Agencies bill for time and pass through costs, which makes client profitability the number that matters and the one generic bookkeeping hides. Pick for how the work is tracked, not for the ledger.
The number an agency manages is profit per client. Almost no accounting product gives it to you without work.
QuickBooks will hold the ledger correctly and leave you to reach that number through classes, tracking categories, or — more often — a spreadsheet maintained beside the books that stops being accurate in month three.
Media spend, contractor invoices, software bought on a client’s behalf. All of it lands on your books before it is recovered.
Categorise it wrong and two numbers break at once: revenue looks larger than it is, and margin looks smaller. Neither is obvious from a P&L, because both errors are internally consistent.
The thing that catches it is not a better chart of accounts. It is whether the receipt is bound to the posting, so that “what was this $4,000 for and which client wears it” is answerable in seconds rather than reconstructed from an inbox.
Agencies often want one system for hours, invoices, and books. FreshBooks and Odoo will give you that, and the price is a plan tier — FreshBooks caps billable clients, Odoo moves you to per-user pricing once timesheets become the second app.
The alternative is tracking time somewhere dedicated and letting the ledger see invoices rather than hours. Less elegant, and it keeps your accounting cost independent of headcount.
If any client pays in another currency, the entry tiers on this list stop being relevant. Xero moves to Established, Zoho to Professional, Sage to C$72.
For an agency with one foreign client, that is a lot of subscription for a small share of revenue, and it is worth checking before the invoice goes out rather than after.
Best for: Agencies that live in time tracking and proposals, and whose invoice is a client-facing document rather than an internal record.
Watch out: Billable clients are capped — five on Lite, fifty on Plus — and double-entry accounting, bank reconciliation, and accountant access all start at Plus.
Best for: Handing a clean file to an accountant, with tracking categories for splitting revenue and cost by client or project.
Watch out: Multi-currency is on the Established plan, which matters as soon as you take a client abroad.
Best for: Agencies already running Zoho CRM or Projects, where the client record and the project already exist in one place.
Watch out: Invoice counts are capped on every tier and users are metered — one, three, five, ten.
Best for: Running projects, timesheets, and accounting on one data model, with the accounting app free for unlimited users.
Watch out: Timesheets are a second app, which moves you to CAD 35.20 per user per month across everyone.
Best for: Agencies that would rather outsource entirely, with payroll and the return from the same firm.
Watch out: Every price is "starting at", and onboarding with prior cleanup is a separate project from $1,000.
Best for: Agencies with cross-border clients where pass-through costs arrive in another currency and the receipts have to support an input tax credit.
Watch out: Ours, and we do not do time tracking. If billable hours are the product, pair us with something that does or look at FreshBooks.
It is not, exactly — it is a capable ledger with the largest bookkeeper population of anything here. The friction is that the number an agency actually manages is profit per client, and reaching it means classes, tracking categories, or a spreadsheet maintained beside the books. QuickBooks records what you give it and will not tell you which clients are losing money.
This is the recurring agency problem. Media spend, contractor invoices, and software bought on a client's behalf all sit on your books before they are recovered, and if they are miscategorised your revenue and your margin are both wrong. Whether the receipt is attached to the posting matters more here than in most businesses.
Only if you want one system. Plenty of agencies track time in a dedicated tool and let the ledger see invoices rather than hours. Combining them is convenient and it is also how you end up on a plan tier priced by seats you did not want to buy.
The tier you will be on. Xero puts multi-currency on Established, Zoho on Professional, Sage on its C$72 plan. Compare at that level rather than at the entry price.
Claims about other products last verified August 25, 2026