Navigating the world of retainers can be a daunting task. We've found that internal workflows and client needs vary significantly and it's often hard to know where to start.

Retainers refer to jobs that have an agreed model upfront. Often this comes down to the cost or the brief from your client.

For a basic run-through about working with retainers, explore this article. Or if you're interested in managing your retainers using Priorities, check out this article.

Brooke, from our Customer Success team, has come from managing Streamtime in agencies herself. Having seen a lot of these types of projects over the years, she's used her experience to bring you this comprehensive series on how to best set up and manage fixed price retainers in Streamtime.

We know that one size does not fit all so if you have questions about how Streamtime can handle retainers for you, reach out to our Customer Success team by clicking the '?' in your account.

Before jumping into the retainer set-up itself, you'll want to consider what both your team and your client need to run the project successfully. This video dives into the considerations you'll want to make before getting stuck in.

As with everything, the set-up is just as important as the execution.

If you're doing a lot of retainer work, particularly focused on fixed price retainers or are working with clients that sign retainers for long periods upfront, master items are key to quick and easy reporting. While slightly different to how you may currently use master items, this approach allows you to update the rate card and reapply it to all relevant jobs in just a few clicks.

Rate cards and master settings make all jobs a breeze to build so they're definitely worth exploring if you aren't already using them.

A common approach to retainers is to have one larger job that covers the year, or retainer period, with each month, or brief, represented as a phase within the job.

In this example, Brooke walks through retainers with a set figure each month for an agreed period, billed at the end of each month where the balance is absorbed as profit so we don't have a rolling balance.

To get the most out of this approach, we recommend using labels to help organise your projects and quickly get the reports you need. Brooke also shows an example of a template job which is a powerful way to save time on all projects, not just retainers.

Another common fixed price retainer is one with a rolling balance. This would be where you want to track spend each month, and roll it to the next month. Here we have set up individual jobs for individual months, or brief.

As above, you'll want to take advantage of template jobs and, of course, labels.

In this video, Brooke shares useful tips for scheduling time and ensuring your team logs time accurately to the appropriate retainer job. You can learn more about Scheduling here.

When billing retainers set up on a month-by-month basis, you'll want to handle this on a separate job for accurate tracking. Labels are again very powerful to help reduce manual effort here.

Our WIP & Billing reports are a great way to see what we've spent, what we've billed and when both those things happened across the retainer.

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We know reporting is key for retainer management so this video explores custom views you can build to show how your retainers are progressing at an agency level.

For more on creating and saving those custom views, head here.