Agency commercial operating system
Lumo is the one system where an agency's work and its money move together: briefs, estimates, purchase orders, invoices, resourcing and time, reconciled while the job is live.
45 minutes with a product consultant who knows agency workflows. No canned video, no hard sell.
For most agencies the work lives in a PM tool and the money lives in a finance package. Profit disappears in the gap between them — quietly, on live jobs, while everyone is busy doing good work.
You quote the job, then check the margin at month-end. By the time the numbers reconcile, the invoice has gone and the damage is done.
"Just one more round of changes." Untracked, those rounds become free work and invisible write-offs.
A PM tool here, a finance package there, and one heroic spreadsheet in the middle. When it breaks, so does your month-end close.
Everything below runs on one connected record. A campaign holds its jobs, a job starts from a brief, the brief carries its estimate — and time, scope, purchase orders and invoices reconcile against that estimate for as long as the job lives.
The full agency money chain, native: Cost Estimate → Purchase Order → Sales Invoice → Credit Note, approval-gated, with estimate vs actual on live jobs. Quote it, control it, bill it and reconcile it without leaving the system the work lives in.
Every job starts from a structured brief and stays governed as scope moves. Agency reverts stay non-chargeable; client reverts become billable after the agreed rounds.
Week Planner and live capacity views show who is over- or under-loaded, with hours tracked from planned to booked to confirmed to actual per phase and task.
Time captured the way people already work: a background tracker, drag-and-drop entry, and two-way Outlook and Google Calendar sync. Accurate data without the Friday-afternoon chase.
One screen per job answers the questions that used to take finance a week: timeline performance, financial status, employee contribution and performance against estimate.
Plan sync with Asana and Smartsheet, links to Teams, Jira, Basecamp and Google Sheets, and full accounting with Xero, QuickBooks Online or Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.
Agencies have plenty of tools for tasks. Lumo owns the agency-specific layer: money, scope, capacity and live job truth.
There is no estimate-to-invoice chain in a task board. Lumo runs Cost Estimate → Purchase Order → Purchase Invoice → Sales Invoice → Credit Note as one connected sequence, with estimate vs actual built in.
Scope changes stop being Slack messages and become governed, traceable and billable once client rounds pass the agreement.
Read any job four ways from one record: timeline performance, financial status, employee contribution, performance against estimate. Less month-end archaeology.
Legacy agency systems knew this domain, then stopped evolving. Lumo carries the same depth in a modern cloud product your teams will actually use.
Lumo imports and exports plans with Asana and Smartsheet, links to Teams, Jira, Basecamp and Google Sheets, and hands full accounting to Dynamics 365 Business Central. Your teams keep the tools they like. The agency gains the financial layer those tools were never built to hold: estimates, purchase orders, invoices, Reverts and live estimate vs actual.
Keep: Asana, Smartsheet, Teams, Jira, Basecamp, Google Sheets.
Add: estimates, POs, invoices, Reverts, live estimate vs actual.
In the job itself. Estimates, POs, invoices, credit notes and actuals stay tied to the job that created them.
Yes. Structured briefs, resource plans and the Job Overview form one operational spine from request to billing.
To capacity. The Week Planner tracks hours from planned to actual, so the plan stays honest as reality shifts.
That is what the system is for. Reverts, estimate vs actual and low-friction time capture surface invisible write-offs while there is still time to bill them.
Lumo is an indispensable tool for our consultancy. It has transformed the way we manage projects, track time, and handle financials — giving us real visibility across every job.
Deep dives on the operational problems that cost agencies the most, written for COOs, Finance Directors and founders.
Where agencies lose profit between the brief and the invoice: scope creep, estimate-vs-actual gaps, and the four quiet leaks that drain margin from every job.
Get the white paperThe hidden cost of running an agency across disconnected tools, and why the reconciliation gap between your PM tool and your finance package costs more than you think.
Get the white paperHow capacity planning and accurate time capture drive agency profitability, and what to do when your utilisation numbers fall short.
Get the white paper45 minutes with a product consultant who has run agency workflows for a living. No canned video, no hard sell — bring your messiest scenario: estimate vs actual on a live job, unbilled client changes, utilisation this week, or the path from estimate to invoice.