Aeion Finance for Agencies
Agency finance is its own discipline. Time-based billing (hourly), milestone billing (fixed-fee deliverables), retainer accounting (monthly recurring with rollover), project profitability tracking (revenue - direct labor - subcontractors - allocated overhead), contractor + employee blended margin, AR aging on slow-paying clients (60+ days is normal in agency-land). Aeion ships all of this through its `projects` collection + `time_entries` + retainer recognition + per-project P&L reporting.
The Agency Finance Stack
Five activities that define agency finance:
Project Setup Patterns
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Time Tracking + WIP Accounting
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Retainer Recognition
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Project Profitability — The Most-Watched Metric
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AR Aging + Collection
Agency AR is famously slow — 60+ days is normal.
FAQ
Harvest (time tracking + invoicing) + Forecast (capacity planning) ≈ Aeion's time_entries + invoicing + crm-analytics. FreshBooks (small-agency accounting) ≈ Aeion Starter / Pro tier. Aeion's depth wins for agencies >5 people; specialized tools have nicer mobile apps.
Contractors' hours billed at standard rate but cost-of-labor is the contractor's pay rate. Aeion tracks cost separately from billing rate; margin computed correctly. Year-end 1099-NEC generation native.
Configurable per project. Rate change effective date set; hours before that date billed at old rate; hours after at new rate. Audit trail preserved.
Yes. Project budget in client's currency; time tracked in employee's home currency; FX translation at invoice time using configured rate source.
No dedicated trust-accounting engine today — legal-adjacent agencies needing enforced no-commingling rules should model trust funds as a separate cost center/account and rely on manual controls until native trust accounting ships.
Enterprise PSA (Professional Services Automation) tools cost $50-200K+/yr. Aeion replaces the finance + time-tracking layers; CRM/pipeline lives in Aeion CRM; resource planning ships as Pro+ feature.
Time entries roll up to project and employee totals, so you can see billable hours logged per person per period. Comparing that against a target utilization rate (e.g., 70% billable) is a reporting exercise you build on top today, not a built-in target/flag feature.
Aeion's expense workflow + receipt OCR handles receipts. Expenses on billable projects pass through to client invoices (with markup if configured); non-billable absorb into project margin.
Aeion's CRM analytics compute a pipeline-weighted forecast; combined with project burn rates, that becomes a capacity-utilization projection. Helps with hire/fire/grow decisions.
No dedicated change-order object — add a new milestone (with its own amount and due date) to extend a fixed-fee project's scope, or raise the project budget directly. Both show up in the project's billing and profitability totals; there's no separate client-approval workflow around it yet.