Multi-Job Recon

Consolidate many Jobs into a single reconciliation. Answer whether a client, a service line, or a period of work actually made the agency money.

Multi-Job Recon takes everything Recon does for one Job and runs it across many at once.

A single Job's margin tells you how that Job went. It does not tell you whether the client is worth having, whether your website work is priced correctly, or whether a service line you have been running for three years actually earns anything. Those questions only answer at the level of a group of Jobs, and this is the report that groups them.

Because Agencydesk was built exclusively for agencies, the consolidation is real rather than approximate. Every hour, supplier cost, meeting, and invoice across the selected Jobs is reconciled together, priced at the same resource rates as an individual Recon.

Open it from Reports in the left-hand navigation, then the Multi-Job Recon tab.

What it answers

Is this client actually profitable?

A client can bill well and earn badly. Consolidating every Job you have ever run for them gives one margin figure for the whole relationship, including the hours that overran and the meetings nobody counted.

Are websites profitable, and by how much?

Consolidate by Job Category and a service line reports as a business unit. Not one good website and one bad one, but what the category returns on average across everything you have delivered.

Is Corporate Identity worth doing?

Some service lines are strategically valuable and financially thin. Worth knowing which is which, and by how much, before deciding whether to keep selling it at the current price.

Is hosting and maintenance making money?

Low-value recurring work is where margin quietly disappears, because each Job is too small to review on its own. Consolidated across a year, the pattern is unmistakable.

Great for the annual pricing review. Run each service line through this report once a year and you have evidence rather than opinion about which categories to raise rates on, which to templatise, and which to stop selling.

Building the report

The report is built in three steps, shown as a stepper across the top.

Step 1: Choose scope

Pick how to gather the Jobs:

• Client based — Client, then Brand, then Jobs. Use this for relationship profitability.

• Category based — Job Category, then Jobs. Use this for service-line profitability.

• Date based — a date range, then Jobs. Use this for a quarter, a financial year, or a specific campaign period.

An optional Add date window narrows any of the three to a period.

Click Find jobs to continue.

Step 2: Select jobs

Every Job matching the scope is listed, split by status into Active, Draft, and Closed, each with a count. A Search field narrows a long list.

The table shows the Job number, Client, Job name with its status tag, the AE, Progress as tracked against estimated time with a coloured bar, and the Due date.

Progress bars are colour coded so you can see the shape of the selection before you run it: green where the Job came in comfortably within its estimate, orange where it used most of it, and pink where it went over.

Tick the Jobs to include, or use the header checkbox to take them all. A counter shows how many are selected.

Closed Jobs are usually the ones you want. A closed Job has finished consuming time and finished billing, so its margin is final. Including active Jobs mixes settled results with work still in progress.

Step 3: Report

Click Generate report. The consolidated reconciliation opens, and can be exported using Download.

The headline cards

Three cards summarise the whole selection.

Hours Variance

Total tracked hours against total estimated hours across every Job in the selection, counting billable and non-billable time together, with the difference expressed as a percentage.

A negative figure means less time was used than estimated, which shows in green.

Hours Variance % = |Hours Variance| ÷ Total Estimated Hours × 100

A selection estimated at 50:00, being 37:00 billable plus 13:00 non-billable, that consumed 37:54 has a variance of −12:06.

12:06 ÷ 50:00 × 100 = 24% less than estimated.

Time Variance Value

The hours variance converted into money. The variance on each Task is multiplied by that Task's own rate per hour, and the results are summed.

So it is not a flat average. An hour saved on a Task billed at R1,500 is worth more than an hour saved on one billed at R550, and the figure reflects that.

Read it as the value of the time you got back, available to be put to billable use on other work.

Billing Efficiency

How much of the billable work performed was converted into billing.

Billing Efficiency % = Billable hours invoiced ÷ Billable hours tracked × 100

37:00 invoiced against 33:12 tracked gives 111.4%.

Above 100% means you invoiced for more hours than the team spent on them, which shows in green. Below 100% means hours were worked that have not been invoiced.

Unlike Hours Variance, this counts billable time only, since non-billable hours were never going to be invoiced.

User Time Recon

Every person who worked across the selected Jobs, with their department, a progress bar, tracked against allocated time, their share of the total, and the number of Jobs they touched.

Expand a row to see that person broken down Job by Job.

Great for understanding a client relationship properly. Consolidating a client's Jobs shows exactly who has been servicing them and how much of the agency's capacity that account has absorbed over time, which is rarely what anyone assumes.

Task Reconciliation

Task Reconciliation is visible only to the Account Owner or a Super Admin, because of the potentially sensitive information it carries.

The studio side of the consolidated selection, split into Billable and Non-Billable summary rows, each expandable into the individual Jobs behind it.

Column	What it shows
Actual/Estimated	Hours tracked against hours costed
Resource Cost	What those hours cost the agency, at each person's Resource Cost rate
Margin	What is left after resource cost
Total Estimated	The billable value
Billed Amount	What was actually invoiced

Where a user has no Rate/Hour set on their profile, the Resource Cost column reads User rates are not set and that person's time is costed at nothing. The margin on those lines will look better than it is.

Set a rate for every user who tracks time under Users before relying on these figures. See Resource Cost for how to calculate it properly.

Cost Reconciliation

The procurement side, showing the Expense paid to suppliers, the Markup added, the Total Estimated resell value, and the Billed Amount, again expandable into the individual Jobs.

Meetings Reconciliation

Total Hrs and Value (Rate × Hrs) for meetings across every Job in the selection, costed by attendee hours at each attendee's rate.

Job Recon

The consolidated summary, marked Consolidated and labelled with how many Jobs it covers:

• Total Costs & Expenses — resource cost plus supplier expense across the selection.

• Total Billed — what was actually invoiced.

• Gross Margin — Total Billed less Total Costs & Expenses, as a value and a percentage.

• Nett Margin — Gross Margin less meeting cost.

Where an individual Job's Recon reports against estimated value while the Job is still running, the consolidated view reports against Total Billed, which is what makes it a verdict rather than a projection.

Margin Allocation

The same donut as on a single Job, breaking the consolidated nett margin into Task Costs, Task Margin, Cost Expense, and Cost Markup.

Great for seeing what a service line is really made of. Two categories returning the same margin percentage can be entirely different businesses: one earning it on studio hours, the other on marked-up production. They carry different risk, need different people, and should be quoted differently.