The Groups feature is designed to ease retainer management and reporting for businesses. Of course, retainers come in all different shapes and sizes, so we’ve outlined a few of the more common setups for creative businesses, and how we recommend using the feature to support these.
Brooke, our Success & Adoption Lead, came to Streamtime from an agency background. Firstly, let’s hear from her on the different types and agreements of retainers you might have.
Alongside your terms, you may also have a range of flexibility for the deliverables you’ve promised to provide for your fee. Some companies will include ongoing projects within the retainer agreement, and others will have strict deliverables.
If your setup isn’t covered in the following use cases, we’d be happy to help! Contact Customer Success with any tricky situations you’d like some help on.
The Money Job
Quotes and Invoices live on a job, so with retainer agreements, we’ll recommend that you set up a job to handle quoting and billing. This will be the job that manages the financial aspects of your retainer agreement.
You can choose whether or not to also log time to this Job, depending on how you want to report on your retainer deliverables later.
If you decide you prefer to invoice per job, to keep your job profitability measures intact, you can still do this too, and use the Group as a reporting mechanism.
Scenario 1: A mix of ongoing projects and standard deliverables
Where you set up a monthly budget of $10,000 for 12 months, and you always bill $10,000, no matter how much time is spent. Your agreement covers certain longer projects, but also standard monthly deliverables.
Firstly, set up your Money Job and quote up the agreement in full, so you can invoice each period separately.
Then, set up the jobs within the groups that you may want to track separately. One setup could be by discipline, if you’ve agreed a certain allocation for different types of roles. Another could be if your retainer covers ongoing projects, or generic types of work.
Our Sunset Tourism sample setup here uses the same job as the Money Job and to track standard deliverables, but also has an ongoing job with its own planned phases and items inside the group:
Planned Time Good To Know:
You can configure your groups to include planned time in your projections, so you’ll want to ensure that you only plan time on either your master job or the sub-jobs in the group. If you plan on both, you’ll be doubling up your numbers, not just in the group but also in availability calculations for planned time in reporting.
When it comes time for your team to log time and expenses, they can log to the different ongoing projects within the group, or to their standard deliverables job, and the Group will automatically apportion the time and expenses based on their individual dates.
Scenario 2. Monthly standardised deliverables, with a fixed price
As above, but you have a fairly rigid plan set up: your monthly deliverables are the same, and you have granular planning for this — maybe even down to the team member.
You can do this a few different ways. You can create one large job, with phases or items per month, allowing you to plan granularly per month.
Or, you can create one large job (or multiple jobs) for the entire retainer timeframe. The benefit of this is that your team members won't have to select particular jobs or items based on the month — their time will automatically be attributed to the months they were logged in on the Group page. This is how we've set up our Mockingbird & Lee sample setup here:
Scenario 3. A bucket of hours or money, which is burned down ad hoc
The most flexible of all the setups! Depending on how reactive your business is in terms of new work coming in, you can set up your Group with your Target, and add jobs as you need them through the months. As you add jobs and log time and expenses, this will burn down against your Group targets as you go.
Scenario 4. Any agreement billed by Time and Expenses
Since invoices live on a Job, in order to invoice by Time & Expenses, you'll have to log the time onto your Money Job to easily select the time and expenses to invoice.
You can still use a Group to help separate your time and expenses per time period, even if there's only one job within the Group. However, you can be more flexible with your item and phase set up: set up your items as disciplines, type of work, or mini-jobs.
You can have separate jobs if need be, just be aware that you'll invoice each job separately.