These days a lot of companies work with Retainers. With Retainer work, you can choose to have the one retainer job and issue multiple invoices on that one job (e.g. one invoice per month) or you can create one retainer job per month, and issue invoices for each job.

Create a New Project

The first step to managing Retainer work is to create a new Project in Streamtime. This will allow you to group a series of jobs together.

To create a new Project number go to Jobs > Project List and select New Project

A new project number will be created by Streamtime and you can enter in the relevant project details

Create Job/s and link to Project

You can then go about creating your Jobs in Streamtime, just be sure to assign the relevant project number to any job associated with the Retainer.

Note: You can also use the Job Status field to identify that it is a Retainer job. For more information on statuses click here

As mentioned above, with Retainer work, you can choose to have the one retainer job and issue multiple invoices on that one job (e.g. one invoice per month) or you can create one retainer job per month, and issue invoices for each job.

Option 1 - One Retainer Job, Multiple Invoices

With this option you'll be creating one master Retainer job which might last for the whole year, and each month you'll use this job to create your monthly invoices.

Create your master Retainer job by going to Jobs > New Job
Be sure to:

1. Give it an easily identifiable name

2. Assign the related Project number to it

Then you can go about creating your individual jobs that are part of the overall Retainer, remembering to associate it with the project number you created earlier.

Note: All time, materials and purchase orders should go on these individual jobs. The master Retainer job is used for creating the monthly invoices

Invoicing

Then you can go about creating the monthly invoices by going to the Quotes & Invoices tab within the master Retainer job and clicking the New Invoice button

Option 2. One Retainer Job for each Month

With this option you'll be creating monthly Retainer jobs, which you will then use to create your monthly invoices. In most cases this will mean one invoice for each Retainer job.

To Create a monthly Retainer job go to Jobs > New Job
Be sure to:

1. Give the job an easily identifiable name

2. Assign the related Project number to it

Once you have your Retainer job set up you can then create the individual jobs that will be part of the retainer. Be sure to associate the project number with these jobs.

Note: All time, materials and purchase orders should go on these individual jobs. The master Retainer job is used for creating an invoice each month

Alternatively, if you don't have that many jobs per month for that Retainer, you could create Tasks on the master Job instead, using the Details field, to specify which task belongs to which job.

Note: With this option you'll just have one job for the whole month and all time, materials, purchase orders and invoices would be on the one job

Then each month you can create a new job by going to Jobs > New Job

Remembering to give the new job:

1. An appropriate Name

2. And assign the related Project number to it

Duplicate previous Job

The other option is to duplicate the last month's Job

By duplicating the job, Streamtime will create a brand new job, but you will need to ensure you update the name of the Job to reflect the month the Retainer is for

When duplicating a Job, you can also opt to duplicate the invoices that are part of the original job.
If you say No

Then you simply go to the Quotes & Invoices tab on the Job and click the New Invoice button to create a new Invoice

If you click Yes to duplicate the Invoice as well as the Job,

Then when you click on the Quotes & Invoices tab of the new job, you will need to go into the Invoice detail by clicking on the arrow to the left of the Invoice

And make sure you amend the Invoice detail to be relevant for the new Job.

Reporting on a Project

When you run reports using the Reports tab you must remember to select reports that can be run by a project number. Below are a selection of reports that can be run by a project number in the Reports tab that will help you report on a project/Retainer.