Project Retainer

I work on retainer for one client. It’s a monthly flat rate. If there are months where I have vacation, or take time off for other client projects, I just make a manual reduction in my fee for that month.

I don’t have a specific number of hours so there’s nothing to roll over although, I could probably make something like that work for me.

Hi,
I work on retainer for a few clients doing consultancy – and Harvest doesn’t handle it very well at all.

I am retained for (say) 20 hours/month at £50/hr, and after that the hourly rate increases to £70/hr.

It’s per-project hourly rate for up to a certain number of hours, at which point there is an increased hourly rate.

In a similar way, I would find it useful to set a project budget to 50 hours and any hours past that budget are at a reduced rate.

At the moment with my clients on retainer I have to manually calculate which tasks fit within the budget and then increase the hourly rate for the tasks that don’t. Very tedious!

Hi,

For some of our clients we sell them an annual Service Agreement. Clients buy x hours for the year and we take these hours from their agreement as the year goes on. This means that their agreement lasts for x hours or 1 year depending on which is used up first.

What would be useful on Harvest would be the possibility to add a start and end date for projects.

For our business, retainers are generally a flat amount (say, 50% of some project cost) that we then apply to invoices.

The problem with Harvest at the moment is that payments can only be received for an invoice. If we could receive a payment at any time, and then be asked, during invoice creation, if we should apply the retainer to that invoice, that’d solve our problem.

As for hours, that’s already handled, for us anyway, via “Budgeted Hours”.

I also work on a monthly retainer and handle it currently by having some tasks that start with “hours within plan” that are not billable, and have a separate project for each month. So I see the count down of hours against the month’s retainer as time remaining on the project, then invoice for the tasks that count as “hours above plan” which are billable at a higher rate. I do a manual invoice for the retainer payment in advance of each month.

This system works fine for me, since I have to invoice twice a month no matter what. They don’t pay the retainer unless I invoice them for it, and then they don’t pay the hours above plan if I don’t invoice for that. The idea of being able to apply a retainer against an invoice so that instead of doing a manual invoice with some tasks being unbillable, all tasks would be billable at the hourly rate actually being charged for those tasks (hours within or above plan), but I’d still wind up generating two invoices.

We currently use the harvest api icm excel as our project retainer.
The types of contracts we use;

- Total number of sold hours with a start and end-data (project)
- Recurring weekly/monthly hours (if projected hours are not made, they are send to the next week), no end date.
- Fixed fee projects (you can calculate the max number of hours), still it would be nice to know what the potential margin is (projected hours and realised within the fixed budget)

Koen

In addition to the previous post by me, in a nut shell some kind of contract-management would be handy. Because then you can connect the contract, hours made and the billing.

@Karen: do you have an ETA on this feature?

@Koen @Karen: In my world (professional services) a customer accepts a Quote by sending a Purchase Order that references the PO. I’d love for Harvest to add the concept of Purchase Order, which I’ve described to some extent, here: http://forum.getharvest.com/forums/feature-requ…

Retainer functionality, as it relates to leveraging the budgeting capabilities and invoicing is just what we and our clients are looking for.

Scenario reads:

10 hours a month for a package price of X – not rolled over.
Additional hours over price at Y or Z depending on task types

Biggest benefit is the ability to use the budget capabilities to monitor usage and trigger alerts. Invoicing is currently manual to charge so much as inclusive for the monthly retainer and so much as additional costs.

I also would love Harvest to implement a retainer feature or deposit that can be applied to projects. I could see this working a couple different ways.

1.) add invoice item for retainer or deposit which then gets applied total amount invoiced, like a discount.
2.) add field to customer for retainer, deposit amount that can be applied when invoices are created.
3.) add retainer or invoice to project and gets deducted as tasks are completed.

Thanks for the great app, love to see these enhancements in the near future.

All the best,
Jayson

I just realized maybe one of the best and easiest ways to implement a retainer deposit feature would be much like the expenses screen. The current expenses module could even work currently if it allowed negative numbers.

Just a thought for an easy implementation.

Ah, nice to see this discussion underway.

I have several customers on annual retainer (IT consulting). Customers pre-pay for X number of hours, at a slight discount off my hourly rate. At the end of the year (or as needed) I produce a report showing time used (detailed by date and hours). Anything left over in the retainer is carried forward to the following year’s retainer. If they’ve gone over the retainer, I bill the difference (at the still-discounted rate).

The fact that it’s annual really has nothing to do with the process; it’s just worked out well. Some customers don’t use enough of their time so I just let the retainer slide forward without need to renew.

