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Agency Profitability

Know Which Clients Make Money and Which Ones Drain Your Team

Your team does the work. Rize captures every hour automatically, by client and project. You get real-time margins, budget burn rates, and the data to make pricing and staffing decisions with confidence.

No timesheets to chase. No end-of-week reconciliation. Your team doesn't change anything about how they work.

+20%
Billable hours recovered
15%
Profitability increase
8 hrs/wk
Admin time saved
“Rize allows my team to get deep into work and go where their creativity leads them without really having to think about time tracking.”
Ben Jackson
Ben Jackson

CEO, Momentum Studio

The profitability problem hiding in your timesheets

Manual time tracking creates a gap between the work your team does and the data you use to price, staff, and invoice.

01

Billable hours vanish

When your team fills out timesheets from memory, 15-30% of billable work never gets logged. That revenue is earned but never billed.

02

Client margins are a guess

Without accurate time data, you cannot tell which clients generate profit and which ones cost you money. Pricing decisions rely on instinct instead of numbers.

03

Scope creep goes unnoticed

Over-servicing happens slowly. By the time you realize a project is unprofitable, the work is already done and the invoice is already sent.

The dollar cost

Billable hours go unlogged every week. Here is what that costs.

The gap between hours worked and hours billed is not a rounding error. It is a revenue leak that compounds across every team member, every week.

$9,375
Missed per person / year at 1.25 hrs a week
$93,750
Missed per 10-person team / year
20%+
Recovered with Rize

The math

If each team member misses just 1.25 billable hours a week across 50 working weeks a year, at $150/hr that is $9,375 per person per year in revenue that was earned but never invoiced. Scale that to a 10-person agency and you are looking at $93,750 per year. Momentum Studio, a 12-person creative agency, recovered 20% more billable time after switching from manual timesheets to Rize. The time was always being worked. It just was not being captured.

Retainer burn

How agencies track retainer burn and over-servicing

Retainer burn is the share of a client's included hours or budget used so far in the billing period. Rize counts automatically captured hours against each retainer, so burn by client and project is current every day, not reconstructed at month end.

1. Set the retainer

Set each client up as a monthly retainer, or as a hybrid retainer with included hours and an hourly overage rate for extra hours.

2. Let capture count the hours

Rize attributes every work session to a client and project automatically, including the short reviews and calls that never reach a timesheet, and counts them against the retainer as the period runs.

3. Check burn by period

The client profitability view shows burn for each billing period, with hours used against hours included. Over-servicing shows up mid-month, while there is still time to re-scope or start an overage conversation.

4. Reprice with evidence

Period-by-period burn builds a history for each client. When a client runs over its included hours month after month, that history is the case for a retainer increase.

Profitability visibility your spreadsheets can't give you

Rize runs silently in the background and turns raw time data into margin insights per client, per project, per team member.

01

Real-Time Project Margins

See profit and loss per project as work happens, not weeks later. Rize calculates margins by comparing tracked time against your billing rates in real time.

02

Billable vs. Non-Billable Visibility

Know exactly how much of your team's day is billable. Rize splits every tracked hour into billable, internal, and admin categories automatically.

03

Client Profitability Ranking

Rank your clients by actual margin, not gut feel. See which accounts make money and which ones quietly drain your team's capacity.

04

Utilization Dashboards

Monitor team utilization rates across the agency in one view. Spot overloaded team members and underused capacity before it hits your bottom line.

05

AI-Powered Time Categorization

Rize's AI detects the client and project from the apps, websites, and documents your team uses. No manual tagging, no end-of-day guesswork.

06

Automated Client Reports

Export accurate time and profitability reports per client in seconds. Send clean data to your invoicing tool or share breakdowns directly with clients.

“We use Rize to know: 'We spent 30 hours on this client and got this result.' That's powerful when you're working lean and launching quickly.”
Leonard Roussard
Leonard Roussard

Founder & CEO Impulse Labs

Calculate Your Agency's Profitability Gap

See how much revenue your agency loses to untracked time — and what automatic tracking could recover.

Try the Profit Calculator

Comparison — updated October 2026

Rize vs Harvest

For agencies, the difference between Rize and Harvest is where the hours come from. Harvest relies on timers each person has to remember to start, so the time data behind every report and invoice is only as complete as the team's timer discipline. Rize captures every work session automatically and categorizes it by client and project, so margins and invoices are built on a complete record. Harvest Teams starts at $9/seat/month billed annually with usage-based Flex charges on top; Rize's Team plan is $29.99/seat/month billed annually and includes client and project profitability — reporting Harvest gates to its Enterprise tier.

