Retainers are supposed to be the calm part of the agency. Recurring revenue, a known client, a rhythm you can staff. In practice they are often where margin dies, because the work lives in the project tool and the commercial truth lives in a spreadsheet that someone updates on Friday night.
This is a practical look at how studios keep retainers honest without building a second operating system in Sheets.
Why retainers drift
Most retainers are sold as outcomes and delivered as hours. The client bought "we will keep the site, the content, and the ads moving." The studio tracks "who logged time this week." When those two views never meet, you over-service quietly until the effective rate looks like a junior intern.
Typical drift looks like this:
1. Scope was clear in the proposal and fuzzy in week six. 2. Time is logged in one tool, tasks in another, and invoices in a third. 3. Nobody sees burn until the month is over, when it is too late to say no.
Felagar's profitability and time surfaces exist so burn sits next to the board, not in an export.
Put the retainer on the same board as the work
A retainer is not a folder of invoices. It is a living engagement: cards, hours, files, and reviews. If the team cannot see remaining hours (or remaining outcome budget) while they drag a card, they will always choose the client who is shouting in Slack.
Run one retainer as a project (or a small set of projects under one company) with:
- A written scope on the company or project, not only in the signed PDF
- Estimates on the work that is in flight
- Actual time against those cards
- A burn view the account lead checks twice a week, not once at invoicing
When a request is out of scope, it should become a card with a commercial flag, not a polite yes in chat. Guest deliverable review still works for retainer output. The difference is you know whether that round was already paid for.
Track time even when you do not bill by the hour
Studios that sell outcomes still need cost. If you skip time tracking because "we are not a timesheet shop," you are guessing at margin. The client does not need to see every six-minute increment. You do.
Keep the ritual light:
- Log against the card, not a generic "retainer" bucket
- Review burn in the week view so capacity and retainers talk to each other (capacity planning)
- Treat unlogged heroics as a process bug, not a badge
Felagar is built so estimates, hours, and retainers live with the project instead of in a side ledger. That is the spreadsheet you are trying to retire.
Watch effective rate, not vanity utilization
Utilization that looks healthy can still be a bad retainer. A senior can be 90% utilized rewriting the same landing page because the client never approved v1. Guest review links and a real approval state stop that loop. Until a version is approved, you do not start the next unpaid round.
Check three numbers on a cadence:
- Hours in vs hours you sold
- Effective hourly rate (fees divided by hours)
- How long work sits in review
If review is the bottleneck, the problem is not staffing. It is the client path. A client portal with one login beats a Drive folder plus five email threads.
Staff the week, not the myth of infinite hours
Retainers fail in the calendar as much as in the ledger. If three retainers all "need a little something" on Thursday, you have no capacity model. You have hope.
Use a week view that shows who is already committed. When a new request lands, the question is not "are we nice." It is "whose other work moves." Felagar capacity planning is meant to make that visible for the people you already employ, not to generate a fake utilization trophy.
A healthy retainer week has slack. If every hour is sold, the first production bug eats the margin. Price and staff as if something will go wrong, because it will.
What to do this month
You do not need a perfect Agency OS on day one. You need one retainer that is not a mystery:
1. Pick your noisiest retainer. 2. Put its board, files, and hours in one workspace. 3. Write what is in and what is extra where the team will actually read it. 4. Look at burn on Wednesday, not on invoice day.
Pricing for hosted Felagar is invite-only beta. Request access if you want retainers, time, and the portal in the same product. Self-host comes later. Until then, the principle holds in whatever stack you use: one commercial truth next to the work, not a spreadsheet that apologizes after the fact.