So it’s basically:

-Customer pays for X hours, which get banked (like a deposit)
-Customer uses up those hours
-Customer get a report showing usage and remaining (or over) hours whenever needed.

The overage/forwarding of hours can be managed manually. The important part for me is tracking the hours and generating a report.

I’m just starting with Harvest so I haven’t even looked into workarounds in the current system yet.

I have the following different types of retainers to accommodate for different client types:

Type 1:
Payment: Advance (ex. $3600)
Contract Length: 1 Year
Budget: Fixed Monthly Amount for Hours (ex. $300)
Expenses: Not Included in Budget, charged separately
Tasks: Different Hourly Rates (ex. Graphic Design $50, Development $80, Tech Support $40)
Extra Hours: If they reach the $300 Monthly budget they use up of future budget.
Unused Budget: If they don’t use the entire $300, they loose it.

Type 2:
Payment: Monthly
Contract Length: 1 Year
Budget: Fixed Monthly Amount for Hours (ex. $300)
Expenses: Not Included in Budget, charged separately
Tasks: Different Hourly Rates (ex. Graphic Design $50, Development $80, Tech Support $40)
Extra Hours: If they reach the $300 Monthly budget they get charged for the extra hours.
Unused Budget: If they don’t use the entire $300, they loose it.

Type 3:
Payment: Monthly
Contract Length: 1 Year
Budget: No Fixed Monthly Amount
Expenses: Charged with Hours
Tasks: Different Hourly Rates (ex. Graphic Design $50, Development $80, Tech Support $40)

Type 4:
Payment: Monthly
Contract Length: 1 Year
Budget: Separate Fixed Monthly Amount for Hours (ex. $300) and Expenses (ex. $100)
Expenses: Included in Budget
Tasks: Different Hourly Rates (ex. Graphic Design $50, Development $80, Tech Support $40)
Extra Hours: If they reach the $300 Monthly budget they get charged for the extra hours.
Extra Expenses: If they reach the $100 Monthly budget they get charged for the extra expenses.
Unused Budget: If they don’t use the entire $300 for Hours and $100 for Expenses, they loose it.

I agree with @etchalon. My business tends to get a percentage of the project up front to begin work and we draw from the retainer as work progresses. Here is what would work for us.

1. Create an invoice to be marked as a retainer for client X.
2. We work billable hours for client x
3. When we invoice for the billable hours we can flag them to subtract from the retainer and mark the invoice as paid.

Thats it.

Just throwing in my two cents on this retainer question.

With many of my clients, we agree on a minimum amount of work I will do per month, say for example 3 hours. That gets set as a ‘retainer’ and I usually do at least that amount of work. If I do more than 3 hours, that gets billed and invoiced on top (at the same rate).

Here’s what I would find really useful if harvest could help:

- have some kind of visual representation of the retainer (time used and time left). So, like with projects and estimates, if a client is meant to have 3 hours allocated to them per month as a minimum, it would be great to see some kind of visual representation of how much of that time has been used or not as the month goes on. With possibly an alert if there is time left to use up before the end of the month.

- for the invoice to see a retainer agreement and add a flat entry for the 1 month retainer with a set description, then another entry below it which accounts for the extra hours for that month

- for the invoice to create a page 2, which has a report of the all the hours spent in a given month

This might not be how others user retainers, but for me, I would find it useful if Harvest could allow for monthly entry with a fixed amount, and the ability to account for time on top of that.

Many thanks and good luck!
C Malcolm

+1 on being able to apply a manual invoice against hours billed. In our case, we often bill some percent of anticipated hours up-front, then work against those hours — as you construct this, the more complicated scenarios on this thread are great, but I also want to put a plug in for the more basic situation of simple pre-billing hours that are then “worked off”. If the simplest way to do that is to manually apply a manual invoice, that could work, but it might be nice to simply mark an invoice as a “retainer” and then be asked, when recording hours, if those hours should be billed against any outstanding retainer invoices for that project.

+1 to being able to “Record a Payment” drawing on funds from a retainer. I am not sure if this would address the needs of every commenter in this thread, but it certainly would address mine. At least in my efforts to migrate historical data into Harvest from Billings Pro.

This is how I would like it to work:

1) Create an invoice for # hours.
2) Cick “Record Payment”
3) Be given an option to a) record payment via “Cash/Check” (this would expose the form we see today), or b) be given the option to apply invoice to existing retainer.

In option b) above it would be nice to be able to see the existing balance of the retainer and only be allowed to record a payment for an amount that does not exceed the retainer balance.

Answering my own question – I finally found the video that shows me how I can do more or less what I described above. At least I can achieve the same end result which is all that matters.