CASHFISH FOR MARKETING AGENCIES

Most of the
retainer wasnever yours
to keep.

A retainer arrives as one clean number. Behind it sit ad platform charges on the company card, contractor invoices that land whenever they land, and a software stack nobody has reviewed since the last pitch. CashFish maps each of those costs to the account it served, so margin per retainer becomes a figure you can read instead of a feeling you carry into the renewal call.

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Media spend by clientContractor costsRetainer renewalsMargin per account

Scale plan · $44/mo billed yearly ($529) · 4-day free trial · Full refund guarantee

01Revenue has a name. Costs arrive in a heap.

Media, contractors and tools
collapse into one column.

The retainer bills clean — one number, once a month, with the client's name on it. Nothing behind it behaves that way. Ad platforms charge the card mid-flight, contractors invoice when they surface, and the tool stack adds a seat here and a tier there.

So revenue is known per account and cost is known in total. Margin per client stays somewhere between a hunch and an argument — usually settled by whoever sounds most certain in the meeting.

Nobody loses money on the work. Agencies lose it on the costs that never got a client's name attached to them.

The costs column · this week5 unanswered

01media invoice · gross, or net of the platform's fee??

02freelancer invoice · third reminder to approve it?

03retainer renewal · sixty days out, nobody counting?

04ad account charge · which client did this one serve??

05another seat added · nobody reviewed the tier?

Every line here has an answer somewhere — in a card statement, a PDF, a signed agreement, a thread from March. Finding it is the job nobody has time for at month end.

02One account, one month, traced

Twelve thousand in.
Three thousand six hundred and seventy kept.

Alderline Goods, September. The bar is the whole retainer; the pale segments are what left on the client's behalf, and the green tip is what stayed. Each line below names where CashFish read that number from.

ALDERLINE GOODS · SEPTEMBER$12,000 BILLED

01Retainer billedStripe payout, matched to the invoice that raised it+$12,000

02Media placed for the clientcard charges arriving through read-only bank sync−$4,600

03Freelancers and contractorsinvoices extracted from the inbox in under 3 seconds−$2,750

04Share of the software stackrecurring charges divided across the accounts they serve−$980

05What the account actually keepsbilled, minus everything mapped to it$3,670

Documents are read from Gmail, Outlook or any IMAP inbox, with 150 days of history imported at connection and a sync every 5 minutes. Bank connections are read-only across 12,000+ banks and begin on Growth. CashFish never moves money.

02bFour things that happen without being asked

01

Stripe, the inbox and the bank start reporting

Retainer payouts, ad platform invoices and freelancer bills arrive without being fetched. Card and bank activity joins them through read-only sync, which begins on Growth.

02

Every cost document is read on arrival

A media invoice or a contractor bill is extracted in under 3 seconds — amounts, dates, supplier — with duplicate detection so the same charge never lands twice.

03

Each cost is tied to the account it served

Categories connect media, freelance and software spend to a client. CashFish recommends the mapping from what it has seen before; the call is always yours.

04

Renewals and new business sit beside the money

Contract extraction reads each agreement's dates and amounts, and CRM Lite keeps contacts and pipeline stages next to the revenue they belong to.

03Spend to revenue, by client

Five retainers.
Five different answers.

Same month, same agency. The biggest retainer keeps a thinner share of its fee than the smallest one on the list, and the strategy account with barely any media keeps the most. Pick a row to see where its costs went.

Five retainersSeptember, everything mapped$37,000$12,22033%

Alderline Goods — $12,000 billed, $3,670 kept

the biggest account is not the best one — media eats the difference

Media $4,600Freelance $2,750Software $98031% kept

Fernhouse Hotels — $9,500 billed, $3,600 kept

steady since March; contractor hours track the content calendar

Media $3,100Freelance $2,100Software $70038% kept

Copperleaf Studio — $6,000 billed, $1,250 kept

freelance hours have grown past the fee — worth a conversation before renewal

Media $1,900Freelance $2,300Software $55021% kept

Marlowe & Finch — $5,400 billed, $2,200 kept

little media placed, so almost all of the fee stays in the agency

Media $1,300Freelance $1,500Software $40041% kept

Vantage Row — $4,100 billed, $1,500 kept

small account, quiet costs, no surprises for two quarters

Media $1,100Freelance $1,150Software $35037% kept

Profitability by client is a Scale feature: what an account was billed, set against every cost mapped to it — media, contractors and its share of the stack. Copperleaf Studio is in amber because freelance hours have grown past what the fee covers, which is a renewal conversation rather than a surprise.

