Creative agencies run on projects. Every estimate you send, every hour you track, every invoice you close is data that could, if the right system connects it, tell you exactly how healthy your business is. That's what agency project management software is actually for: not just task lists and deadlines, but the full picture of where the work stands, where the money is going, and whether the margin you quoted is the margin you'll actually keep.
But knowing is only possible if you're using the right features.
As Function Software's Product Manager, I spend a lot of time in the parts of the product that most people never open. What strikes me repeatedly is how often customers ask us to build something we shipped years ago. The features below don't have usability problems, they have discoverability problems. Here are six that deserve more attention than they get.
Why We Built the Software
Function Point is built for mid-to-large agencies that need the full picture across multiple active projects, multiple teams, and a real set of financial controls. FunctionFox is built for smaller studios, the ones where the owner is often also the operations team, that want the same clarity without the overhead. Between the two, we work with thousands of creative agencies who've moved from guessing to knowing.
Estimated Cost, Billable & Margins
- What it is: A view on the estimate showing cost, billable value and the resulting margin, as a dollar figure and a percentage, at the estimate total and by service group. Cost comes from your Cost Rate Card or from individual staff cost rates.
- Why it's underrated: Most creative agencies discover their real project margin months later, once timesheets are in, when the only options are absorbing the loss or renegotiating. This is the one point where the number is still free to change. It stays hidden because cost rates need configuring first, and because viewing cost is permission-gated.
- Who it helps most: The Owner or Finance Lead at the agency, carrying the P&L.
Admin Fees
- What it is: A percentage or flat overhead fee applied to an estimate, a 10% media management fee, say with control over whether it applies to a single Service Group or the whole estimate, and which service types it covers.
- Why it's underrated: Most agencies absorb this kind of overhead and treat it as the cost of doing business, which seems a shame when it's recoverable and configured once. The scoping is the recent part: a customer asked us for a percentage they could point at specific Service Groups, roughly the way tax works but more flexible. We'd already built it.
- Who it helps most: The Owner or Finance Lead setting pricing policy.
Timesheet Reminders and Summaries
- What it is: Two alerts for two different problems. Reminders go to the person with time missing. Summaries go to whoever does the chasing, listing every staff member with time outstanding, and can be scoped to a single office. Each comes in a daily and a weekly version, and you subscribe to either or both. Outstanding time is calculated against that person's capacity on the Work Calendar, not a simple check for whether they entered anything.
- Why it's underrated: They stay silent when there's nothing to chase, so they never become the nag people learn to ignore. It shipped in 2023 and we still get requests to build it, which tells you how well hidden it is. One customer put it better than I could: they'd rather the system did the chasing, because you can't argue with a robot.
- Who it helps most: The Studio or Traffic Manager currently chasing timesheets by hand.
Custom Fields on Timesheets
- What it is: Your own fields added to the timesheet — text, pick lists, dates — which then become available in reporting. Out of the box FunctionFox slices time by client, project and task. A custom field lets you slice it by work type, market, funding source, or a chargeback code.
- Why it's underrated: Custom fields get written off as an admin setting and a number on a plan comparison, which badly undersells them. The timesheet is the busiest surface in the product, so you're adding reporting dimensions to your largest dataset. Three on Classic, up to unlimited on In-House.
- Who it helps most: The Finance or Ops Lead reporting on a dimension the standard reports miss.
Pinned Comments on the Project Blog
- What it is: Any top-level comment on a Project Blog can be pinned to the top of the thread, where it stays regardless of what gets posted after it. You can pin anyone's comment, not only your own.
- Why it's underrated: The two or three comments that genuinely matter, an approved scope change, a written client instruction, end up buried under a fortnight of scheduling chatter. Pinning is probably the cheapest documentation an agency will ever produce, given it's one click on a comment that already exists.
- Who it helps most: The Account Manager asked six weeks later whether the client approved that.
Availability
- What it is: A view under the Traffic menu showing who is free and who is buried, with drag-and-drop to move work to another day or another person. An Action Status filter lets you exclude work parked in states like On Hold or Waiting on Client.
- Why it's underrated: Anything sitting in On Hold makes every day look slammed, so without that filter the page overstates the problem and quickly gets distrusted. It's on Premier and In-House, and by default only account admins can see it, which is almost certainly why plenty of Traffic Managers never have.
- Who it helps most: The Traffic Manager keeping the team from quiet overcommitment.
Before You Go
If there's a thread across these, it's that our quietest features in Function Point and FunctionFox are often already solving the problem you were about to ask us for and most are one setting away!
If you're already using Function Point or FunctionFox: pick whichever one above sounds like your biggest current problem and turn it on this week. If you need help configuring it, our support team is one message away.
If you're still evaluating whether Function Point or FunctionFox is the right fit for your agency: these are exactly the kinds of things we'd walk you through in a demo, not a feature tour, but a look at how agencies like yours are actually using them. Let's talk!
Either way, the features are already there. The only thing left is turning them on.
