Agency time tracking
Time tracking that answers one question: are we over-servicing this retainer?
Most agency time tracking is billing theater — rates, approvals, timers nobody keeps running. Retainer agencies need something simpler and more honest: minutes against each client, rolled up against the retainer they pay for, visible while the month is still happening.
What Phloz time tracking is
- Minutes against a client, optionally a task
- Every entry is minutes of real work logged against the client whose retainer it burns — and, when it was task work, against the task. Logged in seconds from the client page: minutes, day, an optional note. No timers to forget, no start/stop buttons running overnight.
- A burn bar against the retainer
- Give a client a monthly retainer-hours budget and the month's logged time rolls up against it as a burn bar on the client page. The question it answers is the one that matters in a retainer business: how much of this month's hours are already spent, and on whom.
- The over-servicing signal
- The client quietly consuming 140% of their retainer every month is the most expensive client on your book, and in most agencies nobody can prove it. The burn bar makes over-servicing visible while the month is still happening — not in a quarterly margin review after the damage.
- Roles that match how agencies log
- Anyone on the team from member up can log time; setting the retainer budget is owner/admin. View-only seats see the burn bar without the form. Deleting a task never deletes its hours — the time was still spent, so it stays on the client’s ledger.
What it deliberately is not
The time-tracking category is crowded with job-costing suites and employee-monitoring tools. Phloz is neither, on purpose:
- No hourly rates, no billing
- Phloz time tracking deliberately has no rate cards, no billable/non-billable flags, and no invoice export. If you bill hourly and need job costing, a PSA tool is the right purchase. Retainer agencies need a different answer: whether the hours a client consumes match the retainer they pay for.
- No approval workflows
- Timesheet approval chains exist for hourly billing disputes. For an internal over-servicing signal they just add friction that makes people stop logging — and a time-tracking system people stop feeding is worse than none, because it looks authoritative while being wrong.
- No surveillance
- No screenshots, no activity scores, no idle detection. Entries are logged by the person who did the work, visible to the team, attached to real clients and tasks. It tracks the retainer, not the employee.
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Agency time tracking FAQ
- What is agency time tracking software?
- Software that records the hours an agency team spends per client and rolls them up against something that matters — for retainer agencies, the monthly retainer-hours budget. It answers "which clients consume more time than they pay for" (over-servicing) and "where did this month actually go." That is different from job costing, which prices hours for invoicing, and from employee monitoring, which tracks activity rather than clients.
- How does Phloz time tracking work?
- Open a client, log minutes against them (optionally against a specific task) with a date and a note. Set a monthly retainer-hours budget per client and the client page shows a burn bar: hours logged this month versus the budget. Team members log their own time; owners and admins set budgets; view-only seats see the burn without the form.
- Does Phloz do billable hours, rates, or invoicing?
- No, deliberately. There are no rate cards, no billable flags, and no invoice generation — Phloz time tracking is built for retainer sanity, not hourly billing. If your agency bills by the hour and needs job costing or invoice export, pair Phloz with a dedicated PSA or accounting tool; if you run retainers, the burn bar is usually the number you were actually trying to get out of the heavier tools.
- Why track time at all on a retainer?
- Because retainers hide their own losses. A fixed monthly fee looks healthy while one demanding client consumes double the hours behind it — margin quietly moves from your best clients to your loudest one. Tracking minutes against each retainer makes consumption visible per client per month, which is the evidence you need for a scope conversation or a price increase at renewal.
- Is time tracking included in every Phloz plan?
- Time entries and the retainer burn bar are part of the core client workspace — the same place tasks, messages, and the tracking map live — priced per active client, not per seat, so a ten-person team logging time against three clients pays for three clients. The free Starter tier includes one active client.