04What the agency gets to see

Six things that hold
the account together.

None of them ask you to keep a spreadsheet current. Each one keeps a fact where the money already is.

01

Media spend, traced to the account that spent it

Ad platform charges and media invoices are categorized to the client they served, so pass-through spend stops hiding inside one costs total.

Alderline

$4,600

Fernhouse

$3,100

Copperleaf

$1,900

02

Contractor invoices read the moment they land

Freelancer bills are extracted from Gmail, Outlook or any IMAP inbox — amounts, dates and supplier — and 150 days of history come in on the first sync.

Contractor invoice · PDFread

Supplier · J. Reyes, motion$1,150

Mapped to · Vantage Rowok

2.4s · NO DUPLICATE

03

Billing status, account by account

The retainer that never got invoiced this month shows up this month, next to the four that did. No spreadsheet keeps the score for you.

Alderline · invoicedFernhouse · invoicedCopperleaf · not yetMarlowe & Finch · invoicedVantage Row · invoiced

04

Renewal dates lifted out of the contract

Contract extraction on Growth reads terms, dates and amounts from each agreement. On Scale, renewal alerts arrive ahead of the date instead of after it.

Alderline Goodsrenews Oct 1

31 days out · terms read from the signed agreement

05

New business next to existing revenue

CRM Lite builds contacts from documents and emails and keeps basic pipeline stages on Growth. Scale adds CRM automation and lead scoring on top.

proposal · Harbor & Co.sent
proposal · Bluepeakawaiting
proposal · Ironwood Coawaiting
3 IN PIPELINE · CRM LITE

06

Margin per account, after everything clears

Per-client profitability on Scale puts billed against spent for every retainer — the gap between an account that performs and one that pays for its own media.

Alderline Goods$3,670 · 31%

Fernhouse Hotels$3,600 · 38%

Copperleaf Studio$1,250 · 21%

05For the record

Read fast. Counted honestly.

$0/mo

average savings subscribers report after connecting their accounts

0+

app integrations available on Growth and up

under 0s

to read a media invoice, at 99% extraction accuracy

Bank access is read-only and data is protected with 256-bit encryption (SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, GDPR). Every connection can be reviewed or disconnected from settings. Forecasts are estimates built from your own history, receivables, payables and recurring patterns — never promises.

06What plugs in

The tools already open
on the account team's screens.

Connect what you use. Store and CRM integrations begin on Growth, alongside 1,000+ apps.

Stripe

Retainer payouts matched back to the invoices that raised them

Available

Gmail & Outlook

Media invoices and contractor bills read as they arrive

Available

HubSpot

Client and prospect records alongside the revenue they carry

Available

QuickBooks

Existing ledger history brought into CashFish

One-way import

Google Drive

Signed retainers and statements of work kept with the account

Available

Slack

Notices where the account team already reads them

Available

QuickBooks and Xero import one way into CashFish; nothing is written back to them. Salesforce, Pipedrive, Zoho CRM, Dropbox, OneDrive, DocuSign, Notion, Asana, Zapier and webhooks connect the same way. Running a client's Shopify store as well? That integration is in private beta, so the only step available today is to request access.

07Scale, and why

Find out what each retainer
actually keeps.

Connect Stripe and the inbox, add read-only bank sync, map the costs once — and margin per account turns into a number the whole agency can look at. Scale is the plan this page describes, because per-client profitability, renewal alerts, revenue leakage and CRM automation live there. Free for four days on any plan.

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

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08Before the next renewal

Fair questions.

There is no ad-platform connection. Media spend enters the way it actually leaves the business: card and bank transactions through read-only sync on Growth and up, plus the platform invoices already sitting in your inbox. You confirm which account a charge belongs to, and CashFish recommends the category on the ones that follow.

Most of theretainer wasnever yoursto keep.

Media, contractors and toolscollapse into one column.

Twelve thousand in.Three thousand six hundred and seventy kept.

Five retainers.Five different answers.

Six things that holdthe account together.