A digital agency has three chronic pains, and all three come down to the same thing: the work is born in client chats and lives anywhere but.
- Revisions arrive in a conversation and get lost between “we’ll do it” and “we did it”.
- Nobody knows exactly how much a given client earned you.
- Team workload is estimated by eye, so some people are buried and others idle.
Let’s look at how this comes together into one loop — and state up front where our tool isn’t the answer, so you don’t waste a trial.
Pain 1. Revisions live in client chats
A typical day: 40 messages in the client chat, four of which are actual revisions, two of them phrased as “could we just nudge this a little”. The account manager holds it in their head and transfers it to the tracker in the evening — if there’s time.
There usually isn’t. Then one of two things happens: the revision is forgotten (and the client reminds you a week later), or it gets done and nobody records that it was work beyond the estimate.
How it’s solved. The bot sits in the working chats — client-facing and internal — and recognises free-form assignments. “Folks, swap the homepage banner by Friday” becomes a task with an owner and a date; the account manager just confirms it. No manual duplication, which means the “everything goes in the tracker” rule stops being an act of self-discipline. The mechanics are covered in our breakdown of tasks from conversations.
The side effect matters more than the main one: when revisions are captured automatically, by month’s end you can see how much out-of-scope work you did for free. It’s usually an unpleasant discovery — and the first step towards charging for it.
Pain 2. You can’t tell what a client earned you
The classic picture: revenue is known, hours are approximate, and per-project profit is computed once a quarter in a separate spreadsheet the owner maintains in the evenings.
How it’s solved. Client → project → tasks with hours → money all live in one database. Margin is computed as contract minus labour cost (hours × the person’s rate), with no exports and no reconciling spreadsheets. The method is in how to calculate project margin, and the module itself is per-project finance.
What that gives an agency in practice:
- You can see which clients feed you and which eat you. Usually 20% of clients deliver 80% of the margin, and one or two projects run at a loss — which nobody suspects until it’s calculated.
- You can see the moment a project goes into the red before delivery, not after. While it’s still running you can negotiate an increase or cut scope.
- The conversation about raising a client’s price stops being awkward: you have numbers instead of a feeling.
Pain 3. Workload by eye
“Who’s free?” is a question agencies routinely answer wrong. The new project lands on whoever protests least loudly, rather than whoever actually has time.
How it’s solved. Workload by person and by deadline is visible in analytics: who has how many active tasks, where deadlines pile up, who is genuinely idle. The same view answers “why is it on fire again” — usually because three projects deliver in the same week, and that was visible a month earlier.
What it looks like day to day
The shape project teams settle into:
- A client is created once — with the deal, contacts and history. Every project and task then hangs off them.
- A project carries the estimate, dates, team and rates. Margin comes from here.
- Tasks arrive two ways: from the client chat via the bot, and manually from the manager.
- The doers work from a mini app inside Telegram or MAX — no browser, nothing to install.
- The owner looks at two things rather than at chats: project margin and per-person workload.
Notifications, meanwhile, arrive where the team already is — in the messenger, not in an in-app bell nobody sees.
When we’re not the right fit
Honestly, so you don’t spend a trial finding out:
- You need a real sales department with funnels, scripts, end-to-end ad analytics and call tracking. Our CRM is for running the clients of a project business, not a sales platform.
- You need deep agile methodology — portfolios, flow metrics, elaborate Scrum. There are specialised tools for that.
- You need an ecosystem around it: screenshot-based time tracking, automatic hourly billing, integrations with a dozen external systems. We have no app marketplace.
- The agency is large — 50+ people with dedicated roles and established processes. We were built for teams up to a few dozen.
- There’s no automatic import from another system. Active tasks are moved by hand; there are usually only dozens of them, but it is manual work.
If two or more of these describe you, take a specialised combination instead — that’s the honest answer.
Where to start in one day
1. Create two real projects, not test ones. One profitable, one problematic — the contrast teaches more than ten test cards.
2. Set hourly rates for your people. Without them margin can’t be computed. Use the loaded rate: salary + payroll taxes divided by billable hours, not by 160.
3. Connect the bot to one client chat. Not all of them at once — one chat is enough to see how it handles your way of phrasing things.
4. After a week, look at two numbers: margin on those projects, and how many tasks the bot pulled out of the conversation. The second number is usually the answer to “how much were we losing”.
Bottom line
An agency doesn’t need another tracker. It needs revisions from client chats not to vanish, margin to compute itself, and workload to be visible before the crunch rather than after.
For most teams those are three separate systems — and that’s exactly why none of them works: everything falls through the gaps between them.
Gosudarynya merges them into one: the bot pulls tasks out of Telegram and MAX chats, clients and projects sit together, and margin is computed as you go. 7 days free, no card. The industry page is for agencies.