To build this report, waya­head fetch­es all invoic­es ever cre­at­ed in Stream­time and makes annu­al sum­maries based on your finan­cial year. There is a set­ting that lets you choose how far back data has to be retrieved: this could be handy for agen­cies with large vol­umes of invoic­es or in case you don’t have a full year worth of data in your first year of using Streamtime.

All invoic­es are sum­marised by month, by client, by account man­ag­er and by job type. Like oth­er reports in waya­head, these last 2 require you to label the jobs cor­rect­ly in Stream­time first. All results can be con­sult­ed in inter­ac­tive graphs and in insight­ful tables views.

The report also lets you tog­gle between rev­enue of con­tri­bu­tion views. While rev­enue is eas­i­ly cre­at­ed from the sum of all invoic­es, it’s not always use­ful for agen­cies who deal with many or large third par­ty expens­es. Hav­ing an excep­tion­al month with a £250K turnover is fair­ly mean­ing­less if it includes £100K to be paid to a sup­pli­er for a large print­ing order. The con­tri­bu­tion – often referred to as agency fee – is the turnover minus the third par­ty costs (expens­es and pur­chase orders from Streamtime).

How­ev­er, the tricky thing is that Stream­time does­n’t have data describ­ing which 3^rd par­ty expense match­es with each out­go­ing invoice. While both the expens­es and invoic­es are relat­ed via the same job, there is no data con­nect­ing the dots. In some cas­es it seems straight for­ward: you pur­chase some print work and bill it out at the exact price as men­tioned in the pur­chase order. But in oth­er cas­es, the invoice could have mul­ti­ple expens­es merged into a sin­gle price or spe­cif­ic costs, such as a free­lancer’s hours, may be includ­ed in oth­er services.

waya­head has long offered a solu­tion for this prob­lem: you can con­nect the dots using the Invoice Con­tri­bu­tion report. This report can show you all invoic­es sent out in a par­tic­u­lar date range and let’s you deter­mine for each invoice which third par­ty costs match the out­put. With the last release there is even a new func­tion allow­ing you to par­tial­ly match expens­es with invoic­es. So we can say that 30% of a free­lancer’s cost was billed on the first invoice and 70% went out on the final invoice. This makes the cal­cu­la­tions of the actu­al con­tri­bu­tion a lot more accu­rate. Best prac­tice is to use the Invoice Con­tri­bu­tion report month­ly to val­i­date all invoic­es for that month.