Agency KPIs: The 8 Numbers You Want to See Weekly
Most agencies look at numbers once a month, and at the wrong ones. Last month's revenue is a result, not steering information: by the time you see it, there is nothing left to do about it. This article gives eight numbers you want to see weekly, each with its formula, a target range, and above all the action that follows. A KPI without an action attached is a chart.
Why weekly, and not monthly
An agency runs on hours, and hours are structured by week. A project that overruns, overruns in weeks. An employee below their target utilisation is below it for a week. Look monthly and every signal is on average three weeks old, which is exactly too late to fix with a conversation or a reshuffle.
The rule of thumb: monthly you look at results, weekly at the things that can still change the result. Five of the eight numbers below fall into that second category.
1. Billable utilisation
Formula: billable hours divided by hours present, per employee and for the team.
Target: 65 to 75% for an agency with its own sales and internal duties. Above 80% you approach a staffing model; below 60% you structurally lose margin.
Why it comes first: this is the metric with the biggest lever you have. Ten percentage points of utilisation shift the rate you need by nearly 17%, as worked out in calculating your hourly rate. No rate negotiation does that.
Action on deviation: look at the spread, not the average. One person at 45% explains a team average better than "it was a quiet week". The approach is in increasing billable utilisation.
2. Realised hourly rate
Formula: invoiced amount divided by tracked hours, per project and per employee.
Target: within 10% of your list rate. Structurally below that means money is leaking through discounts, uninvoiced hours or overrunning fixed-price projects.
Action on deviation: work out which of the three leaks it is. They call for completely different responses: a commercial agreement, an invoicing process, or a project control problem.
3. Work in progress
Formula: work performed but not yet invoiced, in euros and expressed in days of revenue.
Target: under 45 days. Agencies invoicing monthly typically sit at 20 to 30 days; anything above 60 days means you are financing your clients.
Why it has to be weekly: work in progress is the classic creeping number. It grows without anyone making a decision, and it only becomes obvious when the bank calls.
Action on deviation: look at the ageing. Hours from last week are normal; hours from three months ago are a problem, because the older the entry, the smaller the chance of invoicing it without an argument.
4. Invoices overdue by more than 30 days
Formula: the sum of open invoices more than 30 days past their due date, plus the average days to payment.
Target: under 15% of your outstanding balance. Average days to payment should be within 10 days of your agreed terms.
Action on deviation: this is where automation pays best, because nobody enjoys the task itself. Automatic reminders after the due date and an iDEAL payment link on the invoice and in the reminder remove the friction for the client who simply forgot. In practice that is the majority.
5. Budget consumption on live projects
Formula: budget consumed as a percentage, set against actual progress.
Target: the gap between the two percentages stays within 10 points.
Why it works this way: a project at 70% of budget is neither good nor bad; it depends on whether it is also 70% done. The gap between those two is the only signal that arrives in time. More in preventing project budget overruns.
Action on deviation: at more than 10 points of gap there is exactly one good moment for the conversation with the client, and it is now. If it turns out to be additional work, record it as such rather than letting it vanish into the project budget.
6. Capacity for the next eight weeks
Formula: scheduled hours divided by available hours (contract hours minus leave minus calendar appointments), per week ahead.
Target: 80 to 90% for the coming two weeks, tapering to 40 to 60% for weeks seven and eight. A fully booked week eight is not a good sign but an acquisition problem in the making, because work always arrives in between.
Action on deviation: a gap in week four can still be filled with sales or pulled-forward work. A gap in week one cannot. That is why capacity planning looks forward rather than accounting for hours after the fact.
7. Weighted pipeline against your revenue target
Formula: the sum of open opportunities multiplied by their win probability, set against next quarter's revenue target.
Target: at least two to three times your target. If weighted value sits below your target, it is already too late to repair that quarter, because the lead time from proposal to started project in professional services is rarely under six weeks.
Action on deviation: look at the age of your opportunities. A pipeline that looks healthy but never moves is a list of hopes.
8. Missing hours
Formula: the number of employees who logged less than 80% of their contract hours last week.
Target: zero, every Monday.
Why this is the most important of the eight: the other seven all derive from tracked hours. If those hours are missing, your utilisation, your work in progress and your project margins are not wrong but unknown, which is worse. An agency still missing 40% of its hours on Monday morning steers on an estimate all week.
Action on deviation: make tracking easier before you enforce it. A weekly timesheet that takes two minutes, suggestions from the calendar and a weekly reminder achieve more than an email from management.
How to set this up in practice
Eight numbers are too many to maintain by hand and too few to justify a data warehouse. Three practical rules:
Put them on one screen. If assembling the overview is work, it stops happening after three weeks. The Horixa Insights dashboard shows utilisation, work in progress, revenue per month and productivity per employee from the same administration the hours are logged in, so there is no export step.
Let the deviation come to you. A weekly digest that reports on Monday morning which projects are running over budget, who is missing hours and which invoices are overdue works better than a dashboard you have to open. The difference is who takes the initiative.
Discuss at most three per week. Pick the three you can act on this week. The rest is context.
Frequently asked questions
What are the most important KPIs for an agency? Billable utilisation, realised hourly rate, work in progress, invoices overdue by more than 30 days, budget consumption on live projects, capacity for the next eight weeks, weighted pipeline and missing hours. The first four cover what has happened, the last four what is about to.
What is a good utilisation rate for an agency? 65 to 75% of hours present, for an agency with its own business development and internal duties. Measure it per employee rather than only as a team average, because the average hides exactly the cases you could act on.
How much work in progress is too much? Expressed in days of revenue, under 45 days is a reasonable ceiling, and 20 to 30 days is normal with monthly invoicing. More important than the total is the ageing: hours older than two months are hard to invoice after the fact.
How often should I look at these numbers? Weekly, at a fixed moment, preferably Monday morning. Monthly is too late for the five forward-looking metrics, and daily produces noise without adding steering information.
What is the difference between a leading and a lagging indicator? A lagging indicator measures the result (revenue, realised rate); a leading indicator predicts it (capacity, pipeline, missing hours). Agencies almost always report too much lagging and too little leading, which is why the reports are correct but nothing changes.
Do I need a separate BI tool for this? Not for these eight, provided they come from one administration. A separate BI tool becomes interesting once you want to combine sources that do not live in your project administration. As long as hours, projects, costs and invoices sit in the same system, an extra tool is mainly an extra export step.
Want these numbers delivered weekly instead of assembling them? Try Horixa free for 14 days, including the Insights dashboard and the weekly digest.