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.
- 7-day free trial
- Cancel anytime
- Works with Xero
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
Retainers with an hours budget show all project hours used, hours remaining, and days left in the current period, including non-billable work. 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%
Configure the threshold and choose eligible managers or administrators to receive email and in-app warnings and overrun alerts. Organisation defaults can be overridden per project, so the right people can act before the period closes.
- 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
Hourly retainers let you choose eligible entries from completed periods. Fixed retainers bill the agreed fee for each started period, regardless of usage. Discuss extra scope before taking it on and use a separate hourly project for separately chargeable work.
- Choose eligible hourly entries or the agreed fixed period fee
- Unselected hourly entries remain available in their original period; fixed-fee time is not rebilled hourly
- 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
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.