Is This Client Actually Making You Money?

Industry benchmarks from Parakeeto and Promethean Research put healthy digital-agency net margin at 20–30% per client. Above 30% is excellent and usually signals either premium pricing or under-servicing. Below 10% is the bleeding zone — fix the retainer, narrow the scope, or part ways.

The average across all clients matters less than the spread: most agencies have a handful of high-margin clients subsidising several break-even ones. That’s the distribution this calculator surfaces.

“Loaded” means the true cost of an hour of someone’s time — not just their hourly rate. It includes salary, employer taxes, benefits, software seats, and allocated overhead. The formula: annual salary × 1.3–1.5× (the burden multiplier), divided by realistic billable hours per year (~1,600 for senior, ~1,800 for junior — not the theoretical 2,080).

The dropdown’s tiers reflect roughly: Junior ($45K base ≈ $50/hr loaded), Mid ($65K ≈ $75/hr), Senior ($95K ≈ $110/hr), Lead/Strategist ($130K ≈ $150/hr), Director ($175K+ ≈ $200/hr). Pick whichever role does most of the work on this client. If you skip the loaded math and use raw hourly rates, you’ll overstate margin by 30–40%.

Only if it flows through your books as pass-through revenue. If the client pays platforms directly with their own card, ad spend never touches your P&L — set the pass-through slider to 0%.

If you invoice the client for media and pay platforms yourself, set it to 100% — the spend is both revenue and cost, netting to your management fee or markup. Most agencies are 0% on Google Ads and 100% on display or programmatic where they buy in bulk.

Monthly for active retainers, quarterly for project-based work. The trap is reviewing once a year at QBR — by then scope creep has compounded for ten months. Monthly cadence catches it early, gives you data for renewal conversations, and means renegotiations happen quarterly instead of annually.

This is the case for automated reporting: a manual monthly calculation per client doesn’t survive past five clients. Start a free trial and the monthly cycle runs without anyone remembering.

Aim for 2.5–4× your loaded hourly cost. If your team’s loaded cost is $70/hr, you want effective recovery (retainer ÷ team hours) of $175–280/hr.

Anything below 2× and there’s no room for utilisation gaps, sick days, or growth investment. Anything above 4× is either premium positioning or the client is under-served — both worth knowing.

It uses Swydo’s actual pricing — $69 flat for the first 10 data sources, then $4.50 per source (11–100), $3.00 (101–500), and $2.00 (501+) — and allocates this client’s proportional share based on the data sources you connect for them.

The point is to count the line, not exclude it. Agencies that ignore software costs underestimate true margin by 3–8 points on average. Connect your stack in a trial to see the real allocation against your actual client count.

Agency-wide P&L is a lagging average. Per-client view is the only place where decisions live: who to upsell, who to renegotiate, who to fire, where to staff. Two agencies with identical 22% agency-wide margins can have completely different futures.

One has every client between 18–26%. The other has clients ranging from –10% to +55%. The second agency is one departure away from a crisis. Per-client visibility is how you find that out before it happens.

No — and it’s not trying to. This is a margin-decision tool. It tells you which clients to renegotiate, which to expand, and which to fire. It doesn’t track invoices, run payroll, or file taxes.

Pair the per-client profitability view in Swydo with your accounting tool (Xero, QuickBooks, etc.) and time-tracking tool (Toggl integrates natively). Three systems, one source of truth for the margin question.