Retainer time tracking
A retainer sold as “X hours a month” only makes money if someone watches the hours burn down. Timix.AI sets the allotment as a budget, counts every logged hour against it live, and warns at your threshold — so over-servicing surfaces mid-month, not at a renewal you're about to lose money on.
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Illustrative entries
01 The problem
Retainers don't fail loudly. They fail as a slow drift of over-servicing nobody clocked until the month closed and the account was already underwater.
“How many hours has this client used this month?” is only answerable once the timesheets are in — by which point the favourite client has already eaten next month's margin too.
A few extra hours here, an “it'll only take a minute” there. Without a live cap, the small overages compound into a retainer that's priced for 40 hours and delivering 55.
When it's time to re-price the retainer, there's no defensible record of what it actually took — so you either eat the loss or argue from memory.
02 How Timix.AI fits
Set the month's hours as an hour-cap budget; Timix.AI burns it down against live entries and raises the flag before, not after.
Enter the period's hours as a T&M hour-cap budget on the retainer. A soft limit warns the account team, a hard limit blocks further entries, and the threshold you pick — say 75% — fires the alert well before the allotment is gone.
The retainer's monthly hours become a T&M hour cap: soft limit warns, hard limit blocks, threshold alert fires at the percentage you set.
Budget health is computed from live hours and sits on the dashboard; or ask Timix.AI which retainers are over this month.
Budget health from live hours; Timix.AI answers budget and hours questions (Starter+).
A billed customer rate and an internal cost rate price every logged entry, so each retainer shows profit, not only consumption — the over-serviced account and the quietly unprofitable one are the same flag. Cost rates are effective-dated, so a mid-year raise re-prices new hours without rewriting last quarter's margin.
Effective-dated customer and cost rates turn each retainer's hours into a profit-and-margin number, not just a consumption count.
Approved hours export to PDF or CSV, with branded PDFs on Professional+, to show the client what the retainer bought.
Approval workflow plus Customer Billing report to PDF or CSV; org branding and branded PDFs on Professional+.
On the reports tab
Built-in report pages ship with every workspace. These are the ones this team reaches for — each one exports to PDF or CSV, billing-ready.
By role
Owner, Admin, Finance, Manager, Member, Viewer — six roles, scoped so each person sees exactly what they should.
Owners set each retainer's allotment as an hour cap, pick the alert threshold, and price the work with customer and cost rates so renewal is a number, not a guess. Admins manage which clients are on retainer and own the org branding on exported summaries.
Account managers live in budget health: they see the allotment burn down in real time, catch the threshold alert mid-month, and approve the team's hours — Draft to Submitted to Approved — before anything reaches a client summary.
Whoever delivers the retainer logs against it with a timer, the week grid, or a sentence to Timix.AI, and saves favourite entries for recurring retainer tasks. Viewers read the burn and margin without being able to change a logged hour.
03 Try it on a real retainer
Create a workspace, set a client's monthly hours as a budget, log a few entries, and watch the allotment burn down with the alert you'd actually want. Full access, 90 days, no card.
90-day free trial, full access, no credit card.
Want to look around first? Pre-seeded IT-services, law-firm and construction demo workspaces are open to everyone and show budgets and alerts on realistic data. Open the IT-services demo
04 FAQ
No — there's no automatic monthly reset or rollover-bank automation. You set the retainer's budget per period; the cap and its alerts apply to the hours logged against it. It's a usage guardrail, not an auto-recurring billing meter.
Timix.AI generates commercial invoices from tracked hours on Professional and up, but it won't auto-bill overages. It tracks usage against the cap and alerts you before you go over; you decide what to invoice, and can also raise the bill from billing-ready exports in your accounting tool.
Yes — that's the point. Alert thresholds fire at the percentage you choose (for example 75%), and a hard limit can block further entries, so over-servicing surfaces mid-month while you can still act.
No — there's no client portal or client login. You export an approved, branded hours summary (PDF on Professional+) to share.
Ready when you are
90-day free trial on every new workspace — full access to everything, no credit card.
