Building the ultimate finance dashboard for PR agencies tracking campaign performance

Key takeaways

• Connect money to media. A good PR agency finance dashboard links financial results directly to campaign outputs, showing you the real profit behind every press release and client event.
• Automate the basics. Use tools to automatically pull data from your accounting software, project management, and time tracking into one view, saving hours of manual reporting each month.
• Focus on margin per client. The most important number is your gross margin per client (the money left after paying your team), not just total revenue. This tells you who your profitable clients are.
• Track utilisation and realisation. Know what percentage of your team's available time is billable (utilisation) and what percentage of the time you bill for you actually get paid for (realisation). These are your efficiency engines.
• Forecast with confidence. Use your dashboard to predict future cash flow and profitability based on current retainer values, project pipelines, and planned team costs.

What is a PR agency finance dashboard and why do you need one?

A PR agency finance dashboard is a single screen that shows your agency's key financial numbers and how they connect to your campaign work. It answers questions like: "Is this client profitable?", "How efficient is my team?", and "What's our cash position for the next quarter?".

You need one because spreadsheets and gut feeling are not enough to run a profitable agency. Financial data lives in your accounting software. Project data lives in your task management tool. Time data is in your timesheets. A dashboard brings it all together.

For PR agencies, this is especially powerful. Your work is often retainer-based and labour-intensive. A dashboard shows you the true cost and profit of servicing each client account. It turns abstract financial reports into actionable commercial insights.

Think of it as your agency's financial control panel. Instead of checking five different places, you get one truth about your business health. This lets you make faster, smarter decisions about pricing, resourcing, and which clients to grow.

How do you start building your PR agency finance dashboard?

Start by defining the 5-10 most important questions you need answered weekly or monthly. Then, find where that data lives and use a tool to connect it all. A good setup guide focuses on simplicity first, not complexity.

Your first step is not buying software. It's writing down what you want to know. Common starter questions for PR agencies are: What is our cash balance? What's our gross margin this month? Which clients are most profitable? What's our team's utilisation rate?

Next, audit your data sources. You likely have Xero or QuickBooks for finances. You might use Harvest or Clockify for time tracking. Project data could be in Asana, Trello, or Monday.com. List them all.

Now, choose a dashboard tool. For most agencies, this is a business intelligence platform like Google Data Studio (now Looker Studio), Microsoft Power BI, or a specialised agency tool like Parakeeto or FunctionFox. These tools can pull data from your other software via reporting integrations.

The goal of your initial setup guide should be a "minimum viable dashboard". This is a one-page view with your top three financial metrics and two key performance indicators (KPIs). You can expand from there once this is working smoothly.

What are the essential metrics for a PR agency dashboard?

The essential metrics are cash flow, gross margin per client, team utilisation, and client profitability. These numbers tell you if you're financially healthy, efficient, and working with the right clients.

First, track cash flow. This is simply the money coming in versus the money going out of your bank account. PR agencies often have irregular income from project work alongside retainers. Watching cash flow helps you avoid surprises.

Second, calculate gross margin per client. Take the fee you charge a client. Subtract the direct cost of your team's time (their salaries or freelance rates) spent on that account. The remaining money is your gross margin. This shows you which clients are worth the effort.

Third, measure team utilisation. This is the percentage of your team's available working hours that is billable to clients. If your team of five has 160 available hours per week each, but only 500 of those hours are client work, your utilisation is 62.5%. Most agencies target 65-75%.

Fourth, monitor client profitability over time. A client might be profitable in month one, but if scope creeps and your team spends more time, profitability falls. Tracking this trend helps you have better pricing and scope conversations.

Specialist accountants for PR agencies often help clients identify which of these metrics will have the biggest immediate impact on their business.

How can you automate KPI tracking and reporting?

You automate KPI tracking by using software that connects to your data sources and updates your dashboard automatically. This KPI automation saves you from manually copying numbers every week.

Start with your accounting software. Platforms like Xero and QuickBooks have built-in connections to dashboard tools. You can set up a feed so your profit and loss data flows into your dashboard daily without you touching it.

Next, connect your time-tracking tool. If your team logs time in Harvest, this data can automatically update your utilisation and realisation rates. Realisation rate is the percentage of billable time you actually invoice and collect payment for.

Then, look at project management. Some tools allow you to export data on project budgets versus actual time spent. This can feed into your client profitability calculations.

The magic of KPI automation is in the rules you set. You can tell your dashboard to highlight a client in red if their gross margin falls below 40%. Or to send you a weekly email summary of cash flow. The system does the work, you get the insight.

This automation turns financial management from a monthly chore into a real-time tool. You can check your dashboard in five minutes and know exactly where your business stands.

Which reporting integrations are most useful for PR agencies?

The most useful reporting integrations connect your accounting software, time tracker, and CRM or pipeline tool. This gives you a complete picture from lead to delivery to cash collection.

The first and most critical integration is with your accounting platform. This brings live revenue, expense, and profit data into your dashboard. It's the foundation of any financial view.