Time capture
RizeAutomatic — runs in the background, no timers
HarvestManual start/stop timers and timesheets
Categorization
RizeAI assigns every session to a client and project
HarvestManual project and task tagging per entry
Invoicing
RizeBuilt in — invoices generated from captured time
HarvestBuilt-in invoicing and expense tracking
Profitability reporting
RizeClient and project margins on the Team plan
HarvestGated to the Enterprise tier
Pricing
RizeFrom $9.99/mo; Team $29.99/seat/mo billed annually
HarvestFree (1 seat); Teams from $9/seat/mo billed annually, plus usage-based Flex charges

Full feature-by-feature breakdown on the Rize vs Harvest comparison page.

Frequently Asked Questions

Agency profitability tracking software monitors how your team spends time across clients and projects, then calculates real margins by comparing labor costs to revenue. Rize does this automatically — no timers, no timesheets — using AI to categorize every working minute by client and project.

Rize automatically logs every minute your team spends on each client, then breaks it into billable vs. non-billable categories. Pair that data with your hourly rates and you get real-time profit margins per client without anyone filling out a timesheet.

Harvest requires manual timers and end-of-day entries, which means billable time gets lost. Rize tracks automatically in the background and uses AI to categorize time, so the short tasks and calls that manual timers miss still reach the client total. Rize also provides real-time margin dashboards that Harvest does not offer.

Toggl is a manual timer that depends on your team remembering to click start and stop. Rize runs silently on each team member's computer and captures every working minute automatically. For profitability specifically, Rize shows billable vs. non-billable splits per client and project in real time — Toggl requires manual tagging after the fact.

Productive.io and Scoro are full agency management suites with project management, resourcing, and billing built in. Rize focuses on one thing: accurate time data captured automatically. If your biggest problem is unreliable time data feeding into profitability reports, Rize solves that at the source. It integrates with your existing PM and invoicing tools via Zapier.

Agencies relying on manual timesheets consistently undercount billable hours. The missing time is mostly short tasks, calls, and context switches that never reach a timesheet. The time is worked; it just is not captured.

Set each client up in Rize as a monthly retainer, or as a hybrid retainer with included hours and an hourly overage rate, and Rize counts automatically captured hours against it as the month runs. The client profitability view shows burn for each billing period, with hours used against hours included.

Compare the hours a fixed-fee client actually consumes with the hours the fee was priced on. Because Rize captures the short reviews, calls, and Slack threads that timesheets drop, the client profitability view shows over-servicing while the engagement is still running instead of at renewal.

Raise the price when a client's captured hours run over the retainer's included hours for several billing periods in a row, or when the effective hourly rate falls below your target. Rize shows both numbers per client, so the decision rests on a trend rather than one busy month.

Bring the client the last few billing periods from the client profitability view: included hours, hours actually delivered, and burn for each period. Rize builds those numbers from automatically captured time, so the numbers come from the work itself rather than from timesheets the client may question.

Rize is built for retainer and fixed-fee agencies: it captures every hour automatically, counts it against each client's retainer or budget, and turns it into margin per client using your cost rates. Productive, Harvest, and Toggl report on the same questions but depend on manual time entry, so their burn and margin numbers only include the hours people remembered to log.

Yes. Rize runs as a native desktop app on macOS and Windows. Each team member's time is captured locally and synced to a shared dashboard. Managers see real-time utilization and client breakdowns regardless of where the team is working.

Rize's AI observes which apps, websites, and documents each person uses and automatically assigns that time to the correct client and project. This eliminates the two biggest margin killers: forgotten billable hours and misattributed time. Agencies get accurate per-client costs without adding any admin work.

Have more questions? Contact us

Related Resources

ToolAgency Profit CalculatorSee how much revenue your agency loses to untracked time and what automatic tracking could recover.Try the calculator →SolutionRize for AgenciesAutomatic billable hours tracking for agency teams. No timers, no timesheets.Learn more →ComparisonBest Harvest AlternativeSee why agencies switch from Harvest's manual timers to Rize's automatic tracking.View comparison →ComparisonRize vs Toggl for AgenciesHead-to-head comparison of automatic vs manual tracking for agency teams.Read comparison →SolutionFor Operations LeadersTeam visibility, budget burn rates, and capacity forecasts without chasing timesheets.Learn more →FeatureProject ProfitabilityTrack estimated vs. actual hours per project and know your margins before the invoice goes out.See feature →

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