Retainer overrun tracking
Stop overservicing your retainer clients. See retainer usage in real time and get alerted at 80%, not after the period closes. Bill scope creep honestly, or stop it at the source.
Free plan. No credit card.
Green under the cap, amber approaching it, red once you are over.
Overservicing happens quietly
It is a common story. The retainer was profitable when you sold it. Twelve months later you are delivering extra hours every month for free and nobody is quite sure when that started.
What fixes it is seeing the number live, so you can have the conversation while it is still small.
- A "quick favour" turns into ninety minutes, and it happens most weeks.
- The account manager does not see the numbers until the end of the month, by which time it is too late to reset expectations.
- Nobody wants to invoice the overage retroactively because it feels confrontational.
- The hours get written off, and the team starts treating that client as their loss-leader.
Three layers of protection
Usage you can see today, a warning while there is still time to act, and a decision you make on your own terms at the end of the period.
Usage you can see today, not next month
Every retainer shows hours used, hours remaining, and days left in the current period. The number updates as the team logs time. There is no delay, no spreadsheet, no batch import.
- Live progress bars on the dashboard
- Days remaining in the current period at a glance
- Auto-resets at the end of each period, fresh budget every cycle
Get warned at 80%, not 110%
Configurable alert thresholds per retainer. The account manager sees a warning while there is still time to act: pre-approve the overrun, redirect capacity, or have the conversation with the client before it is a problem.
- Threshold set per retainer, override on the ones that matter
- Visual states, green then amber then red, so the dashboard tells the story
- Hours over the cap are still tracked, never silently dropped
Bill the overrun, or don't, on your terms
When you invoice the period, you pick which entries are billed. Bill the retainer cap. Bill the cap plus the overrun. Bill the cap this month and the overrun separately. Whatever your agreement allows, the system supports.
- Select exactly which entries are on this period's invoice
- Overrun entries stay available until you decide what to do with them
- Invoice pushes to Xero as a draft so finance can review before sending
The cap, where the hours are spent
A retainer is rarely burned by the big pieces of work. Those were scoped. It is burned by requests: a client emails, somebody answers, and twenty minutes goes somewhere no timesheet can see. By the time the overrun shows up on a dashboard, the hours that caused it were spent in a mailbox.
So the meter goes next to the reply box. The person deciding how much effort this request deserves can see that the month has two and a half hours left in it, while they are deciding.
- Client mail lands in a shared inbox, matched to the client from your Xero contacts
- The retainer meter sits beside the conversation, not on another screen
- Start a timer or log a duration from the thread, against the same retainer
- The hours reach the same cap, and the same invoice, as everything else
An add-on at $12 per seat per month on the Team and Business plans, included in your trial.
Morning. Two customers rang this week to say their Amex card bounced at checkout. Visa goes through fine. Can someone take a look before the weekend sale?
Hi Priya, found it. Amex was failing the address check on the new gateway rules. Fixed and tested both cards this morning, so you are clear for the sale.
How to stop overservicing
Model the retainer honestly, watch it while the period is running, and arrive at invoicing with a decision instead of a guess.
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Model
Set the cap to the contract, not the wish
Pick the period that matches the agreement, weekly through to custom, and set the alert threshold to 80%. That gives an account manager time to react before the cap rather than after it.
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Watch
Two minutes a week, not two days a month
The amber retainers are this week's conversations. Because support mail is tracked from the thread, the number you are looking at includes the hours that usually go missing.
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Decide
Invoice with a decision, not a guess
When the period closes you already know the number, because you watched it arrive. Choose what goes on the invoice and push it to Xero as a draft.
What changes when you can see the cap
Common questions
What is retainer overservicing?
Overservicing is delivering more hours than the retainer covers without charging for them. It often happens slowly: a small favour here, a quick fix there, until a client is consuming well over the retainer and you are effectively running at a loss on them. The fix is real-time visibility, so the situation never reaches month-end as a surprise.
How do I track retainer hours used vs budget?
Set a retainer with an hours budget and a billing period (weekly, fortnightly, monthly, quarterly, or custom). Track time against that client as normal. Hour Cap shows usage as a percentage with a configurable alert threshold so you hear about a problem at 80%, not 110%.
What is a good alert threshold for retainer usage?
80% works for most teams. It gives the account manager and the delivery lead enough notice to either stop work, pre-approve an overrun with the client, or rebalance team capacity. Setting it higher than 90% leaves no room to react.
Do the hours spent answering client email count against the cap?
They do if you log them, and the Customer Support Inbox add-on is what makes that realistic. Client mail lands in a shared inbox inside Hour Cap, so you start a timer or log a duration from the conversation itself rather than opening a second application. Those hours land on the same timesheet and against the same retainer as everything else, which is usually the difference between a cap that reflects reality and one that does not.
What happens to hours that overrun the retainer cap?
They are still tracked. Hour Cap shows the retainer at over 100% so you and the client both have visibility. When invoicing the period, you can choose to bill only the retainer cap, the full hours used, or a subset. The decision stays with you; the system makes sure nothing is hidden.
Can different retainers have different billing periods?
Yes. Each retainer has its own period (weekly, fortnightly, monthly, quarterly, or custom). Periods do not need to align with calendar months or with each other; the budget for each resets independently on its own cycle.
Why I built Hour Cap
I'm Jonathan, a freelance web developer in Brisbane, Australia. After 15 years, I wanted my client work to run on one system instead of separate tools that didn't handle retainers or Xero, copy/paste errors, and time that never got invoiced. I needed one tool that handled retainers, fixed-price, and hourly projects, let me write proper multi-line descriptions, showed me what was actually profitable, and pushed straight to Xero as invoices. Nothing did all of it, so I built one. Today it is pivotal to my business: all my time tracking, invoice drafting, and profitability runs through Hour Cap, and it scales the same way for agencies and teams.
Independent and self-funded. When you email support, you reach the person who built it.
More about JonathanSee the cap before you hit it
Real-time retainer tracking, including the hours spent answering the client. Free to try.