How to Automate Function Point

An agency's profit hides inside its own hours

Function Point is agency management software for creative shops: advertising and design studios, PR and communications teams, production companies, and the in-house agencies that work the same way. It has been doing that job since 1997.

Agency economics are simple and unforgiving. The business sells people's time, bills either by the hour or against a fixed fee, and lives in the gap between the two. Everything else is bookkeeping.

So Function Point puts the whole cycle in one place. A prospect sits in the CRM, becomes a blended estimate, becomes a job with briefs and files attached, collects time logged by everyone who touched it, picks up expenses, and ends as an invoice. On top sits the part an owner actually reads: staff utilisation, billability, project ROI and revenue forecasting, which is how a partner learns a client is unprofitable during the work rather than after the final invoice.

Nothing on the schedule moves until somebody chases a person

Agency work has a lot of waiting inside it, and the waiting is what costs money.

A brief sits with a client for six days and the deadline does not move to compensate. A designer's timesheet is not in on Friday, so Monday's utilisation number is wrong and nobody trusts the report built on it. A retainer is two thirds spent in week two and it surfaces when the month is billed. An invoice went out three weeks ago into a client's accounts portal that decides on its own when it gets paid.

Around that sits the chasing with no home. The publisher's booking deadline for next month's insert. The platform cut-off for a campaign asset. The feedback promised on Tuesday that arrived as three emails, a marked-up PDF and a voice note.

Each of them is somebody opening a tab to find out whether a thing has happened yet.

Function Point

Retainer burn caught in week two Hours booked against a retainer read beside what is actually live for that client, so an overrun is named at the point it starts, not at the invoice.

Approvals nobody is chasing Briefs, proofs and estimates waiting on a client, gathered from wherever they are sitting and ranked by the deadline each one threatens.

Deadlines other people set Publisher booking cut-offs and platform closing dates read where they are published and matched to the jobs that depend on them.

Estimates, jobs, timesheets and invoices already join up

Function Point covers the inside of that list properly, and an agency using it only for timesheets is paying for six modules and opening one.

Blended estimates and custom rate cards price work the way the agency actually sells it. Time tracking maps to those rates, so a logged hour becomes something billable and reportable rather than a note. Resource management covers staff utilisation and workload forecasting, which turns whether the studio can take another job into a question with an answer. The client portal shows clients their project updates and upcoming tasks without an account manager writing a status email. Batch invoicing raises many invoices at once and carries them into QuickBooks instead of a second system somebody retypes.

Reporting sits over all of it, and it is the real reason agencies buy this category rather than a project board.

The ceiling is the agency's own walls. Function Point can report on every hour its staff logged and every invoice it raised. It cannot open the review tool a client insists on using, read a publisher's booking deadline, check the platform where the campaign is actually running, or find out whether the client's accounts department has scheduled the invoice for payment.

A job list that reflects what the client actually did

Give the job list a way to see the client's side, and the Monday status meeting changes character.

Approvals waiting on a client, gathered from wherever they are genuinely sitting rather than from an account manager's memory, ranked by which deadline each one puts at risk. Retainer burn read against what is live for that client, so an overrun shows up in week two instead of in the invoice.

Publisher and platform deadlines read where they are published and set against the jobs depending on them, because a missed booking date costs the client money and the agency a conversation. Invoices checked in the client's own payment portal, so the chase list is the accounts that have not scheduled payment rather than the ones that have not replied. A prospect's newsroom or a public tender page watched for the change that makes a pitch worth making this week.

Then the quiet one: a deliverable digest built from where the work really lives, the review link, the shared drive, the staging site, so the account manager walks into the meeting already knowing.

Anything going to a client, an estimate, an invoice, a nudge, is drafted and left. The relationship is the asset.

Account managers should spend that hour on clients

The information is not hidden. It is spread across eight logins the agency already has, and collecting it is the least valuable hour in anybody's day.

WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens the client's review tool, the publisher's site, the campaign platform or the payment portal, reads what is there, and either writes it against the job in Function Point or hands the team a list.

There is no API to arrange and no integration that has to exist first, which matters when every client arrives with their own tools. It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, you can watch a run and stop it, and anything client-facing waits for you.

The workflows below are already built, and each one names the sites it opens.