The Retainer Hours Rollover feature allows you to carry over unused or overused hours from one recurring budget period to the next. This provides greater insight into time management while keeping invoicing accurate and unaffected.
In short, this feature is designed to simplify monitoring time for retainer budgets, offering flexibility without compromising billing accuracy.
By eliminating the need for manual adjustments, it makes managing hours across retainer services more efficient and hassle-free.
The Retainer Hours Rollover feature is available on the Ultimate subscription plan.
How It Works
1) Setting Up
To enable the rollover hours feature, go to your Recurring budget tab, select "Edit recurring," and activate the "Roll over unused hours to next occurrence" option. This can be done at any time.
Client Budgets: Only the deficit/surplus of billable (approved) hours will roll over to the next budget/period.
Internal Budgets: Only the deficit/surplus of worked hours will roll over.
Once enabled, a "Rolled over time" column appears in the budget service editor.
2) Budgeting Example
Here’s how the rollover works for a sequence of retainer budgets with fixed billing type services:
Budget for September 2024 (2024/9): You have a monthly retainer of 40 hours, but you only work 30 hours (billable, approved).
You can still invoice for the full 40 hours, and the remaining 10 hours roll over to the next month.
Budget for October 2024 (2024/10): The 10 unused hours from September are added to the 40-hour retainer for October, giving you 50 hours total of Budgeted time.
Budget for November 2024 (2024/11): Let's say you work 60 hours in October (out of 50 available). You’ll still invoice for 40 hours, but only 30 will remain for the next month due to overuse.
Manual Adjustment
You can manually adjust the number of rollover hours per service. To do so, edit the budget, and add the desired number of hours in the "Rolled over time" column.
Tip: Enter a negative value (e.g., -10 hours) to account for overworked hours in the previous month and subtract them from the current month's budgeted time.
Note: If subsequent budgets in the recurring sequence have already been created, the manual input will not be reflected in their budgeted time calculations. However, if the next budget has not yet been created, the manual adjustment will be taken into account in the rollover calculation for the upcoming period.
Recalculating Rollover Hours
If you need to recalculate rollover hours (e.g., after approving time entries retrospectively), go to the Recurring tab in the budget and select "Recalculate rolled over time".
Important: Manually entered rollover hours will remain only on the first budget in the sequence. Any manual adjustments will be cleared from all budgets and replaced with recalculated values based on tracked and (approved) billable time.
Example scenario
You enable the Rollover Hours feature on a recurring budget.
You proceed to manually input rollover hours in the first budget (e.g., to account for a previous time before the feature was active).
These hours will be added to the Budgeted time for the current budget.
Future occurrences will automatically calculate rollover hours.
If you later add manual rollover hours to a subsequent budget and trigger "Recalculate rollover hours", a message will warn you that manual inputs (except those in the first budget) will be erased.
Tracking and Visibility
The rollover feature doesn’t affect invoicing but provides better insight into budget profitability.
The "Rolled over time" column in the budget editor shows the hours carried over from the previous month.
Limitations
Only hours can be rolled over; this feature doesn’t apply to revenue or other metrics.
FAQ
1) What happens when I uncheck "Roll over unused hours to next occurrence"?
Unchecking this option will delete all rollover data for past and future services. The "Rolled over hours" column will also disappear from the service editor.
2) Can I roll over hours for internal (non-billable) services?
Yes, rollover hours can be applied to non-billable services in internal budgets.
3) Can I roll over hours for non-billable services in client budgets?
No, rollover only applies to billable services within client budgets, not non-billable ones. This feature supports Fixed billing and Time & Materials billing types.
4) Will the estimated time field include rollover hours?
No, the estimated time field won’t change based on rollover hours. It will remain as originally set.
5) How does the Retainer Hours Rollover feature affect invoicing for Time and Materials billing type services in recurring budgets?
The rolled-over time does not impact invoicing. In general, for Time and Materials services, there are two scenarios:
With Cap: Invoicing is based on the amount of work tracked, but only up to the cap. The cap is determined by the set quantity of hours, and rolled-over hours do not affect this.
For example, if you have a cap of 20 hours and 10 rolled-over hours, you can still only invoice a maximum of 20 hours, regardless of how many hours you track.
Without Cap: In this case, you invoice based on the total hours tracked, and rolled-over hours still have no impact. You simply invoice for the exact number of hours worked.