Sharing what tools we use, what we recommend and why.

Most agencies accumulate their finance tools the way they accumulate clients, one at a time, without a plan. Someone sets up Xero in the early days. A bookkeeper introduces receipt-capture software. The founder signs up for a cash flow tool after a scary month. By the time the agency hits the £1m revenue mark, there are six or seven tools in the mix, half of them aren’t connected to each other and nobody’s sure which ones are actually earning their subscription.

We’ve set up, inherited and rebuilt finance tech stacks across a number of creative, marketing and PR agencies over the years. What follows is a practical guide based on what we’ve seen work in practice (not a sponsored list). We’ll cover each category of tool an agency needs, what we recommend and why, the alternatives and where AI is starting to change the picture.

A note before we start: no tool will fix a broken finance function on its own. The right software makes a good finance setup faster, more accurate and less manual. But if nobody interprets the data, connects it to decisions and holds the founder accountable to the numbers, even the best tools will just produce reports that nobody reads.

1. Accounting platform: Xero

There’s a reason Xero is the default for UK agencies and it’s not just familiarity. It’s cloud-native, which means your finance team (whether in-house or outsourced) can access it from anywhere without passing files around. It integrates with practically everything else on this list. And it handles multi-currency, project tracking and bank feeds well enough that most agencies that generate under £5m revenue don’t need anything more complex.

We’ve seen agencies try QuickBooks, FreeAgent and Sage. In almost every case where the agency is doing £750k+ and plans to scale, Xero is the right choice. The ecosystem around it is deeper, the integration options are broader and the reporting capability is stronger. If you’re on something else and it’s working, don’t switch for the sake of it. But if you’re setting up fresh or outgrowing your current platform, Xero is where we’d start.

2. Data capture and document management: Briefcase and Dext

Data capture sounds unglamorous, but it’s one of the highest-impact areas to get right. Every receipt, invoice, and bank statement that has to be manually processed is time your finance team could spend on something more valuable. Every document that gets lost or misfiled creates reconciliation problems later.

Briefcase

Briefcase is our current recommendation and the tool we use most frequently with clients. Briefcase combines data capture with broader financial operations workflow, it handles receipt and invoice scanning, but also helps manage the approval process, document storage and audit trail in one place. For agencies that want to move beyond just “snap a receipt” toward a more structured approach to financial documentation, it’s the more capable option.

Dext (formerly Receipt Bank)

Dext is the more established name in this space and remains a strong option, particularly if your team is already familiar with it. The mobile app is excellent, snap a photo of a receipt, Dext extracts the data and it flows into Xero automatically. It’s simple, reliable and does one job very well.

The choice between Briefcase and Dext often comes down to how mature your finance processes are. If you’re looking for a straightforward receipt-capture tool and your team is already comfortable with Dext, there’s no urgent need to switch. If you’re building or upgrading your entire finance workflow, Briefcase gives you more room to grow.

3. Supplier payments and expense management: Apron 

Apron has become our go-to for supplier payment management. It connects to Xero and gives you a single dashboard for managing all your supplier payments, approvals, scheduling, batch payments and reconciliation. For agencies that are still paying suppliers by logging into their bank and making individual transfers, this is a significant upgrade in both efficiency and control.

What makes Apron particularly useful for agencies is the approval workflow. The founder or finance lead can review and approve payments without being the one who processes them. That separation of duties is important as the agency scales, it creates accountability without bottlenecking everything through one person.

Apron also handles team expenses well, making it a viable alternative to a separate expenses tool. Team members can submit expenses through the platform, approvals flow through a clear process and everything syncs back to Xero automatically.

4. Credit control: Chaser

Late payments are endemic in the agency sector. The typical pattern is depressingly familiar: the invoice goes out, nobody chases it, 60 days later the founder notices it hasn’t been paid and sends an awkward email. Multiply that across a dozen clients and you’ve got a permanent cash flow drag that’s entirely preventable.

Chaser automates the chase. It connects to Xero, identifies overdue invoices and sends a sequence of increasingly firm reminders on a schedule you define. The messages are customisable, they can come from the founder’s email address and sound like a personal follow-up rather than an automated demand. The system tracks who’s opened the emails, who’s clicked on the payment link and who’s consistently late.

