Agency Stack places freelancers with agencies and brands across Australia and the US. Founder Dan Copsey told us how the business got there, and what still gets in the way.
Agency Stack is an outsourcing and staffing business. "We place skilled freelancers in SEO, content, design, development and marketing operations with agencies and brands that need extra delivery capacity without the cost and overhead of hiring," says Dan Copsey, its founder. Today that means around 50 freelancers across several countries, and roughly 300 clients across Australia and the US.
For a long time, the work that held all of that together lived in several places at once. "It was spread across email, WhatsApp, spreadsheets and a separate invoicing tool," Dan says. With freelancers in different time zones working across multiple client accounts, there was no single view of who was working on what, how many hours were going into each account, or what was ready to bill.
Growth made the problem visible. "The tipping point came as we grew. Month-end billing had become a manual reconciliation exercise, and clients were asking for more visibility than we could easily give them." What Dan was looking for was easy to describe: "one place where the work, the conversations, the time and the billing all lived together."
Templates from day one
A new client at Agency Stack now starts from a template. The templates cover the firm's standard engagements, such as monthly SEO retainers, content programs and website builds, so the recurring tasks and task lists are in place from the first day. Freelancers are assigned to the relevant tasks and log their time directly against the work they are doing.
The conversations moved too. "All discussion happens inside the task rather than in chat apps," Dan says, "which means context never gets lost when someone is offline or a handover happens across time zones."
Clients are part of the same project, invited as client users. They see progress on the tasks Agency Stack shares with them, along with deliverables, files and comments, and they give feedback in the same place. What they do not see is the other side of the business: internal discussions, freelancer rates, budget tracking, or anything marked hidden from clients.
Then the month ends. "The tracked time and expenses flow straight into the invoice, so what we bill matches the work that was done."
Mind the gap
Asked which single thing has changed the way he works the most, Dan points to one connection: time tracking tied directly to invoicing.
"Before, the work and the billing lived in different places, and things fell through the gap between them. Now every hour logged against a task can be billed, and month-end invoicing takes a fraction of the time it used to."
He can put a number on it. Agency Stack currently manages around 40 active projects, 20 freelancers and 25 clients in ActiveCollab. "Month-end invoicing that used to take the better part of two days now takes a couple of hours, which saves us roughly 12 to 15 hours a month on billing and status updates alone."
What he thinks ActiveCollab could do even better
Dan is just as direct about what is missing. "Reporting could be more flexible, particularly for comparing profitability across clients and freelancers without exporting data. Support for multiple currencies and entities would help us, because we work across USD and AUD." The mobile app, he says, is fine for quick updates, but his freelancers still prefer the desktop version for anything substantial. And deeper integrations with the accounting and communication tools Agency Stack already uses would reduce some double handling.
Where the value is
His advice to someone in the same line of work comes with one condition. "If you're managing a distributed team across multiple clients and you bill on time or retainers, it's well worth it." The rest is about where to spend the effort at the start: "Put the effort into setting up your project templates and client permissions properly. That's where most of the value comes from, and it makes onboarding both new clients and new freelancers far easier."