How PLECOM separates its own money from its clients' ad budgets

PLECOM builds and runs online shops for eCommerce businesses from Stralsund, in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Two kinds of revenue go through the same account: monthly retainers that look reassuringly stable, and shop builds that arrive in lumps. And a third kind of money goes through it that is not revenue at all — the ad budgets they run for clients, paid out first and invoiced on.

That last one is what makes the bank balance a bad number to plan against. Some of what is in the account on any given morning is a client's media spend waiting to leave, and some of it is a shop build that was paid up front for work that still has to be delivered. Both look exactly like headroom.

What they connected

Accounting first, then banking. Bookings arrive already assigned to an account, so nothing has to be categorised by hand, and the plan ends up using the same numbers the tax advisor does.

• Accounting — actuals, accruals and open items, including client invoices issued but not yet paid.
• Banking — the actual balances the forecast starts from.
• Team and tools — salaries, freelancers and the licences that scale with the number of shops under management.

The first usable forecast was on screen in about twenty minutes. Nobody built a model — the accounting structure was already the structure of the plan.

How the month is planned now

Each retainer is a scheduled line with its own start date and payment terms, so a client leaving is a change with a date rather than a hole discovered later. Shop builds are dated to their milestones. And the pass-through ad spend is planned as what it is: an outflow on the day the platform charges it, and an inflow when the client pays it back — with the gap between the two visible instead of quietly financed out of the agency's own cash.

What that changes at the moment of deciding:

Part of the money in our account was never ours — the plan shows that now, before we spend it.

The second effect: capacity

The pass-through spend was the reason they started. Capacity is where the model earned its keep a second time. Every new shop under management is recurring revenue and recurring hours at the same time, and the hours have to come from somewhere — a hire, or a freelancer at a higher rate.

Instead of deciding that by feel at the point the team is already overloaded, PLECOM can put the next hire in the simulator on a start date, run it against the retainers already signed, and see whether the trough it creates still clears. The freelancer alternative goes in the same way, so the two are compared on one curve rather than two hunches.

Where they are now

Client media spend no longer flatters the balance, retainer changes are planned with a date on them, and the monthly spreadsheet rebuild is gone. The forecast updates itself on every sync.