Case file · agency operations · arq itself · aug 2026

From lead to off-boarding: agency automation.

A client's board said five campaigns were still to do. All five were live and spending. Someone had shipped the work and forgotten the card. We don't send a report we can't stand behind, so we built the thing that checks every board against the real ad account every morning. Then eleven more like it, covering everything from capturing a lead to handing the whole account over on the way out. All of it before we had the client count to justify any of it.

A glowing database core at the centre with data conduits flowing inward from all sides and beams leaving upward One warehouse per client. Everything reads from it. Nothing gets its own private copy.
01 — the architecture

The whole arc, one warehouse.

Every client gets their own store, filled daily from the ad account, the shop, the subscription system and their own attribution tool. Every automation below reads from that one place, so two people can never quote two different numbers in the same meeting. Stage three is the one that repeats: it runs every week for as long as they stay.

runs on a schedule a human decides 12 automations · 4 gates we never automated
02 — the board

Every test on one board.

This is what stage three looks like from the inside. Each card is one experiment with its own label in the ad account, so the spend can always be traced back to the card that authorised it. Nothing moves right without a person moving it.

arq / cureend — experiments
Client
Yesterday
2.8×roas
€4.1kspend

Experiments

read due: 2
Design3
XP-021Comparison LP for whiteningcriterion not set
XP-022Broad match on guarded CPAcriterion not set
Hypothesis2
XP-019Listicle LP vs product pagewaiting on you
XP-020Branded defence at 90% tISbuilt, paused
Run3
XP-014BOFU search, buying intentday 19/21 · 2.9×
XP-016PMax feed-only splitday 8/28 · 2.2×
XP-017Native discovery anglesday 4/21 · 1.6×
Verdict1
XP-011Competitor conquestmemo ready · you call it

Built paused, labelled XP-### · the run flip is the only thing that spends money

The handover at the end of the arc is the part most agencies do not have. A client who leaves takes the warehouse, the dashboard, the boards and the automations with them, under licence. We wrote that down before we had a client who could ask for it.

03 — what lands

It only speaks when something is off.

The truth-check posts nothing on a normal day. Silence means the boards, the ad account and the invoice agree. When they don't, it says exactly what drifted and leaves the fix to a person.

Slack · #client-engine · 07:30
Board Truth-Checkapp07:30

Two boards drifted overnight. Nothing was changed for you.

5 cards say “to do” — the campaigns are live spending since Monday · the board is 4 days behind the account
whoever shipped it: move the cards, or tell me it was a mistake
XP-014 is past its read date sample minimum reached 2 days ago · decision memo is ready
the verdict is yours to call
Board blueprint drift repaired two clients had silently diverged: missing column, missing automation
04 — the numbers

Built before the scale that needs it.

12Automations live across the client arc, each standing in for a role an agency normally hires.
4Decisions kept human by design. The engine proposes, it never calls a verdict.
69Campaigns on one account moved onto a single naming standard in a day.
3Client accounts running on it while the agency is still pre-launch.

One lesson cost real money before it became a rule. An early demand-mapping run was about four times more expensive than it needed to be and produced a headline number that did not survive checking, because the system was doing arithmetic in prose. Now a script does every calculation that touches a client's money, and the model only writes the reasoning around it.

05 — the stack

Reproducible, or it doesn't ship.

Every client's boards, ids and settings live in one config file and a set of blueprints. That is what makes a handover possible: if a client leaves, they take the warehouse, the dashboard, the boards and the automations with them.

Google Adsbuild · measure
Shopifyorders · products
monday.comboards · blueprints
Calendarmeeting intake
Postgreswarehouse · learnings
Claudethe reasoning layer
Railwaycrons · services
Slackfour channels per client
Book a call 30 min · you talk to the founder Next: the 3-agent cockpit 13 problems the first night it ran