One Second Wind member agency discovered this role almost by accident. A new hire, brought on for general office support, turned out to have far more capability than the job called for. A background that included real administrative and management experience gave her a level of maturity uncommon among new hires at most agencies. The agency's principals could see it too. The problem was, she had no traditional agency skills. No creative background, no account service experience, no media training.
They started her in traffic, where she did well. As the agency grew, she moved into a role that probably doesn't exist by name at most other shops. The principals later told Second Wind that the position has been worth thousands of dollars in additional bottom-line profit every year since.
What is the position? An accounts receivable zealot.
Accounts receivable is the money clients owe the agency. Most agencies already have someone handling that: a bookkeeper, a controller, someone who runs the books. This role is different. It has nothing to do with the agency's accounting process. It doesn't post the general ledger, produce financial statements, pay bills, or run payroll.
This person simply knows more about the jobs moving through the agency's project management system than anyone else in the building. She sees them the moment they're opened. She watches estimates and timelines get built. She monitors daily time entries, the purchase orders going out to vendors, and every miscellaneous charge logged against a job. In short, she's the agency's zealot for making sure everything the software is capable of tracking actually gets tracked, on schedule, every time.
Capturing All the Billings
Every agency has a project management platform. Fewer agencies actually use it the way it was designed to be used. In most shops, staff let time entries slide by a day, a week, sometimes longer. At this agency, the zealot makes sure entries get logged daily, not batched and reconstructed from memory at month's end.
Many agencies issue purchase orders late, or generate them without a firm price attached, leaving the agency dependent entirely on the vendor's invoice to confirm what was actually agreed to. She makes sure every purchase order goes out prepriced before the vendor starts work. Expense reports, travel, meals, client entertainment, tend to trickle in late in most shops even with an app doing the collecting. She enforces the deadline anyway, because a tool that isn't used on time doesn't help anyone.
That's not the whole job either. Every month, she pulls a current billings-to-date report for every active project and puts it directly in front of each account executive. That constant monitoring surfaces hours and charges the system already captured but nobody acted on, and gets the agency invoicing more consistently and more often, which is exactly what earns the title.
Every agency could use a zealot like this. Most agencies underperform on profitability, and pushing net profit meaningfully higher than the industry average is hard. With traditional forms of agency compensation, commissions, markups, largely gone, capturing every billable hour and dollar on every project matters more than it used to. Software makes that possible. It doesn't make it automatic.
The agency principal, the controller, or the account executives could theoretically do this work themselves. It doesn't require a dedicated hire. But because this agency recognized the value hiding in the gap between what the system could capture and what actually gets captured, and gave one person the job of closing that gap, they're making meaningfully more than a typical agency their size.
Does your agency have an accounts receivable zealot?
