Accountants for Social Media Marketing Agencies.

Allocate your real delivery costs to each account: the editors, videographers and freelancers who work on it, a fair share of delivery salaries, and any client-specific tools. Set that against the retainer and you have margin per client, which is the number that matters, not total revenue. You do not need perfect timesheets; a rough map of who spends time where gets you 90% of the answer, and it almost always finds one account being carried by the rest.

Freelancers keep costs flexing with revenue, which suits an agency whose content volume moves month to month. An employee costs more than the salary: employer National Insurance runs at 15% on pay above £5,000 a year in 2026/27, plus pension and holiday, though the £10,500 Employment Allowance offsets the NI bill for most agencies with a team on payroll. The usual tipping point is when a freelancer is invoicing you the equivalent of a full-time wage every month; at that point an employee is often cheaper and more committed.

Insist on an invoice for every payment, code each cost to the client it serves rather than one big content bucket, and pay on a fixed weekly or fortnightly run instead of ad hoc transfers. Genuine freelancers sit outside payroll, but keep contracts and details tidy because HMRC can ask who you paid and why. Done properly, you always know your true cost per account, and creators get paid on time, which is how you keep the good ones.

A defined content volume, a named number of revision rounds, and a clear line on what costs extra, including paid boosting, additional platforms and client-specific tools. Scope creep is the silent margin killer in social: ten extra stories a month feels like goodwill until you cost the editing time. Price the retainer from your delivery cost plus the margin you need, then re-cost every account once or twice a year, because content expectations only ever grow.

Because the costs and the tax are not on the same rhythm as the income. Freelancer invoices bunch up after heavy production months, VAT leaves in one quarterly lump, and corporation tax accrues silently on every profitable month before landing long after year end. Open a separate account and move a fixed percentage of every month's receipts into it for tax, and the tightness usually disappears within a quarter.