5. Cash flow forecasting: Float

A quick clarification: there are two products called Float. Float for cash flow forecasting (floatapp.com) is a financial tool that integrates with Xero and projects your cash position forward. Float for resource management is a completely different product used for scheduling and capacity planning. This section is about the cash flow one.

Float pulls your actual data from Xero (invoices raised, bills due, recurring costs) and projects it forward to show you what your bank balance will look like in 30, 60, or 90 days. You can layer in scenarios: what happens if that big invoice is 30 days late? What if you hire next month? What if you lose your second-biggest client?

For agency founders, the value is straightforward, you stop managing cash by checking the bank balance and hoping for the best. Instead, you have a forward-looking view that lets you make decisions proactively rather than reactively. We use Float with the majority of our clients and the conversation shifts from “can we make payroll?” to “what does our cash position look like for Q3 and what do we need to do about it now?”

The key features for agencies are:

• Automatic sync with Xero, no manual data entry.
• Scenario planning for major decisions (hiring, investment, client loss).
• Visual cash flow timelines that make the picture immediately clear.
• Budget vs actual tracking that connects to your forecast.

6. Reporting, budgeting, and planning: Syft and Fathom

This is the layer that turns your raw Xero data into reports the founder can reliably use. Both Syft and Fathom connect to Xero and produce visual management reports, KPI dashboards and financial analysis that goes well beyond what Xero’s native reporting can deliver.

Syft

Syft is strong on data quality and automated reporting. It flags anomalies in your data, produces clean monthly reporting packs and handles consolidation well if the agency has multiple entities. The benchmarking feature is useful; it lets you compare your agency’s financial performance against sector averages, adding context to the numbers that founders often lack.

Fathom

Fathom leans more toward financial analysis and KPI tracking. It produces visually polished reports and lets you build custom KPI dashboards that track the metrics that matter most to the agency, gross margin by service line, revenue per head, client concentration, whatever the founder needs to see each month. The budgeting and forecasting module is also solid, though for pure cash flow forecasting, we tend to use Float instead.

The choice between Syft and Fathom often depends on what your finance team (or your outsourced partner) is most comfortable with. Both are strong. If data quality and automated error-checking matter most, lean toward Syft. If visual reporting and custom KPI dashboards are the priority, Fathom has the edge. We use both across our client base, depending on the agency’s needs.

7. Project management and productivity: Scoro, Productive, Float, and Accelo

This is arguably the most important category for agencies specifically and it’s the one where finance and operations need to talk most closely. In an agency, the product is people’s time. If your finance function can’t see how that time is being planned, deployed and billed, it’s only telling half the story.

The right project management tool for an agency should track time (billable and non-billable), manage project budgets and provide visibility into utilisation and capacity. 

Here’s how the main options compare:

Scoro

Scoro is the most comprehensive option, it’s an all-in-one platform that covers project management, time tracking, quoting, invoicing and reporting. For agencies that want a single system rather than a collection of tools, Scoro can replace several standalone products. The financial reporting is strong, with project profitability visible at a granular level. The downside is complexity: it takes longer to set up and configure than more focused tools and the learning curve for the team is steeper.

Productive

Productive is purpose-built for agencies and has gained serious traction over the past couple of years. It handles project management, resource planning, time tracking, budgeting and profitability reporting in a clean, modern interface. The agency-specific features (such as built-in utilisation dashboards and margin tracking by project or client) make it particularly well suited. If you’re choosing a project management tool today for an agency doing £1m+ revenue, Productive is one of the strongest options available.

Float (resource management)

Float is a visual scheduling and capacity planning tool that’s popular with agencies for managing who’s working on what and identifying when the team is over or under capacity. It’s not a full project management tool, but it works well for resource planning specifically, providing a good level of reporting and visibility into time tracking and team utilisation. 

Accelo

Accelo combines project management with CRM and service operations. It’s strongest for agencies that run a mix of project and retainer work who want to manage the full client lifecycle (from sale through delivery to invoicing) in one platform. The retainer management features are particularly useful for agencies where recurring revenue is a significant part of the model.