The second key integration is with your time-tracking software. For PR agencies, time is the main cost. Connecting time data lets you see the true cost of client work and calculate accurate margins. It powers your utilisation and realisation metrics.

The third valuable integration is with your CRM or sales pipeline tool, like HubSpot or Pipedrive. This lets you see the financial value of your sales pipeline. You can forecast future revenue based on likely wins.

Some agencies also benefit from integrating with tools specific to PR work. This could include media monitoring platforms to correlate financial spend with earned media value, though this is more advanced.

The goal of these reporting integrations is to create a single source of truth. You're not logging into four different apps to piece together your story. The dashboard does it for you. To understand how your agency measures up across financial health, AI readiness, and operational efficiency, take our free Agency Profit Score — a quick 5-minute assessment that gives you a personalised report on what's working and where to focus.

How should you structure your dashboard for different users?

Structure different views for founders, account directors, and finance managers. Founders need the big picture, account directors need client-level details, and finance managers need granular data for accuracy.

Create a founder or leadership view. This should be one page with the top-level numbers: cash balance, monthly revenue, gross profit, and pipeline value. It's a quick health check, not a detailed report.

Build an account director or client service view. This page should show metrics for their specific clients: profitability per client, budget versus actual spend for campaigns, and team utilisation on their accounts. This helps them manage scope and resources.

Design a finance or operations view. This can have more tabs and detail. It includes the full profit and loss statement, aged debtors (who owes you money), detailed expense categories, and payroll costs. This is for the person who needs to reconcile the books.

The power of a good dashboard tool is that you can build these different views from the same underlying data. You set the permissions so each person sees what's relevant to their role.

This structure saves time in meetings. Instead of preparing separate reports, everyone can look at the same live dashboard, focusing on the view made for them.

What are the common mistakes when setting up a dashboard?

The most common mistakes are tracking too many metrics, not connecting to live data, and forgetting to act on the insights. A dashboard is a tool for decisions, not a piece of reporting art.

Mistake one is vanity metrics. Agencies fill dashboards with numbers that look impressive but don't drive action. Focus on metrics you can influence directly, like utilisation or margin, not just total followers gained for a client.

Mistake two is manual updates. If you have to export CSVs and paste them in every week, you'll stop using the dashboard. The value is in automation. Invest time in setting up the reporting integrations properly from the start.

Mistake three is ignoring the data. You build a beautiful PR agency finance dashboard, see that a client has a 20% margin, but do nothing to address it. The dashboard's job is to highlight problems. Your job is to fix them.

Mistake four is not involving your team. The people who need the data should help design the views. An account director will tell you what client information they actually need to manage better.

Avoiding these pitfalls turns your dashboard from a cost centre into a profit centre. It helps you spot issues early, like rising costs on a retainer, so you can adjust before it hurts your bottom line.

How does a dashboard improve campaign performance tracking?

A dashboard improves campaign tracking by linking the financial cost of a campaign directly to its outcomes. You see not just what you delivered, but what it cost you to deliver it, and what profit was left.

Without a dashboard, you might know a press tour generated 50 pieces of coverage. With a dashboard, you know it generated 50 pieces of coverage, cost £8,000 in team time and expenses, and delivered a £2,000 profit on a £10,000 client fee.

This financial clarity helps you price future campaigns more accurately. You can see which types of work (media relations, events, content creation) have the best margins for your agency. You can steer your team towards more profitable work.

It also helps with scope management. If you see the time spent on a client's monthly reporting is creeping up each cycle, you can address it immediately. You can re-scope the work or adjust the retainer.

Ultimately, a PR agency finance dashboard turns campaign performance from a qualitative story into a quantitative business result. It answers the founder's key question: "Are we doing good work that also makes us good money?"

For help turning these insights into a forward-looking plan, discover where your agency stands financially with our Agency Profit Score, a free tool that analyses your performance across profit visibility, revenue, cash flow, operations, and AI readiness in just five minutes.

What's the next step after your dashboard is live?

The next step is to build a regular review habit and start forecasting. Use your live dashboard to look forward, predict cash flow, and model different business scenarios.

Schedule a weekly 30-minute meeting with your leadership team to review the dashboard. Look at cash, margin, and utilisation. Discuss any red flags and agree on actions. This habit ensures the dashboard drives decisions.

Then, start forecasting. Use the historical data in your dashboard to predict the next 90 days. How much cash will you have if two big invoices are paid late? What happens to profit if you hire another account manager?

Advanced dashboards let you create "what-if" scenarios. You can model the financial impact of winning a new retainer, losing a client, or giving your team a pay rise. This reduces risk and helps you plan growth confidently.

Finally, iterate. Your first PR agency finance dashboard won't be perfect. After using it for a month, ask your team what's missing or what's confusing. Tweak the metrics and views until it becomes an indispensable part of running your agency.

Getting your financial tracking right is a major competitive advantage. If you'd like to see how your agency's finances compare and get tailored insights, our Agency Profit Score takes just 5 minutes and reveals your financial health across five key areas.