Recon
Recon is where an agency finds out what a Job actually earned. Tracked time costed at real resource rates, supplier margin, meeting cost, and true nett margin, all in one place.
Recon is where a Job stops being a plan and becomes a verdict. Every hour your team tracked, every supplier invoice you carried, every meeting you sat in, and everything you billed, reconciled into one answer: what did this Job actually make?
Most agencies answer that question with a spreadsheet, weeks late, using an average cost per head and a lot of goodwill. Because Agencydesk was built exclusively for agencies, Recon is built into the Job itself. It costs the actual people who did the actual work at their actual cost to the business, subtracts what you spent with suppliers, prices the time you spent in meetings, and reports the margin that is genuinely left.
What Recon answers
Did we actually make money on this Job?
Everyone has a feeling about whether a Job went well. Recon replaces the feeling with arithmetic. Every input from the team and the agency is summed in one place, so the answer accounts for the hours that overran, the supplier costs that crept up, and the meetings nobody counted.
What is our true nett on this Job?
Gross margin is what is left after the cost of delivering the work, both your own people and your suppliers. Nett margin takes the meetings off as well. It is the number that tells you whether the Job paid for the studio that delivered it.
Is a high-turnover client building the agency or quietly hurting it?
Revenue and profit are not the same thing, and a client can be your biggest biller while sitting near the bottom on margin. Running Multi-Job Recon across that client's Jobs shows whether the volume is carrying the agency or absorbing it.
Who is carrying this Job, and who is eating the margin?
Time Recon shows every assigned person's tracked time against their estimate and what share of the Job they hold. A senior sitting inside their estimate and a junior at triple theirs on the same deliverable is visible immediately, whether the cause is a skills gap, a briefing problem, or work that was underscoped from the start.
What did the team's collaboration on this Job actually look like?
A Job costed for two people that ended up touching nine is a different Job. Recon shows how the work distributed, which is often the first sign that scope moved without anyone raising it.
How much are the resources on this Job costing?
Task Reconciliation prices tracked time at each person's Resource Cost, not their billing rate. That is what the Job cost you to deliver, separate from what the client paid.
How much did procurement contribute to the profit?
Cost Reconciliation separates what you paid suppliers from what you resold it for. On production-heavy work, procurement margin can quietly outperform studio margin, and knowing which is which changes how you quote the next one.
What did our meetings on this Job cost?
Meetings are the easiest cost in an agency to ignore. Agencies routinely put four or five people in a client call to show presence, and nobody prices it. Meetings Reconciliation totals the attendee hours and costs them at each attendee's rate, so the price tag on that presence is visible.
The headline cards
Three cards sit across the top of the Recon tab.
Hours Variance
Tracked hours against estimated hours for the Job, 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.
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.
Unlike Hours Variance, this counts billable time only, since non-billable hours were never going to be invoiced.
Time Recon
Time Recon lists every person assigned to the Job, with their department beneath their name.
Each row shows a progress bar, their tracked time against their allocated time, a Progress percentage, and % of Job, which is the share of the Job's total estimated hours that person carries.
Task Reconciliation
Task Reconciliation is visible only to the Account Owner or a Super Admin, because of the potentially sensitive information it carries.
Task Reconciliation prices the studio side of the Job, line by line:
Estimated
The hours costed for the Task
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 of the Task
Billed Amount
What has actually been invoiced against it, or a Non-Billable tag
The gap between Total Estimated and Billed Amount is work delivered but not yet billed. The gap between Total Estimated and Resource Cost is what the Job is earning you before suppliers and meetings.
Cost Reconciliation
Cost Reconciliation prices the procurement side, showing what you paid, the Markup you added, the Total Estimated resell value, and the Billed Amount invoiced so far.
This is where Costs earn their place as a revenue line rather than an administrative one. Print, promo, outsourced production, and licensing all report their own contribution to the Job's profit, separately from the hours.
Meetings Reconciliation
Meetings Reconciliation shows Total Hrs and Value (Rate × Hrs) for every meeting logged against the Job.
