Your team is paid on the last Friday. Your clients pay on their own schedule.
A marketing, creative or digital agency carries its clients: the people are paid before the work is approved, and sometimes the media is too. So the owner’s week turns on three questions — is the cash there for payroll and the freelancers, are the retainers still paying for the hours, and which clients are paying late. CeoDash answers them from the files you already have, and the first figures show in minutes. Fully connected takes about a day.
The team is paid this month for work the client pays for next quarter
Salaries and freelancers leave on fixed dates. A campaign is invoiced on delivery, approved after a round of comments and paid on the client’s own cycle. When you also front media or production costs for a client, the agency is lending money it does not have.
Retainers that stopped covering the hours
A retainer agreed two years ago still pays the same, while the people who service it cost more and the client asks for more. Nobody decided to cut the margin on that account. It eroded one extra round of revisions at a time.
One client leaving is a staffing decision
When a large account goes quiet, the people who worked on it are still on payroll. Whether to keep them for the next pitch or let them go is a cash question with a date on it, and it is usually answered by instinct.
Four questions an agency owner answers every week
Three are answered from your books today. The fourth needs timesheets, and we say where they live.
Is there enough cash for payroll and the freelancers?
A rolling 13-week cash forecast from your opening cash, your budget or last closed months, and the real timing of what clients owe you and what you owe. It names the week the gap opens and says whether it closes on invoices already issued or only if the pitch you are waiting on is won and paid on time.
Is the retainer still worth what it costs to service?
Gross margin and its trend from your own books, month by month, so the moment salary rises overtake your fees is visible while you can still reprice at renewal. Ask the AI CFO in words why margin moved and the answer names the figures it used and their source.
How many people can the account list carry?
Hours per client, utilisation and margin by account are computed from timesheets, and timesheets live in your time-tracking or project tool. CeoDash does not replace that tool and does not guess hours from the ledger. From the books it shows the money side: what has to be billed, and by when, to keep the team covered.
What do you show your partners or the bank?
A board pack generated from the same live numbers, plus a revocable read-only link you can hand to a partner or a lender without giving them an account. The story you tell outside is the one you run on inside.
Reprice at renewal with the number in front of you
The time to raise a fee is before the renewal is signed, and the evidence is the margin you have lost since the last one.
Agencies rarely lose money on a single bad project. They lose it on good clients whose fees stood still while the team’s salaries did not. CeoDash puts the agency’s margin on a monthly line from your own books, so the drift has a start date and a size you can point to when a retainer comes up for renewal. Pair it with the hours from your timesheets and you have the account-level picture for the conversation. Without them, you still know the direction, and the cash forecast tells you how much room you have to hold your price while the client thinks about it.
Start with a file, connect later
Uploading a CSV or Excel export is free and needs no card. Connect your tools when you want the numbers to refresh without a file. Every name below is live.
- Financial CSV
- Bank statement
- PostgreSQL (read-only)
- Google Calendar
- Gmail
- Manual Google export
- Jira
- Linear
- Manual task import
- Roster upload
- HubSpot
- Client list (CSV)
- Pipeline / Deals CSV
We already use a project and time tool. Why add CeoDash?
Your project tool knows who worked on what. It does not tell you whether payroll is covered in six weeks, or which overdue invoice that depends on. CeoDash sits beside tools such as Scoro, Productive or Kantata and works on the money — cash, margin, receivables — while hours and allocation stay where your team records them.
We pay media and production costs before the client pays us. Does the forecast see that?
The forecast is built on when money actually leaves and arrives, not on when work is invoiced. A cost you pay this month and recharge next quarter shows up as exactly what it is: cash you are lending to the client for that period.
Can CeoDash tell us which clients are profitable?
From the ledger alone, no — margin per client needs the hours spent on each client, and those live in your timesheets. CeoDash shows the agency’s margin from your books and how it moves, and does not quote a per-client figure it cannot trace to a source.
How long does it take to see our own numbers?
Upload the files you already have — a CSV or Excel export from your accounting system, or a bank statement — and the first figures show in minutes. It is free and needs no card. Connecting your tools so the numbers refresh on their own takes about a day.
Can our accountant or a partner see it?
Yes. Invite people to the sections they need, or send a read-only link to a board pack that you can revoke at any time. Nobody needs an account to read a shared pack.
- Guide: seeing the cash gap between payroll and client payments before it opens →
- The four decisions every owner-operator answers, whatever the business →
- What CeoDash reads, and what stays in your other tools →
- Pricing — free with uploads, and what each plan adds →
- Verify us in two weeks on your own numbers →
- Sell developers or engineers by the month? The IT services page →
Know whether payroll is covered before the client approves the invoice.
Upload the files you already have and the first figures show in minutes. Nothing to build, and no card to start.
No card · Free CSV and Excel uploads · No per-connector charge