How to choose agency billing software — 5 questions that decide it
Picking a billing system for a recurring-revenue agency comes down to five questions: recurring vs project AR, per-client margin visibility, ACH cost, white-label portal, and card volume. Here's how to answer each one.
“A generic billing stack is the path of least resistance until you cross ~$200K/year in card volume. After that, you're paying for convenience with margin you can't see.”
Why agencies outgrow their first billing stack
A generic invoicing tool plus a card link plus a reconciliation spreadsheet works fine for the first 10–20 clients. After that, three pressures show up consistently: card processing fees stack up faster than expected, per-client margin reporting requires a spreadsheet, and you can't reuse the same merchant account across every revenue line you run.
The goal isn't a longer feature list — it's a system that answers your own numbers. Walk the five questions below and the right fit becomes obvious for your agency profile.
Question 1 — Is your AR recurring or project-based?
If most of your clients are on retainer, you want a system built for recurring billing and auto-draft, where every monthly invoice generates and collects itself.
If your AR is mostly one-off project work, a simpler accounting-first invoicing tool is the path of least resistance. The recurring-billing machinery is overhead you won't use.
Most agencies are a mix, and the recurring side is where the manual work and the leakage live — so optimize for that.
Question 2 — Can you see per-client margin?
Per-client gross margin (retail − wholesale) is the single most actionable agency metric, and almost no generic billing tool surfaces it — they don't know your wholesale costs.
HubWho is built around this: you enter the wholesale cost per product and bill the retail price, and it joins the two by client so margin is there on demand instead of in a month-end spreadsheet.
If margin visibility matters to you, make it a hard requirement. Everything else can be bolted on; margin can't.
Question 3 — What does ACH cost you?
Card processing on a recurring retainer runs ~2.9% + 30¢ per charge. ACH via Plaid is typically 0.8% capped at $5 — a large gap on $1K+ retainers.
Check the ACH terms specifically. Some tools charge a flat percentage with no cap (e.g. 1%), which gets expensive on bigger invoices; others cap it. On a 50-client book the difference can fund a hire.
A bank-link flow (Plaid) that makes ACH as easy as saving a card is what actually moves clients off cards — the rate only helps if clients adopt it.
Question 4 — Do you need a white-label portal?
If clients pay, view invoices, and see KPI snapshots under your brand, that portal is part of your retention story. A hosted invoice page that renders under the vendor's brand is not the same thing.
HubWho's customer portal is white-label with your logo, colors, and business name — clients see your brand, not the vendor's. A custom-domain option (so the portal sits on your own domain) is rolling out; today it lives at app.hubwho.com/portal. If a branded client experience matters to your positioning, confirm how far the white-labeling goes before you commit.
Question 5 — What's your card volume?
Under $50K/year, a percentage-per-invoice tool can win on price because there's no monthly platform fee to absorb.
$50K–$500K, flat monthly pricing usually beats a per-invoice percentage — HubWho is $29–$249/mo flat with no per-customer fees and no per-transaction overhead on top of your processor.
$500K+, the underwriting case for a direct merchant (Authorize.net / NMI) gets compelling regardless of which platform layers on top, because the per-transaction savings dominate.
Where HubWho fits
HubWho is a standalone billing and client-operations platform for marketing and digital agencies that bill recurring clients. It runs recurring invoicing and auto-draft, takes payment by ACH bank-link (Plaid) and card, tracks true per-client margin from the wholesale costs you enter, surfaces MRR / ARR / churn, and gives every client a white-label portal with your logo, colors, and business name (custom-domain routing is rolling out).
It runs standalone, with a source-agnostic CSV importer to bring your clients and subscriptions across from your current tool or a spreadsheet. KPI signals can also pull from the tools your clients already run on (GoHighLevel, HubSpot, BirdEye, Yext).
If you bill recurring clients and want one system for billing, payments, margin, and a branded portal instead of stitching together QuickBooks, Stripe, and spreadsheets, that's the profile HubWho is built for.