Building Outstanding Commercial Intelligence in Creative Agencies: Why Best-in-Class Systems Shouldn't Be Replaced, But Unified
The smart way to get your specialist tools working together without the existential crisis
Introduction: The Patchwork of Agency Software
Running a modern agency (whether you're in creative, design, digital or beyond) means juggling countless priorities and spinning more plates than ever. As a result, most agencies end up with a suite of specialist software solutions: HubSpot for CRM, Float for timesheets, Bamboo for HR, Xero or QuickBooks for accounts, and perhaps a handful of others for project management or resource planning.
This approach makes sense. After all, these products are best-in-class for a reason: they solve specific operational challenges brilliantly. But there's a catch. When it comes to getting meaningful, actionable commercial intelligence—the sort of insights that drive profitability and smarter decision-making—the process quickly descends into spreadsheet hell. Most agencies find themselves patching data together, spending hours every month wrangling numbers, and ultimately falling behind on turning insights into action.
Worse still, this manual effort often fails to get everyone on board. Project managers and teams rarely engage with these complex spreadsheets, meaning the information rarely makes it to the people who need it most.
So what does great commercial intelligence really look like in an agency, and how can you achieve it without sacrificing the specialist tools your teams love?
Why Does Commercial Intelligence Matter? And What Does Good Actually Look Like?
Most agencies will have some kind of finance package. Your Xero or QuickBooks will give you a story about your revenue and P&L. But that story is usually about a time long past (the end of last month, quarter, or year). And crucially, it doesn't tell you what's happening right now in your projects, or help you improve performance on the fly.
Outstanding commercial intelligence is about real-time insights that:
Show you the key metrics about projects and people, in real time
Enable you to delegate responsibility for KPIs and commercial outcomes throughout the business
Help you plan, re-plan, and analyse performance against your goals with confidence
Here's the clincher: in the UK, agencies on average write off 25% of their turnover. For every £1m you bring in, that's £250,000 potentially left on the table. With robust commercial intelligence, you can dramatically move the needle on profitability—unlocking vital cash for investment, growth, and reward.
The Problem: Data Silos and the Siloed Mindset
As agencies grow and layer on more software, extracting commercial intelligence gets harder. Information about projects and people becomes scattered across multiple systems, with little integration or standardisation. Data starts to drift (projects have slightly different names in each system, information goes out of date, and before long, nobody's quite sure which figures are right).
The solution isn't to rip out your best-in-class tools. It's to unify the key data across all systems, so there's a single source of truth for projects, people, and performance. You don't need every system to store all the data—just to agree on what's what. When your CRM, timesheets, finance, and project tools all reference the same project names and structures, analysis and day-to-day operations become much simpler. There's less ambiguity, less wasted time, and far fewer "data clean-up" jobs that lose relevance the minute someone goes off-piste.
This is where modern commercial intelligence platforms like Supo come in: they sit on top of your specialist systems, maintaining a unified data state, propagating updates, and preventing errors from creeping in. It's a smarter way to ensure your business runs on accurate, connected data—without having to compromise on your choice of operational tools.
What Should You Measure? Start Simple, But Start Right
Commercial intelligence can generate hundreds of metrics, but the trick is to start with the essentials:
Business-Wide Metrics
Revenue on client work
Write-offs on client work
Write-offs on internal work
Project-Level Metrics (for every project)
Revenue
Gross profit
Billings
Work in progress (WIP)
People-Level Metrics (for every person)
Recorded time and timesheet coverage
Billable vs non-billable time
Net utilisation (recoverability)
Just these core numbers give you powerful, instant insight into where the business is winning, and where attention is needed. You'll be able to spot problem areas and act quickly—long before month-end figures arrive.
Moving the Needle: From Insights to Action
The real magic happens when you move beyond data collection to delegation. It's not just the CEO, CFO, or founder watching the numbers, it's every project manager, every team lead. Commercial intelligence empowers these people to forecast revenue, billings, and write-offs on a weekly or monthly basis, making re-forecasting a routine part of project delivery (with bigger projects updated more often).
When project leads submit forecasts to senior leadership, everyone can see commercial commitments in black and white, making it much easier to plan, flag issues early, and course-correct. Instilling this culture of commercial accountability means founders can focus on growth and winning new work, not just firefighting the numbers.
Want to Know More?
If you're curious about how commercial intelligence can help your agency achieve outstanding results—without disrupting the specialist tools you rely on—get in touch with us at Supo. We'd love to share how other agencies are transforming profitability and performance by building commercial intelligence on top of their existing systems.
Ready to move beyond the spreadsheet? Let's talk.
This article is brought to you by Supo, the commercial intelligence platform built for agencies who want to keep their best-in-class tools, and finally make them work together.