Keep your agency's invoicing on track and revenue on plan

Stay on top of billing, ensure time and costs are recovered, and improve the accuracy of your agency's revenue and profit reporting.

Sales dashboard

Invoice jobs quickly and accurately

Synergist gives you the flexibility you need to invoice in advance or as work is completed, set up monthly billing or invoice multiple jobs in one.

  • Create invoices based on actual costs (timesheets, expenses and purchases), from a quote or billing plan, or manually build your invoice
  • Use branded invoice templates and send straight to your client’s inbox. Add POs and payment terms, detail the work done and include custom notes to help accelerate client approvals and payment
  • Invoice a phase or job, create a multi-job invoice per client or batch invoice based on planned billing dates.
  • Create ‘Managed sales orders’ for clients who give you a budget pot, allocating multiple jobs and drawing off revenue against them
  • For projects or retainers requiring staged payments, billing plans let you invoice a percentage or set value by start or due date, or project milestones. You could set up a recurring invoice each month, when a phase ends or when a percentage of the job is completed
  • Set up approval workflows to ensure accurate invoicing. For example, Client/Project managers can draft invoices, line managers can approve them, and finance can send. Auto emails can be sent to users to approve/take action
  • Allocate timesheets and costs to an invoice to ensure all costs are billed and recovered and drive accurate profit reporting. Once a job has been fully recovered you can mark it as final so no more costs can be allocated
  • Post sales invoices straight into your accounting software. Synergist seamlessly integrates with leading accounting software, reducing the potential for mistakes when copying sales, purchase and expense data

Manage projects more profitability

Read our 6 essential steps to managing multiple projects more profitably

Read article

Billing plan summary

Simplify your agency’s revenue recognition

Projects lasting several months, retainers and upfront payments can all play havoc on your monthly profit reporting. This is where revenue recognition comes in.

  • Recognise or defer revenue on individual invoices, or use the revenue management module to manage revenue recognition on all jobs
  • If a client asks you to bill for their remaining budget in December but you don’t complete the work until the following year, you’ve got the money but don’t know how much is profit. Essentially, it needs to sit on your balance sheet but not be declared as profit until you know the figures
  • The revenue management module allows you to recognise or defer the revenue in line with when the work is done and costs are incurred. So, you can defer (hold back) revenue until the work is in progress, or accrue (recognise or bring forward) revenue and costs to the month it’s spent
  • See the value invoiced vs that recognised and deferred. Allocate the actual or estimated time/costs or the charge-out values, or manually decide how much to recognise
  • Generate a monthly deferred revenue report to adjust the amount of revenue you post in your accounting package. Alternatively, you can post recognised values on sales invoices and revenue recognitions to your P&L accounts and post balancing entries to your accrued/deferred revenue balance sheet accounts

Make your agency more productive

See why thousands of design, digital, marketing and PR agencies - from 10 to 500 people - choose Synergist to manage their projects more intelligently and profitably.

Book a demo

Accurate reporting at the click of a button

Dashboards show you the key metrics, while reports give you the detail to drive revenue and profit.

  • Use the interactive dashboard for an instant view of your invoiced value, gross and net profit, and work in progress, by month. Also, see your billing forecast vs actual and top clients and earnings per head at a glance
  • See all jobs or phases with billing planned for that month. View planned value, costs and estimated gross profit and invoice status, so you can quickly understand what’s been planned vs invoiced
  • Create sales reports to see all invoices, including credit notes and revenue recognitions, in a specified date range. Report invoiced values, purchase costs, gross profit and margin, time and material costs, and net profit and margin
  • Compare a job’s actual costs vs those quoted and invoiced, plus see the profit value, percentage markup, margin and investment (overspend). See totals by client, job handler, job/phase type or team
  • Analyse client performance. Set monthly targets for client turnover and gross profit. Report quoted vs invoiced, billing planned on live jobs and opportunities, and see actual gross profit by month and year to date
  • Schedule reports to be automatically emailed to your inbox, or generated when an event occurs or data meets specific criteria
  • Customise reports using powerful filters and save your selected views for quick access
Management dashboard

"Why wait until the end of the month?
We can now get invoices out at the end of a project. We never used to be able to do that."

Steven Clark, Finance Director, Tayburn

Read full case study

"Synergist has made some massive changes to our month-end. A big part of it is around recognising the correct revenue and making sure I'm accruing the costs associated with that revenue."

Peter McQueen, Finance Director, Media Blaze

Read full case study

See Synergist in action

Whatever your agency looks like – 10 to 500 people, design to digital – Synergist can be shaped to the way you work.

Synergist consultants, Agency Works, will be in touch to arrange your bespoke demo. Their experience working with hundreds of agencies means they can help you work out if Synergist is right for you.

All-in-one agency management software

From new business, costing, project and resource management, through to billing and reporting, Synergist brings together everything you need to manage your agency's projects, people, clients and financials.