All marketing agencies stand to benefit from streamlining their bookkeeping and payroll processes. Every agency needs to track their billable versus non-billable expenses, invoice their clients, pay vendors efficiently and accurately, and handle payroll tasks.
With the advancement of technology, several accounting tools and applications can speed up bookkeeping processes, saving marketing agencies time and money. Accounting and bookkeeping software can significantly streamline financial operations for marketing agencies, which often handle a variety of transactions, from client billings to project expenses and payroll. Let's look at how specialized software can meet the unique needs of marketing agencies and some key factors to consider when choosing the right solution.
Must-Have Features in Accounting Software for Marketing Agencies
- Project Cost Tracking: Can assign costs to specific clients or projects for accurate billing and monitoring of profitability.
- Time Tracking: Integrated time tracking to ensure all billable hours are recorded and invoiced.
- Invoicing and Billing: Advanced invoicing capabilities that can handle different billing models, such as retainer fees, hourly rates, and project-based billing.
- Expense Management: Tools to track and categorize expenses directly related to client work or general operational costs.
- Budget Management: Setting budgets for specific projects or campaigns and tracking performance against them.
- Financial Reporting: Comprehensive reporting tools for insight into profitability, client account statuses, expenses, and overall financial health.
- Integration Capabilities: Ability to integrate with other tools commonly used in marketing agencies, such as CRM systems, project management software, and digital marketing tools.
Benefits for Marketing Agencies
- Enhanced Financial Visibility: Real-time insights into the financial performance of various projects and the agency as a whole.
- Improved Billing Accuracy: Reduces the likelihood of billing errors and ensures that all billable work is accurately invoiced.
- Administrative Efficiency: Automates routine tasks like billing, payroll, and tax calculations, freeing time for more strategic activities.
- Better Cash Flow Management: Timely and accurate billing and expense tracking help improve cash flow management.
Marketing Agency Accounting Software and Tools
1. QuickBooks Online
QuickBooks Online (QBO) is a cloud-based accounting software that can help you with regular bookkeeping tasks like expense tracking, bank reconciliations, and sales tax tracking. It can also help generate invoices, email clients, and send automated invoice payment reminders.
QBO also has a project feature that can help organize expenses, invoices, estimates, transactions, and the time spent on each project. In addition, the project feature can also identify outstanding invoices and payments for all of your current and past projects. This will allow your agency to manage all the financial aspects of your projects on a centralized system and provide visibility on the profitability of each project.
2. Expensify
Working in a marketing agency usually includes travelling to meet your clients or perhaps even taking them out for a meal. Your employees will need to expense these transactions and get reimbursed.
Expensify is an excellent tool for employees to submit their expense reports and get reimbursed, simplifying and speeding up the expense reporting process.
Expensify uses SmartScan technology, allowing users the advantage of being able to snap a picture of their receipts with their smartphone. The program automatically saves and exports all critical data, eliminating the need to keep paper copies of receipts.
Your employees will no longer have to spend precious time filing expense reports. At the same time, you get greater visibility over your cash flow and expenses and save the time and hassle required to chase down employees for their expenses.
3. Dext Prepare
Another excellent expense management tool is Dext Prepare. Your marketing firm must be able to track overhead expenses as well as your billable expenses. When using Dext Prepare, you can code each transaction to the proper account and export it directly to your accounting software.
Dext Prepare uses OCR technology to automatically extract crucial data from receipts, invoices, and bank statements, streamlining your bookkeeping process. This saves you significant time on manual data entry and eliminates the need to store any physical documents since everything is stored in the cloud. Plus, it helps track expenses and easily integrates with other cloud accounting software like QuickBooks Online and Xero.
4. Plooto
Staying up to date with your payables is vital for marketing agencies. Some agencies work with content creators, photographers, videographers, and freelance marketers to deliver on campaigns. Others may work with event spaces and restaurants. These people must be paid promptly to maintain a good relationship and ensure you can work with them again.
Plooto can help streamline your agency’s payables process through its online payment platform. Dealing with cheques can be a hassle as they require printing and postage, plus they can take a long time to be sent and then cashed. Plooto eliminates this problem.
This program can integrate with QuickBooks Online or Xero and identify which invoices need to be paid and when. You can set approval workflows so Plooto will send the approver an email to accept the invoice and then easily pay it using ACH/EFT payments, locally or internationally.
5. Rotessa
Rotessa is a pre-authorized debit payment platform for Canadian and US businesses. It is an excellent tool for collecting payments from clients who are on retainer, and it allows you to set up recurring payments. It automatically withdraws payments from your client's bank accounts on your scheduled transaction day.
Rotessa allows you to import invoices and collect payments from your regular clients, simplifying the receivables process. It also connects with QuickBooks Online and eliminates costly credit card fees. Plus, you get complete visibility over your agency's cash flow with no need to deal with the hassle of expense collections.
6. QuickBooks Time
QuickBooks Time is Intuit’s time-tracking software. Time tracking is a vital part of your business as you need to know how much time your employees are spending on each project. This will give you a better understanding of how profitable each project is.
Using QuickBooks Time, you can easily sync timesheets with QuickBooks Online and allocate time to specific projects. Plus, when invoicing clients, you can show the breakdown of billable hours on the invoice, providing greater clarity.
For more information on streamlining your marketing agency's bookkeeping procedures, contact Enkel today. Our team of experts can help you eliminate the hassle of bookkeeping tasks, simplify your processes, and allow you to do what you do best - be creative!
How We Select and Evaluate Our Recommended Software
We thoroughly research and test the apps we include in our regular workflow for Client bookkeeping services. After deciding on criteria for evaluating the software and then researching the app itself, we tested the app, noting its strengths and weaknesses. We then work with the app for at least a few weeks before deciding whether to recommend it to our readers. We use the software as it was designed for its intended tasks. For a detailed walk-through of how we select and evaluate software, please see the details of our process.
