Stop Juggling Five Tools to Run Your Agency
Opus replaces Monday + HubSpot + Harvest with one platform built for agency workflows. Track retainers, team utilisation, project profitability, and client relationships without switching between tabs all day.
Free plan at $0/month · No credit card required · Xero integration included
What Agencies Struggle With
You deliver brilliant creative work. But the business side of running an agency is a different beast. These are the operational problems eating into your margins and your team's sanity.
Retainer Hours Disappearing
Your team is logging time, but nobody knows how many retainer hours are left for each client this month. You only find out you have overserviced a client when the monthly report is due, and by then you have given away thousands in free work.
Team Utilisation is a Mystery
Some designers are at 120% capacity while others are waiting for briefs. Without a single view of who is working on what, you cannot balance workloads, forecast hiring needs, or spot burnout before people hand in their notice.
Scope Creep Killing Margins
The client asks for "one more round of revisions" or "just a small change to the copy." Without tracking the original scope against delivered work, projects that looked profitable on the proposal end up losing money.
Client Reporting Takes All Friday
Every month, your account managers spend a full day pulling data from five different tools to build client reports. Time logs from Harvest, tasks from Monday, metrics from Google Analytics, invoices from Xero. It is slow, error-prone, and nobody enjoys it.
Too Many Tools, No Single Source of Truth
Monday for project management, HubSpot for CRM, Harvest for time tracking, Xero for accounting, Google Drive for files. Five logins, five subscriptions, five places where data lives. Nothing talks to each other and your team wastes hours switching between tabs.
How Opus Solves It for Agencies
One platform that handles the full agency workflow. Projects, time, billing, CRM, and reporting in one place so your team can focus on the creative work.
Retainer Tracking with Real-Time Burn Rate
Set up each retainer with its monthly hour allocation and rate. As your team logs time, Opus shows the remaining balance in real time. Account managers see at a glance which retainers are on track, which are nearly exhausted, and which have unused capacity you should be proactively filling.
Team Utilisation and Capacity Planning
See exactly how each team member is allocated across projects and retainers. Identify who has capacity, who is overloaded, and where you need to redistribute work. Forecast capacity weeks ahead so you can win new work with confidence or bring in freelancers before deadlines slip.
Project Profitability with Scope Tracking
Every project starts with a defined scope, budget, and timeline. Opus tracks actual time and costs against the original scope in real time. When scope creep happens, you see the financial impact immediately and can have a conversation with the client before the margin disappears.
Time Tracking Across Projects with Xero Sync
Your team logs time against specific projects, tasks, and clients. Opus aggregates it all into timesheets that convert to invoices with one click. Everything syncs to Xero automatically, so your finance team is not re-entering data at month end.
Built-In CRM and Client Lifecycle
No more switching to HubSpot for client details. Opus includes a full CRM that tracks every client interaction, proposal, project, and invoice in one timeline. See the full relationship history when a client calls, and know exactly how profitable each account is over its lifetime.
AI-Powered Agency Analytics
Ask plain-English questions about your agency. "Which clients are most profitable?" "What is our average project margin this quarter?" "Which team members have capacity next week?" Opus analyses your data and returns answers in seconds.
The Agency Client Lifecycle in Opus
From pitch to profit analysis, Opus manages every stage of your agency's client relationships and project delivery.
New Business
A lead comes in from a referral, pitch, or inbound enquiry. Opus captures it in the CRM, logs the brief, and creates a pipeline opportunity so your new business team can track it through the proposal stage.
Proposal and Scoping
Build the proposal with a defined scope, budget, and timeline. Opus stores the approved scope so you have a clear baseline to measure against when the project kicks off.
Project Kick-Off
Client signs off. Create the project, assign team members, set up task lists, and start the clock. Retainer clients get automatic monthly allocations. Project-based work gets a fixed budget.
Delivery and Tracking
Your team logs time, updates tasks, and delivers work. Account managers see progress, budget burn, and retainer balances in real time. Scope changes are logged and flagged.
