Overview of Retainer Budget Type

Retainer budget projects help manage the ongoing, dynamic needs of your clients when the exact workload or tasks may not be known from the start.

This article includes:

Understanding Retainer Agreements

A retainer agreement is a long-term work-for-hire contract between you (the provider) and your client to deliver ongoing services over a set period, typically for a fixed fee. Rather than paying for individual tasks or projects, the client pays a regular fee (often monthly) to ensure the provider is available to handle various tasks as needed. The scope of work is usually more flexible, allowing both you and your client to adjust to changes as they arise. This flexibility makes it easier to accommodate shifts in demand or requirements without the need to renegotiate terms or fees for every new task or project.

Overview of Retainer budgets

In Forecast, the retainer budget type project focuses on periods. These periods have a target, either a monetary value (price) or hours defined for a particular time period, often monthly. A period meets its target by collecting data from the project's tasks and time registrations.

Periods

A period has a start and end date.
Periods often follow calendar months, though duration can be unique to the period or the project.

Best Practice: Align period dates with your project's phase dates so task and time registration data fall within a single period instead of spanning across multiple periods.
A period's target value is set by the project's manager and reflects a fixed value, either hours or price. Target values may be edited if needed.
A period's planned value is determined by the total of all estimated hours on tasks whose start dates fall within the period. These tasks may reside within a phase or in Tasks with no phase. If a task spans multiple periods, the task estimate will be split across each period's planned values.

For example: A project contains two periods, dated to follow the calendar months of March and April. A task within the project has an estimate of 100h. The task start date is March 15 and its end date is April 14. 50h will be distributed to the March period's planned value and 50h will be distributed to the April period's planned value.
A period's distribution is determined by the hours from tasks estimates spread evenly over company working days and the dates of the task. (Check out Configuring your Company Details for more on working hours/days).
Period metrics such as Actual Billable Time Spent to Date or Time Entries reflect time registered on the period's tasks.
Hours registered after a period's end date will not appear on the period, even if the task associated with the time registration falls within the period.
Hours registered after a period's end date will appear in a future period, depending on date of input.
Hours registered after a period has been locked create Conflicted Time. Project Managers will be alerted by a warning and options to resolve. For example, they will be able to reconcile the conflict by subtracting the equivalent time from the targets of future unlocked periods.
If a period does not reach its target before its end, or exceeds its target value, the surplus/deficit may be moved to future periods. (Handling a period's surplus/deficit is covered in Managing Retainer Periods).

Retainer Tracking

The Retainer Tracking tab is the hub of a retainer project and is used to ensure the project is financially on track. Retainer Tracking includes the Retainer Status Chart, Retainer Totals and a breakdown of all periods within the the project.

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To learn more about Retainer Tracking, define metrics in Retainer Status and Retainer Totals and effectively review and manage your periods, check out Understanding Retainer Tracking.

Invoicing

Retainers include ability to invoice periods individually or in bulk. To learn more about invoicing your retainer periods, check out Invoicing Retainer Periods.

Revenue Recognition

Retainer budget projects support Revenue Recognition. Read more in Revenue Recognition in Fixed Price Projects and Retainers.

Reporting

It is possible to report on Retainer budget projects in both standard and advanced reporting. Learn more in Getting Started with Forecast reporting and Getting started with Advanced Analytics.

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