Whichever tool you choose, the critical requirement is the same: your finance team needs to be able to access the project and utilisation data. If the project management tool sits in a silo and the finance function can’t see how time is being spent, you’ll have clean accounts but no profit intelligence. The two need to talk to each other.

8. Payroll

Payroll sits slightly outside the core finance tech stack, but it’s worth addressing because it’s a common source of confusion and errors in growing agencies.

There are three main options:

• Xero Payroll — built into Xero, handles PAYE, pensions and RTI submissions. It’s adequate for smaller agencies with straightforward payroll requirements. The main advantage is that everything stays in one platform with no integration needed.
• BrightPay — a more robust standalone payroll solution, widely used by accountants and payroll bureaux. It handles more complex scenarios (multiple pay rates, salary sacrifice, detailed pension calculations) better than Xero’s built-in module. If your payroll is managed by your accountant or a bureau, they’re likely using BrightPay or something similar.
• Payroll bureau — for most agencies, outsourcing payroll to a bureau is the most practical option. Payroll compliance is exacting, penalties for errors are real, and it’s one of those areas where the cost of getting it wrong significantly outweighs the cost of paying someone qualified to handle it.

Our view, unless you have a specific reason to run payroll in-house, delegate it. It’s a compliance task that requires specialist knowledge and it’s one of the easiest things to take off the founder’s plate.

How AI is changing the picture

Every tool on this list is integrating AI features in some form and it’s worth being clear about what’s genuinely useful today versus what’s still marketing hype.

What’s already making a difference:

• Automated data extraction — tools like Dext and Briefcase use AI to read receipts and invoices, extract amounts, dates and supplier details, then categorise them automatically. The accuracy has improved significantly over the past two years and reduces manual data entry substantially.
• Anomaly detection — reporting tools like Syft can flag unusual transactions, unexpected variances and data quality issues automatically. This catches errors that a human reviewer might miss, especially when processing high volumes of transactions.
• Cash flow pattern recognition — Float and similar tools are getting better at identifying seasonal patterns and predicting cash flow trends based on historical data, not just forward-projecting from current invoices.
• Smart categorisation — Xero’s bank reconciliation has become significantly faster with AI suggesting categories based on previous patterns. Over time, it learns the agency’s specific coding patterns and gets more accurate.

We expect the biggest near-term impact from AI to be in the operational layer: faster month-end closes, fewer manual errors and greater real-time visibility into financial data. For agencies, that means the finance team (whether in-house or outsourced) spends less time on processing and more time on analysis, insight and strategic guidance. The tools get smarter; the humans get more valuable, not less.

How to think about your stack

The biggest mistake agencies make with finance technology isn’t choosing the wrong tool. It’s accumulating tools without thinking about how they connect. A finance tech stack is only as good as its integrations. Here’s a simple framework for evaluating whether your stack is working:

• Does everything connect to Xero? If a tool doesn’t integrate with your core accounting platform, it creates a data island that someone has to manually bridge. That’s the opposite of what the tool is supposed to do.
• Can your finance team access the data they need without asking you? If the founder is the only person who can log into the project management tool, or the only person who knows the bank login, the stack is creating bottlenecks rather than removing them.
• Are you paying for tools nobody uses? Audit your subscriptions. If nobody has logged in to a tool for 90-days, cancel it. The agency sector is littered with unused SaaS subscriptions.
• Is there a gap between your project data and your financial data? This is the single most common integration failure in agencies. The project management tool knows how time is being spent; the finance tool knows what’s being billed. If those two systems don’t talk to each other, you can’t calculate client profitability, track recovery rates, or identify overservicing.

The tools are the easy part

A final thought. The tools on this list will provide your finance infrastructure, making your finance operations faster, more accurate and more connected.

The finance function is what you build on top of it. Get both right and you have an agency that makes decisions based on evidence rather than instinct, scales with confidence rather than anxiety and builds genuine value rather than just revenue.

If you’d like help evaluating or building your agency’s finance tech stack, we’re happy to walk you through our recommendations for your agency size and stage. Book a free discovery call and we’ll take a look at your current setup together.