The Retainer Client Who Always Came In Under Hours
Every month she used less than the retainer. I thought I was getting paid to do nothing. The real story was much worse.
For almost a year, this client used maybe 60 percent of her monthly retainer. Paid in full every month. Never asked for rollover. Never complained.
I thought I had found the perfect arrangement.
I was wrong.
The Comfortable Story
Here's what I told myself. She books a block of my time. Sometimes she uses it, sometimes she doesn't. That's the deal with a retainer. I hold the availability, she pays for it, whatever she doesn't use is just part of the trade.
This is genuinely how retainers work. I wasn't making it up.
But I was using that logic to avoid looking more carefully at what was actually happening.
What the Time Log Showed
About ten months in I pulled a full project report out of habit. I wanted to see where my hours were going across all active clients before I took on anything new.
This client showed up on the report with a consistent pattern. Her billed hours were low. But her unbilled hours were not.
Every month I had short email threads, quick questions, a thirty-minute call that I never started a timer for because it felt too small. Fifteen minutes reviewing something she sent. Twenty minutes thinking through a problem she mentioned in passing.
None of it was on the clock. All of it was real work.
The Gap Between What I Charged and What I Gave
When I added it up, the picture changed completely.
She wasn't using 60 percent of her retainer. She was using closer to 90 percent when you counted everything. The unused portion I thought I was being paid for wasn't unused at all. It was just untracked.
The retainer looked generous from the outside. It wasn't structured to be generous. I had just stopped tracking the smaller interactions because they felt beneath the formality of logging.
That was the mistake.
Why Small Interactions Are the Dangerous Ones
Large tasks feel important enough to log. You open the project, start a timer, do the work.
Small interactions feel too quick to bother. So you handle them and move on and tell yourself it was nothing.
But small interactions have a way of being nothing until you count them. Then they're suddenly an hour and a half a month you handed away for free.
Multiply that by twelve months. That's eighteen hours. At my rate, that's over two thousand dollars.
And this was a client who was already paying me. I wasn't even trying to win her business anymore. I was just leaking time in small increments and calling it a good relationship.
What I Changed
I started tracking every client interaction. Not just the formal work sessions. Emails over five minutes. Every call, every review, every time I sat down and thought about their project.
I didn't send her a surprise invoice for the back amount. That would have been chaotic and unfair. But I restructured the retainer conversation. Showed her what a fuller accounting of my time actually looked like. She wasn't surprised. She just hadn't known I wasn't tracking it.
We adjusted the retainer upward slightly and I committed to giving her a monthly summary of what I had logged. She liked the transparency. I liked having an honest record.
The Habit That Fixed It
Now I start the timer before I open an email I'm going to spend real time on. Not after I finish. Before I start.
It sounds small. It is small. But those are exactly the moments where time used to disappear.
A retainer should work for both people. That only happens if you know what you're actually spending.
Track your time, bill every minute.
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