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What is a Retainer contract line

Understand what a Retainer contract line is.

Julie Bennett avatar
Written by Julie Bennett
Updated over a year ago

Updated August 2023

Retainer contract line in detail

A contract line is defined with a Name and a Line ID and it is always part of a Group. You can also further define your contract line with a description which will appear on the invoice.

PSOhub supports four types of contract lines: Fixed fee, Expenses, T&M (Time and Material), and Retainer.

A contract line defined as Retainer will allow you to invoice a pre-defined Amount based on a schedule and generate a balance invoice/credit (actuals booked vs amount invoiced) at any given time of the project's duration.

The financial information of a Retainer contract line will be displayed in the four following fields: Amount, Budget (Sales), Budget (Costs) and Total Value.

Field

Description

Amount

You will enter here the total value of the retainer (i.e. 6 months of 5k monthly retainer would represent 30k). This field is also leveraged in the process of billing.

Budget (Sales)

Represents your budget based on your selling rate. In the case of
a Retainer contract line, that would be your internal budget (based on your selling rate). By default it will be automatically populated with the value of the Amount field. You can overwrite it manually or via the Workload Sheet.

Budget (Costs)

Represents your budget based on your cost rate.

Total Value

This field is leveraged in the calculation of the Total Project Value (General information section of your project page). It represents the value of the contract line, i.e. it equals the value in the Amount field.

Budget used alert

You will be able to define one or two budget alerts:

Once the value of hours booked towards the contract line reaches the percentage of budget defined for the first alert, a message will show in the Activity feed of your project.

If you have checked the Alerts box for any team member of your project, the alert will show up as a notification in their PSOhub account and/or in their email:

The overrun budgets alerts are highlighted in the contract. The Fixed Fee icon will become orange if the first budget alert has been reached. When the second alert has been reached the icon will become red. If you are only using one budget alert, the icon will simply become red when reached.

Deactivate line on budget overrun

In addition to the alerts, you can also check the function Deactivate the contract line on budget overrun which will prevent anyone from booking time once there is no budget left on the contract line.

An Active or Inactive contract line

The Active option will only appear once your project is set to Active.

As soon as you change the status of your project to Active, your contract line will also be set to Active and this box will be automatically checked. This will allow time entries to be made towards the contract line.

If you wish to prevent team members from booking time or expenses towards a contract line, simply uncheck this box and this contract line will no longer be available for entry.

Add as task list in tasks

This option will allow you to add this contract line as a task list to your project's task board if it's not already included in your project's task board template, or if you plan on creating your task board without any existing template.

Invoicing details

The Invoicing tab will allow you to define how many retainers are required and the invoice schedule.

Field

Description

Due date

Enter the invoicing date for this retainer line.

%

This is where you specify the percentage of the amount to be invoiced for this retainer line.

Description

The description entered here will be displayed next to the contract line name on the invoice.

Amount

The amount used for the calculation.

If your retainer consists of one single amount to be invoiced at the beginning of the mandate, you will enter one line only in the schedule and specify 100% in the % field.
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If your retainer is to be invoiced on multiple dates you will enter the corresponding % of amount to be invoiced on the due date of each line.

If you need PSOhub to use a specific tax category or revenue account for this contract line, you will select it here.

When integrated to an accounting software, you can overwrite the default revenue account defined in the My Organization settings. You can select an alternative option in the GL Name / Article / Item / Service /Product drop-down list.

Once you are done, click Save at the bottom of the screen.

Once the project is ongoing, and at any given time, you will be able to generate a balance invoice/credit (based on hours booked vs amount invoiced).

Note: Multiple retainer contract lines due to be invoiced on the same date will be automatically generated and added to one invoice.

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