Billing and Reporting
Generate invoices from time logs or milestone completions. Sync to Xero. Build client reports that show what was delivered, hours spent, and outcomes achieved.
Review and Grow
Analyse project profitability and client account health. Identify which services and clients drive the best margins. Use that data to refine pricing, pitch new services, and grow the accounts that matter most.
Financial Clarity for Agency Leaders
Agencies live and die by utilisation and margins. Opus gives founders and principals the financial visibility to make better decisions about pricing, hiring, and client selection.
Client Account Profitability
See the true profitability of every client account over its lifetime. Factor in retainer overservicing, project scope changes, and team costs to know which clients are worth growing and which are costing you.
Billable vs Non-Billable Split
Track how much of your team's time is billable versus internal. Identify where non-billable work (admin, meetings, internal projects) is eating into productive capacity so you can protect your margins.
Revenue Forecasting
See projected revenue from active retainers, in-progress projects, and proposals in the pipeline. Opus gives you a forward view of your agency's income so you can plan hiring and cash flow with confidence.
Xero-Synced Billing
Convert time logs to invoices and sync them to Xero with full line items, GST, and client references. Payments received in Xero flow back into Opus so you always know who has paid and who has not.
Know Which Clients to Grow and Which to Fire
Not every client is equally profitable. Some retainers look good on paper but consume 30% more hours than allocated. Some project clients approve every quote without negotiation. Opus shows you the true profitability of each client account so you can invest in the relationships that drive your agency forward and have honest conversations about the ones that do not.
Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions from agency founders and operations leads evaluating Opus as their management platform.
How does Opus replace Monday, HubSpot, and Harvest for agencies?
Opus combines project management (Monday), CRM (HubSpot), and time tracking (Harvest) into one platform. Instead of paying three separate subscriptions and manually syncing data between them, your team works in a single system where time logs feed into invoices, client interactions live alongside projects, and financial data flows to Xero automatically. The result is less admin, fewer errors, and one login instead of three.
Can Opus handle both retainer and project-based work?
Yes. Opus supports retainer engagements with monthly hour allocations and automatic rollover tracking, alongside fixed-scope project work with budgets and milestones. Many agencies run both models simultaneously for different clients, and Opus keeps them separate while rolling everything up into unified team utilisation and financial reports.
How does retainer tracking work?
For each retainer client, you set a monthly hour allocation and rate. As your team logs time against that client, Opus deducts from the allocation and shows the remaining balance in real time. If a retainer approaches its limit, the account manager gets an alert. You can configure overage billing, rollover rules, and monthly reports that show the client exactly what their hours were spent on.
What does team utilisation tracking look like?
Opus shows utilisation as a percentage for each team member based on their logged hours versus available hours. You get a visual dashboard showing who is overloaded, who has capacity, and how the team is tracking overall. You can filter by department (design, development, strategy, account management) and forecast utilisation weeks ahead based on scheduled project work.
How much does Opus cost compared to Monday + HubSpot + Harvest?
Opus starts at $0 with the Free plan for one user. Paid plans start at $10/user/month (Starter), $25/user (Professional), $50/user (Business), and $100/user (Enterprise). For a 15-person agency currently paying for Monday ($10/user), HubSpot ($45/user), and Harvest ($12/user), switching to Opus Professional at $25/user saves over $600 per month while consolidating three tools into one.
Does Opus integrate with Xero?
Yes. Opus provides a two-way sync with Xero. Invoices generated from time logs or project milestones sync to Xero with full line item detail and GST. Client contacts and payment status sync bidirectionally. This eliminates the manual data entry that agencies typically do at the end of each month.
Can we generate client reports from Opus?
Opus stores all project data, time logs, deliverables, and financial information in one place. Account managers can pull client-facing reports showing hours spent, work delivered, budget status, and key outcomes without needing to gather data from multiple tools. Reports can be generated per project, per retainer period, or across the full client relationship.
Ready to consolidate your agency tools into one platform?
Join Australian agencies already using Opus to track retainers, manage teams, and grow client accounts. Free plan available, no credit card required.
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