CASHFISH FOR AGENCIES

The work is scoped,
staffed and shipped.Nobody ever scoped
the margin.

A shop can bill every hour on the sheet and still not know which client pays for the lights. CashFish reads each retainer, project invoice, contractor bill and tool charge from the inbox and card you already use, then lines every dollar up against the account it came from.

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Digital agenciesCreative studiosMarketing shopsDesign & dev studios

Scale plan · $44/mo billed yearly · 4-day free trial · Full refund guarantee

01Four habits, one quiet loss

The invoices go out
on schedule.
The margin doesn't.

Four habits that feel harmless on their own — and quietly decide which clients are worth keeping and which just keep the team busy.

Invoice #218 has been open for forty-one days

It went out to Beacon Health on schedule. Nobody flagged it going stale, because nobody was watching the receivables — the whole shop was watching billable hours.

The sixty-day notice clause is on a page nobody reopened

Beacon Health's retainer renews on its own unless someone gives sixty days' written notice. The agreement that says so has been sitting in a folder since the day it was signed.

Twenty-three subscriptions hit one card

Design software, stock libraries, project trackers — a growing shop accumulates line items faster than anyone reconciles them, until the tool audit gets postponed again.

The best client is the one everyone talks about

Reputation and revenue aren't the same measurement. The account that wins the most praise in standup can still be the one earning the least once contractor bills are counted.

One relationship, four systems. CashFish reads the retainer contract, the project invoice and the contractor bill from the same inbox, matches the card and bank activity — and the annual guess stops being annual.

02A retainer month, mapped

Thirty-six thousand
lands on the first.
What's left after Friday?

One ten-person shop, one ordinary month. Retainers land on schedule, project milestones land when they land, and the card keeps charging quietly in between. CashFish reads all three from the inbox and the bank you already use.

Client retainersProject invoicesBank account

Retainers collected

+$36,000

Project milestones collected

+$12,500

Contractors & freelancers

−$14,200

Tools & subscriptions

−$2,340

Left before payroll & rent

$31,960

THE 1STMONTH END

03Retainer vs project

Revenue is what
you bill.
Margin is what's left
after the freelancer invoice.

Retainer income and project income look identical on a bank statement. They behave very differently once contractor bills, tool costs and a little scope creep are counted against each — and CashFish counts them per client, not once a year.

Harbor & Co.Margin $5,800/mo

Retainer $8,750 · Project $2,000 this month

Northwind MediaMargin $4,100/mo

Retainer $5,800 · Project $2,600 this month

Beacon HealthMargin $2,900/mo

Retainer $4,100 · Project $3,900 this month

Juniper GoodsMargin $650/mo

No retainer · Project $3,800 this month

Four accounts out of the same month mapped above — $18,650 of the retainers, $12,300 of the project work. Profitability by client is a Scale feature; receivables, including the aging on invoice #218, are read from Growth up.

04What shows up on its own

Three things that used to wait
for someone to go looking.

An invoice that's gone quiet flags itself

Every invoice you've sent is tracked from the inbox and the apps you've connected. The ones sitting too long surface before the client relationship gets awkward about it.

Invoice #218 · Beacon Health41 days overdue · flagged$7,500

Invoice #224 · Juniper Goodsdue in 6 days$3,250

Invoice #221 · Harbor & Co.paid in 11 days+$9,000

A contract keeps its own clauses in view

Value, term and renewal date come out of the agreement the moment it's signed — extraction from Growth up. On Scale the notice deadline gets an alert of its own, so page two of an agreement stops being the only place it exists.

Harbor & Co. retainer · renews Jun 1Beacon Health · 60-day notice · act by Apr 309 design-tool subscriptions · $412/mo

A contractor's bill sorts itself before you'd have opened the email

Freelancer invoices are read in under three seconds at 99% accuracy and set against the client work that needed them — so a designer's bill lands where it belongs instead of a general expenses pile.

Freelance copywriterclassified · Beacon Health$1,200

Motion designerclassified · Harbor & Co.$2,600

Stock library renewalclassified · Tools$89/mo

05Read in from

The brief, the invoice,
the bank line — each reports in.

Gmail

Retainer contracts, contractor invoices and client threads are read the moment they land — no forwarding required.

AVAILABLE

HubSpot

Deal stages and contact activity flow in, so a client relationship doesn't live only in someone's inbox.

AVAILABLE

Pipedrive

Pipeline stages sync as well, so a proposal's status is visible without a status-update meeting.

AVAILABLE

Slack

A stale invoice or an approaching renewal can surface where the team already talks, not in a report nobody opens.

AVAILABLE

Asana

Project activity sits beside the invoice it funds, so scope and billing stop living in separate tools.

AVAILABLE

QuickBooks

Existing books import into CashFish — one way — for a single margin picture instead of two half-finished ones.

AVAILABLE

Also Outlook, IMAP, Zoho CRM, Google Drive, Dropbox, DocuSign and Zapier. QuickBooks and Xero import one way into CashFish. Bank access is read-only, data is protected with 256-bit encryption (SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, GDPR), and any connection can be switched off from settings at any time.

06What the numbers say

Not blended averages.
Per client, every time.

extraction accuracy on contracts and invoices, in under 3 seconds

app integrations available from Growth up

$31,960

left before payroll & rent — the retainer month mapped above

per client

margin, receivables and renewals — never a blended, shop-wide guess

07Scale, and why

The client review used to happen once a year.
Now it happens every morning.

Scale is the plan because profitability by client and contract intelligence with renewal alerts are Scale features — the two things a growing shop actually asks for. Growth stops at contract extraction and CRM Lite.

$44/month billed yearly ($529) · or $59 monthly

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08Asked and answered

Before the next retainer.

On the Scale plan, retainer and project income on one side and contractor bills, tool costs and other direct expenses on the other are mapped to each client, so margin per account updates as documents and transactions arrive instead of once a year at review time.