Run Your Agency Like a Machine.

How do small agencies track time across a team?

Team tracking lets each person on your team track their own sessions against shared clients. A designer, a developer, and an account lead can all log time on the same client, and the hours roll up to that account.

The point is not to watch people. It is to see the whole cost of an account. When three people each spend a few hours a week on a retainer client, nobody feels the weight individually, but the total can be more than the retainer covers. Seeing the combined hours is what makes that visible.

How do you know if an agency client is profitable?

Divide what the client pays by the hours spent on them. That is the effective hourly rate, and TimerMVP calculates it per client on the dashboard. A retainer client paying $4,000 a month who took 50 hours of work has an effective rate of $80. If your target is $120, that account needs a conversation.

Compare accounts side by side. Often the client who complains least and pays on time is quietly the most expensive one, because they send a steady stream of small asks. The worth-a-look list on the dashboard flags patterns like this so they do not sit unnoticed for a quarter.

How do agencies manage scope creep on retainers?

Scope creep rarely shows up as one big request. It is a banner here, a quick copy change there, a call that runs long. Tag sessions with a hashtag like #outofscope when the work falls outside the agreement. At the end of the month, filter a report by that tag and you have a list with times and notes.

For work that is clearly separate, create an ad hoc project with its own due date instead of folding it into the retainer. The income page shows retainer, ad hoc, and hourly income separately, so you can see how much extra work you are already billing for and how much you are giving away.

• Tag out-of-scope sessions with a hashtag
• Filter a monthly report by that tag
• Move larger asks into ad hoc projects
• Review retainer hours against what was scoped

How dependent is your agency on its biggest client?

Client concentration is one of the first things worth checking in an agency. The dashboard shows your top client's share of income. If one account is half the business, every decision about that client carries more risk than it looks like.

The leads pipeline helps you act on it. Track prospects from first contact to won or lost, and see whether new business is arriving fast enough to reduce the dependency. Quiet clients, the ones with no recent sessions, also show up on the dashboard, which is often where the easiest new work is hiding.