Hi everyone!
I’m doing some research and would love your input.
If your company works with clients on a subscription model - meaning clients pay a fixed amount each month for a set number of service hours - what do you feel is currently missing in monday.com to support this workflow?
Are there features, automations, or tracking methods you wish existed to help manage those hour-based contracts more smoothly?
Any insights, pain points, or examples would be super helpful. Thanks in advance!
P.S. If you’re a monday expert working with such clients, your input would be as much valuable!
this is really relevant to how the studio i work with operates. we do a lot of ongoing monthly retainer work for clients, usually a fixed block of hours for maintenance, design tweaks, and the occasional bigger feature request.
what works for us is having a dedicated board per client with a recurring group for each month. each item in the group is a task or request, and we use a numbers column to log estimated vs actual hours. at the end of the month we can quickly filter and see where we are against the retainer cap.
honestly the biggest gap we have found is there is no native way to carry over unused hours or flag when a client is about to hit their limit. we have half-solved it with an automation that sends a notification when hours logged reach 80% of the monthly cap (we store the cap in a number column on the board) but it is a bit fiddly and requires manual updating each month.
what would really help is a column type or formula that resets on a schedule, something like a monthly counter. we have looked at workarounds with status automations and date columns but nothing quite clicks.
curious what others have cobbled together for this.
Hello @anowacka
Great question. monday.com can definitely support subscription hour retainers, but a few parts still feel more manual than they should.
The Time Tracking Column is the foundation, but it doesn’t natively handle things like monthly hour buckets, rollover rules, or automatic “you’ve used 80% of your hours” alerts without extra setup.
Dashboards help with visibility, but client ready monthly statements and billing summaries often still require exporting or custom reporting.
Big things I wish were easier out of the box
Contracted hours per month tied to a client record
Automatic usage alerts and rollover tracking
Cleaner time log reporting for invoicing without exporting
Curious how others are handling retainers and hour caps today.
Dr. Tanvi Sachar
Monday Certified Partner, Tuesday Wizard
Thanks for the input! This is the type of the answer I was looking for. If I. may ask you some additional questions: how often the studio you work with modifies the budgeted hours? I’m thinking mostly about increasing the budget, is it more often a new arrangement or just “one time action” based on the current client’s needs?
we do something similar but simpler. one board for all retainer clients, each client is a group. tasks go in as items with a numbers column for hours. we use a formula column that sums hours per group and compares to the monthly cap stored in a separate item at the top of the group.
biggest pain for us is the same as what others said, no native rollover or monthly reset. we ended up using a zapier zap that archives the current month’s group and creates a fresh one on the 1st. not perfect but saves a lot of manual work.
Hello @anowacka
By “invoicing without exporting,” I mean being able to generate a client ready invoice summary directly inside monday.com without exporting time logs to Excel, manually totaling hours, or rebuilding the breakdown in QuickBooks or Xero.
Ideally, you could take tracked time plus billable rates plus retainer cap and instantly see a clean monthly summary with total hours, breakdown by task, and any overages or rollover that is ready to invoice.
Right now, you can get close with dashboards and integrations, but the final invoice view usually still requires exporting.
Dr. Tanvi Sachar
Monday Certified Partner, Tuesday Wizard
