New in Temponia: fixed fee projects, retainers and prepaid hour blocks

Not everything is billed by the hour

Time and materials is a fine way to work, but it is not the only way agencies and consultancies sell. You quote a website for a fixed price. You agree on a monthly retainer with a client who needs ongoing support. A customer buys a bundle of hours and comes back for more when it runs out. Until now, Temponia quietly assumed everything was hourly. From today, it does not: every project has a billing type, and two new ones join time & materials: fixed fee and retainer.

Fixed fee projects: one price for the whole job

Set the billing type to fixed fee, enter the total amount you agreed with your client, and you are done. Your team keeps tracking time exactly as before, but the tracked hours are never invoiced. The fee is.

Invoicing is flexible by design. When you create an invoice for a fixed fee project, the remaining fee is pre-filled and you can lower it to bill an installment: 30% up front, the rest on delivery, or any split you like. Temponia keeps the ledger for you and always knows how much of the fee is still open. Did the scope grow after a talk with the client? Raise the fee, and the difference becomes invoiceable again.

Because time is still tracked underneath, you finally see whether that fixed price was a good idea: reports compare the fee against your internal cost and against what the hours would have been worth if you had billed them hourly.

Retainers: included hours for a fixed fee, every period

A retainer in Temponia is exactly what you agree with your client: a flat fee per period with a number of hours included. Pick a billing period (weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly) and a start date, and periods renew automatically from there. The project dashboard shows how much of the current period is used, plus a history of every past period.

The interesting part of every retainer is what happens at the end of a period, and that is your choice:

• Roll over: unused hours are added to the next period, overspent hours are subtracted. Fair in both directions, and a feature most time trackers simply do not have.
• Extra hours rate: hours above the included allowance are billed at their own hourly rate on the next invoice. Great for retainers where the allowance is a floor, not a ceiling.

Two more things take the busywork out of retainers. Turn on the e-mail alert and the project managers are warned when a period reaches, say, 80% of the included hours: no more discovering over-servicing after the fact. And with automatic invoicing enabled, Temponia creates a draft invoice for each new period (fee plus any extra hours), ready for a quick review before it goes out.

Prepaid hour blocks, for retainers without a calendar

Plenty of client relationships do not follow a monthly rhythm. The client buys 40 hours, you work them down over a couple of months, and when the block runs dry you agree on the next one. For those, choose the ad hoc billing period: nothing renews on its own.

When you and your client agree on a new block, press Start a new block on the project settings or dashboard. The current block is settled on the spot: unused hours carry into the new block automatically (your client paid for them, after all), and extra hours are either billed at your extra hours rate or deducted from the new block. If auto-invoicing is on, the draft invoice for the new block is waiting for you.

Invoices that behave like invoices

Fee and retainer lines are normal invoice lines. Taxes apply as usual, installments and periods appear with clear descriptions, and everything exports to Xero, Zoho Books and QuickBooks exactly like your hourly invoices do. Tracked time on fee-based projects never leaks into an hourly invoice, and once a fee is billed, the hours behind it are marked as invoiced so your uninvoiced reports stay clean.

Was the deal worth it?

The project report gained three optional columns: Fee (the contract value, which for retainers grows period by period), Fee invoiced and Fee profit (fee minus your internal cost). Put them next to the existing spent-money column and you can compare every fixed price deal against what the same hours would have earned billed hourly. That conversation about next year's retainer price just got a lot easier.

Available now on Team and Enterprise plans

Fixed fee projects, retainers and prepaid hour blocks are live today for Team and Enterprise accounts. Open any project, pick a billing type, and the small question mark next to it explains every option. Questions or feedback? Reach out at [email protected]. We would love to hear how you bill.