Agency Retainer Burn and Over-Servicing

Agency Retainer Burn and Over-Servicing is a TimeCampus concept for agencies, consultancies and accounting practices that sell client work as a monthly allowance of hours. Captured and confirmed hours are designed to roll up per client against the retainer and by workstream, so an account director sees burn in the middle of the month rather than at invoicing. The same view is meant for marketing and advertising teams running content, campaign and paid media retainers.

Over-servicing rarely arrives as one large overrun. It builds from extra revision rounds, reports that take longer than planned and small favors nobody records as out of scope, and by the time the invoice is prepared the hours are sunk and the conversation with the client is harder. The concept is designed to surface that drift while there is still time to act, and to count extra rounds alongside the hours they took.

The illustrated client page names the client, its monthly retainer hours and the month, with an over-servicing badge and Share summary and Edit retainer buttons. A burn bar shows hours used against the allowance, the percentage consumed and the working days left. Tiles split hours used into in scope and out of scope and count extra revision rounds. A Where the hours went table lists workstreams, such as a social content calendar, a campaign video, paid media management and monthly reporting, with hours, allowance and an on-track or over status. A Weekly burn chart traces the month week by week. The client, workstreams and figures are sample data.

Two other Burdenoff products appear on the page as design intent. A Revision rounds from ArtistryBase panel lists rounds read from ArtistryBase, which is designed to flag a round beyond those included in the scope of work at the moment it is requested; in the sample, two later rounds of a campaign video are flagged with their request dates. When the retainer runs over, a Suggested next step card sums up the out-of-scope revisions and reporting hours and offers Send to ProServiceWorld pre-bill or Discuss with client first. TimeCampus is designed to draft that out-of-scope summary, and ProServiceWorld to apply the client's rate on the pre-bill. The view builds on TimeCampus projects and captured time and stays per client and per workstream, never per person.