Is this retainer profitable?
Hours consumed against the fee. The renewal conversation starts from a number both sides can see rather than an impression.
Workforce planning
Workforce cost planning
Most services businesses know their revenue per client exactly and their cost per client approximately. The gap is people-time, and it is the difference between a retainer you should renew and one you should reprice.
Where this lives. Admin area → Planning → Cost. It reads the attendance, leave, holiday and project records already in your account, so there is nothing to import and nothing extra for your team to maintain.
The calculation
Deliberately simple. Cost planning fails when it becomes an accounting exercise rather than a management one.
| Role | Hours tracked | Cost rate / hour | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Developer | 42 | ₹900 | ₹37,800 |
| Designer | 14 | ₹800 | ₹11,200 |
| Project manager | 9 | ₹1,100 | ₹9,900 |
| Support | 6 | ₹500 | ₹3,000 |
| Total delivery cost | 71 h | ₹61,900 | |
| Retainer fee | contracted at 40 h | ₹55,000 | |
| Margin | −₹6,900 |
The contract says forty hours. The team delivered seventy-one. This is the single most common finding when a services business counts for the first time, and it is invisible without hours attributed to a client. The rates above are illustrative; yours are whatever you set in Planning → Settings.
Why a role cost rate, not a salary
You could compute this from individual salaries. You should not.
- It makes the data sensitive. A project manager checking retainer profitability should not be able to derive a colleague’s pay from it.
- It is less accurate, not more. True cost includes employer contributions, equipment, software, office and the unbillable time of people who support delivery. A loaded role rate captures that; a salary divided by hours does not.
- It is stable. Rates change annually; salaries change per person per review, and a cost model that moves every month is a cost model nobody trusts.
So the input is one number per role, set by whoever owns the P&L, reviewed once a year. Individual pay stays in payroll, where it belongs.
What it is meant to answer
Did we price this project right?
Quoted cost against actual cost, per project type. Three of these and your estimating gets measurably better.
Which clients cost most to serve?
Not always the biggest. The demanding small client is a well-known pattern and an uncomfortable one to confirm.
What does internal work cost?
The website rebuild, the hiring push, the process project. Real money, almost never counted.
What will this proposal cost to deliver?
Forward-looking: projected hours by role against rates, before you send the quote rather than after.
Where is the margin going?
Scope creep has a cost per month. Attaching a number to it is what makes the conversation with the client possible.
Setting it up
One number per role. Everything else is already being recorded.
- Set a cost rate per rolePlanning → Settings → Cost rates. Loaded cost: salary, employer contributions, equipment, software and a share of overhead. Whoever owns the P&L should set it.
- Match on designation or departmentWhichever your company actually prices by. Designation is checked first, then department, then the default rate.
- Open the cost viewGrouped by project or by client, for any date range. Hours come from daily work reports, which already carry a project.
- Compare against what you invoicedThe product does not know your contract values, so this last step stays with you — and it is where the uncomfortable finding usually is.
Cost planning questions
What is workforce cost planning?
Working out what it costs to deliver work, in people-time, before and after you do it. Hours multiplied by a cost rate per role, rolled up per project and per client, compared against what you charged.
Is this the same as payroll?
No, and it deliberately stays separate. Payroll pays people; cost planning tells you what a project consumed. The cost rate per role is a planning figure you set, not an individual salary, which also means the data is not sensitive in the way payroll is.
Do we have to enter individual salaries?
No, and we would recommend against it. A cost rate per role — what an hour of developer time costs the business, loaded — is enough for every planning decision and avoids putting individual pay into a system that managers can see.
How does this tell us if a retainer is profitable?
Tracked hours against that client, multiplied by role cost rates, compared against the retainer fee. The usual finding is that a contract agreed at twenty hours a month has been consuming thirty-five since March, and nobody noticed because nobody was counting.
Screenshot
Cost of delivery
Reported hours priced at role rates, by project or client, split between billable and internal work — without exposing anyone’s salary.
Count one client this month
Export the hours, apply a role rate, compare against the fee. If the answer surprises you, tell us — that is the feature.
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