Time & Money
Know what every project actually made.
Revenue is easy to see. It's the contractor bill, the media spend and the forgotten SaaS seat that decide whether the project made money — and those live in someone's inbox.
Ask an agency owner what a project billed and you’ll get an answer in five seconds. Ask what it cost and you get a pause, a guess, and a nervous laugh.
That’s not a discipline problem. It’s a tooling problem. The hours are in timesheets, sure — but the contractor invoice is in your email, the media spend is on a card statement, and the API credits are… somewhere. So “that project went well” stays a feeling instead of a number.
Handl puts costs next to the money they ate. Every project gets a Time & Money view: what you billed, what it cost — labor and hard costs — and the margin left over. In actual numbers, with a colour on them.
Time & Money → Costs tab — Expenses, Recurring costs and Scheduled costs widgets with realistic entries
Logging costs
Log it in ten seconds — or just upload the bill
Add an expense the boring way: description, vendor, amount, date, category. Ten categories that actually match how agencies spend in 2026 — Contractor, Hosting, Software/SaaS, AI Credits, Media Spend, Assets, Third Party, Travel, Processing Fees, Other.
Or skip the typing. Upload the vendor’s bill — PDF or a photo — and AI reads it: vendor, amount, date, category, all pre-filled. You glance, fix anything it got wrong, hit save.
Two things it will never do: it never invents numbers, and it never books anything without you. Can’t read a messy bill? It says so and you fill in the form. You’re always the one who hits save.
More on how that works in upload the bill: AI cost capture.
The add-expense drawer after a bill parse — 'Parsed from …' banner, review the fields below before saving
Recurring & scheduled
The costs that repeat, book themselves
Most project costs aren’t one-offs. The hosting is monthly. The retainer contractor is monthly. The SaaS seat is yearly and only remembered when it hurts.
Set a recurring cost once — weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly — and Handl books it each period until you pause it or it hits its end date. Auto-created entries get a “Recurring” badge so you always know what was you and what was the robot.
And for the freelancer you’re paying “$2k deposit, $3k on 1 September, $5k on 1 October”? That’s a scheduled cost: set the installments once, each one books itself on its due date, and the widget shows “1 of 3 paid” with the next date. Booked installments never change behind your back — editing a plan only ever touches the ones still in the future.
Scheduled costs widget — installment plan showing '1 of 3 paid' and the next due date
Margin
Margin, with a colour on it
Costs don’t sit in a list — they land in the maths. Time & Money folds labor from timesheets and hard costs together into the project’s real cost, and shows you margin the way your gut already thinks about it: green when it’s healthy, amber when it’s tightening, red when the project is quietly eating you.
There’s a weekly trend too — billable vs cost, side by side — so you see the exact week a project turned. Not three months later in your accountant’s summary. That week.
One detail agency owners appreciate: cost and margin columns are permission-gated. Your team sees their hours; who sees the margins is up to you.
Team activity table with colour-coded Margin % badges — green, amber and red
Want the full picture of what “profitable” means for an agency project? Read the guide to agency project profitability.
Frequently asked questions
Can I bill these costs on to my client?
Does the AI book expenses automatically?
What can I upload?
What about costs in other currencies?
Is this an expense tracker or bookkeeping tool?
What if a contractor's already in timesheets?
Was it worth it?