email, every attempt is logged, and non-responses escalate. The reporting is ours and the follow-up is their team, which is the split every one of our agreements sets out.
Why does per-project margin need tracked hours?
Because delivery cost in a project business is time, and estimated time is a guess. Building margin from time entries is what makes the best and worst engagements distinguishable, which is the point of running the report at all.
What does a wide margin range tell you?
Which engagements are subsidising which. A healthy blended average hides the fact that some work is barely worth doing. The spread is more actionable than the average, and it changes which work you chase.
Do the reports only surface good news?
No, and that is deliberate. Anything moving the wrong way sits in the same headline block as the things moving the right way, not in a footnote further down. A report that only shows wins stops getting read, and then it stops being worth producing.
What does the weekly report actually contain?
Income, cost of goods sold, total expenses and net income across four discrete weeks, with a four-week total and a four-week rolling average beside three trailing monthly columns. Under that, 15 itemised expense lines, an open-invoice snapshot and a contractor payments tab.
Next step
A 30-minute call, and you will know whether this fitsMonthly bookkeeping, a Fathom dashboard, and fractional CFO advisory for marketing and creative agencies. Logan works every account, and the rates are published rather than quoted.