It's Tuesday afternoon. The client wants artwork by Friday, and your designer is fully booked for the rest of the week. The account lead messages the freelancer they always use: 'Any chance you're free Thursday and Friday?' - and it's sorted.

Three weeks later the invoice lands. It's two days plus a few extra hours. It has no job number on it, because nobody gave them one. Someone in Finance spends 20minutes working out which job it belongs to. Then comes the question nobody can answer - was that cost in the budget?

There are really two ways a freelancer ends up on a job. Sometimes you know at scoping, because you need a skill you don't have in-house or a team you know will be full. In that case, their cost should go into the price, with a mark-up on top, inside the budget the client agreed. The mark-up isn't greed. It covers the briefing, the reviews, the rounds of amends you manage on their behalf, and the fact that you pay them in 30 days while the client pays you in 60.

Other times, you find out halfway through. Then the cost comes out of a budget that was never built for it.

Either way, the money tends to get lost in the same places:

• The scope said the animation would go to a freelancer, but their day rate went in at cost. The agency now manages, briefs and quality-checks the work for nothing
• The freelancer was never in the scope at all, so every hour they bill comes straight off the margin
• The booking happens over Slack, with no agreed hours and no rate confirmed for this piece of work. The invoice is the first time anyone sees the cost
• The brief is a forwarded email thread. The freelancer spends the first couple of hours working out what's wanted, and bills for them (fair enough)
• The invoice gets coded to whichever month it arrives in, or to a general freelance line, so the project report shows a better margin than the job actually made

This doesn't mean the freelancer is the problem. Often they're the most reliable part of the arrangement. Though if you're honest, some of what they charge is probably the cost of working with you. Vague briefs and Thursday deadlines get priced in.

The bigger cost is the pattern you're not looking at - if Design has needed a freelancer three weeks out of four since spring, you're paying a premium every month to avoid a hiring decision. When every booking is a one-off, made in a hurry and invoiced without a job number, you'll never see what's happening.

Where to start

From the next booking, no freelancer starts work without a job number and an agreed number of hours, confirmed to them in writing:

"Booking you for job 2417, 12 hours at your usual rate, brief attached. Please put the job number on your invoice."

Before that message goes out, the account lead checks one thing - is this freelancer in what we sold?

• Yes: do the agreed hours fit within that line, and was it marked up?
• No, and the client has added something that needs a skill we don't have: that's a change request, and it goes to the client before the freelancer starts.
• No, and it's because we're short of capacity: that's our cost. Book them anyway if the job needs it. At least now someone has made that decision knowing what it costs, instead of finding out at month-end.

After a couple of months, you'll have something most agencies don't; a record of which jobs carried their freelance costs, which ones absorbed them, and which teams keep needing outside help. That's when freelance spend becomes something you plan, price and decide on.

💜 If you'd like to know what gaps like this are costing your agency each month, a Visibility Session is a good place to start.

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