How meeting cost is calculated
Meeting cost is attendee hours, not clock hours. Every attendee's time is counted and priced at their own rate:
Job Recon
The Job Recon panel is the summary, covering Tasks + Costs + Meetings together:
Total Costs & Expenses — what the Job cost you to deliver. This is resource cost plus supplier expense added together.
Total Estimated — the Job's billable value.
Gross Margin — Total Estimated less Total Costs & Expenses, as a value and a percentage.
Nett Margin — Gross Margin less the cost of meetings.
The difference between Gross and Nett is the part most agencies never see. A Job showing 83.2% gross and 81.6% nett has given 1.6 points away to time spent in meetings that was never on the quote.
Margin Allocation
The Margin Allocation donut breaks the nett margin into where it came from:
Task Costs — what the hours cost you.
Task Margin — what the hours earned.
Cost Expense — what you paid suppliers.
Cost Markup — what procurement earned.
Resource Cost: the number everything depends on
Recon is only as honest as the Rate/Hour on each user's profile. That figure is the person's cost to the agency, set under Users, and it is separate from the Rate Card rate you bill the client.
Get it wrong and every Job looks more profitable than it is. Leave it blank and that person's time costs nothing at all in the reporting.
Four ways agencies set it
Salary only
Salary converted to an hourly rate
Every overhead the agency carries. Jobs look far healthier than they are
Flat average, whole team
Total agency expenses divided equally across all employees
Puts overhead recovery on people who cannot bill, and prices a director the same as a junior
Flat average, timesheet users only
Total expenses divided across the people who track time
Better, since recovery sits with the people who can bill it, but still prices everyone identically
Per person, per department
Salary, plus a share of departmental overheads, plus a share of general agency overheads
Nothing material. This is the model worth building
The recommended model
Build each person's rate from three parts, and divide the overheads only across the people who can actually put hours on an Invoice:
Departmental overhead share — that department's own tools, software, and AI credits, divided by the number of people in that department who track time.
General agency overhead share — rent, insurance, general software, and the salaries of everyone who does not track time, divided by every timesheet user in the agency.
Daily hour quota — the hours a person is realistically expected to deliver in a day, not the hours they are at work. Six is a common figure. Dividing by eight assumes nobody ever attends a meeting or answers an email.
Worked example
An agency with eight people who track time, three in Design and five in Copy.
General agency overheads
Expenses (rent, insurance, general software)
R145,000
Salaries of non-timesheet staff
R130,000
Total
R275,000
Divided across 8 timesheet users
R34,375 each
Departmental overheads
Design
Adobe × 3, Artlis
R4,440
3
R1,480
Copy
Notion, ChatGPT
R1,190
5
R238
Resulting rates, at a 6-hour daily quota across 21 working days, so 126 hours a month:
Jim
Design
R28,000
R1,480
R34,375
R63,855
R506.79
Betty
Design
R30,000
R1,480
R34,375
R65,855
R522.66
David
Design
R26,000
R1,480
R34,375
R61,855
R490.91
Sally
Copy
R45,000
R238
R34,375
R79,613
R631.85
Graham
Copy
R28,000
R238
R34,375
R62,613
R496.93
Russel
Copy
R26,000
R238
R34,375
R60,613
R481.06
Enter each person's figure as their Rate/Hour under Users, and every Recon across the agency starts telling the truth.
Why this model is worth the effort
Overhead recovery sits with the people who can recover it. Only users who put hours on an Invoice carry the agency's overheads. Management, admin, finance, and new business are funded by the billable team rather than diluted across a headcount that cannot bill.
Seniority shows up. A senior at R632 an hour and a junior at R481 are genuinely different propositions on the same Task. Recon prices the difference, so putting your most expensive person on routine work becomes visible instead of invisible.
Departments reveal their real margin. A department carrying heavy software, licensing, or AI credits costs more per hour to run. When that lands in the rate, Recon shows which departments are structurally thinner and therefore need higher markup or higher rates rather than more hours.
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