Invoicing for agencies
An agency invoice is rarely one line. It is a retainer, a piece of a project, four people's time and someone else's bill passed through at cost — and it has to be legible to a finance team that has never met you.
Build the month as lines, not as one number
A finance team approves what it can read. Give each engagement its own line with its own unit — a retainer for the month, design at a day rate, development in hours, a licence bought on the client's behalf — and the questions stop before they are asked. The arithmetic is done in one place and the totals on the sheet are the totals that were stored.
Pass-through costs
Media spend, stock, a licence, a subcontractor: put it on its own line, at cost, named. If you mark it up, that is a separate line with its own words. Burying either in a rate is how a client discovers it later, which is always worse than reading it now.
One client, one contact, frozen at issue
Clients live in a contact list, so the tenth invoice does not need the address typed again. And an issued document keeps its own copy of both parties: when the client restructures and you correct their registered address, last quarter's invoices still say what they said when they went out. That is the difference between a record and a file.
Numbering that survives an audit
One series per direction, with your own prefix — `INV-`, `2026-`, whatever your accountant asked for. The number is taken when the document is saved, not when the editor is opened, so an invoice you started and abandoned does not leave a hole in the series.
Both sides of the ledger
What you bill and what you are billed are the same document read from either end. Freelancers' invoices to you, the studio's software subscriptions, the printer's bill — recorded as bills, in the same list, with the same statuses. See invoice or bill.
Several currencies, one tool
Currency and language are per document. Bill a Berlin client in euro in German-language formatting and a New York client in dollars from the same account, without a second tool and without a monthly fee per seat.
Common questions
- Can several people in the studio use it?
- Each person signs in with their own Perly account today; shared workspaces are not built. If you need one set of books, one account holds them.
- Can I pass processing fees on to the client?
- There are none to pass on. The client pays you directly and Perly takes nothing, so the only fees involved are your bank's or the network's.
- Can I handle media spend pass-throughs?
- Yes — as their own named lines at cost. There is no separate pass-through mechanism, and for an invoice a line that says what it is does the job better.
- What reporting is there?
- What is outstanding, what is overdue, what has been paid, in both directions. Not a cash-flow forecast — if you want to know what the money did after it arrived, that is what the [Perly app](https://app.perly.io/?utm_source=invoice&utm_content=agency) is for.
- Do you sync with accounting software?
- Not yet. No export to Xero or QuickBooks exists, and we would rather list that as a gap than describe it as coming soon.
Make one now
The generator is the front page. No account, no sign-up, no watermark — fill the document in and the PDF is yours.
Open the invoice generator