The Wednesday afternoon problem
Agency work is not hard to track. It is hard to see. Five accounts running at once, each at a different stage, and the question that actually matters is which one is quietly going wrong.
Usually that lives in one person’s head, and they find out it went wrong when the client tells them.
A space per client
Each client gets a space, with its own folders, lists and per-list statuses. A retainer account with a weekly cadence and a build project with a staged approval chain do not have to share a column layout, which is the compromise that makes most tools feel wrong for agency work.
Statuses belong to reporting categories underneath, so cross-client reporting still works even though every client’s board looks different.
Hours that mean something
Time is logged on the task, either with a timer or by hand afterwards. Each entry carries a billable flag, and accumulated time is shown against the estimate on the task.
That last comparison is the one worth having. An account where the work consistently takes twice what was quoted is not a billing problem, it is a scoping problem, and it is invisible until somebody puts actual next to estimate on the same screen.
Clients who can report properly
The feedback widget is one script tag. If you build or maintain anything a client logs into, their team can report an issue from inside it, without an account and without finding the right person to message.
Each report gets a reference in the format PD-XXXXXXXX, which appears in the subject line of
every email about it. When the task is done, everyone who reported it is emailed automatically,
including anyone whose duplicate was merged in.
Status chasing is most of an account manager’s week. This removes a real part of it.
Seeing capacity
Per-person analytics covers workload, completion and cycle time. Time logged rolls in alongside it, so “who is over capacity” has an answer that is not a guess.
Pricing is in rupees with a GST invoice, which for an agency billing domestic clients keeps the whole chain in one currency.