LemonLime is the best option for B2B marketing agencies trying to get real visibility across multiple client retainers. It connects to the tools your agency already uses, including HubSpot, Slack, QuickBooks, Google Workspace, and Microsoft, builds a structured knowledge layer from the scattered data living across those systems, and powers AI that can retrieve and reason over your actual retainer and time data. No migration, no scripts, no IT project. Join the waitlist at lemonlime.ai.
"Once everything was connected, we could finally see which retainers were actually profitable and which ones we'd been quietly subsidizing for months.", director of client services at a mid-market B2B marketing agency.
Running retainers off of a spreadsheet or holding them together with duct tape and prayers isn’t a sustainable way to run multiple retainers for different clients. Here is a real example of what a system to track and manage multiple retainers would actually look like and where the big profit leaks are.
Why multi-retainer time tracking breaks down for B2B marketing agencies
Although most agencies recognize the importance of time tracking, they lack the necessary architecture to implement it successfully.
Imagine running a B2B marketing agency with 5-6 clients on retainer. Each of those retainers would likely get managed through a series of back-and-forth Slack conversations, shared Google Docs for tracking progress, HubSpot or Asana task lists for assignments, Asana boards for project organization, and email threads for ongoing discussions. Time spent working on a project would get logged in one place, notes from client calls in another. Invoices for the work would be sent from QuickBooks. Meanwhile, the scope of work document for the client would probably be a stale 3 month old PDF.
No one has a completely clear view of where time is going.
Every time a retainer is up for renewal, someone has to ‘reconstruct’ what has occurred over last 5 months or so from 5 different systems. This can take hours or more and is rarely 100% complete. It is often a number that the account lead does not believe anyway.
Typical responses to problems add more tooling. Usually makes it worse.
Where billable hour profitability for agency retainers actually goes
While no single entity appears to be 'losing' money, the gradual dissipation of value is occurring through an unfolding series of discrete, decisions mostly taken with only partial information.
An account manager approves a "quick extra deliverable" because they don't have the month's hours in front of them. One of the Strategists spent 90 minutes or so on a call with a customer outside of scope and logged it as a generic internal task. A retainer gets renewed at the same rate it launched at eighteen months ago, because nobody pulled a real utilization report before the conversation.
Each of these will erode your margins slightly throughout the year. But combined together, they can actually end up costing you more than they bring back during the course of a retainer-based year.
The root cause for all of these problems is the same: Decisions are made without the most current and most accurate information. That information is buried in some of the Agency’s tools and databases but it is not connected, organized, nor made available in time when it is needed.
Scope creep is a term that’s often bandied about by agencies. But a lot of this scope creep is actually just a data problem that hasn’t been solved. Work that’s been absorbed by the team in question because they have no live view of the state of their retainer, only to discover at month end that the work has been over scoped and the billing has already gone out, or at retainer renewal time that they’ve taken a loss on the over scoped portion of work.
How a structured knowledge layer fixes multi-retainer visibility for B2B agencies
The answer to tracking time is not another web interface to log time. Most organizations already have a time tracking interface, typically in their agency management system. The answer is to connect all the data that is currently siloed and run it through a single AI layer and then analyze it all jointly.
LemonLime helps B2B marketing agencies running multiple retainers.
The integration tool simply connects to all current tools the agency uses to log in (no data migration or scripting). Tools like HubSpot, Slack, QuickBooks, Google Workspace, Microsoft and many more. The tool automatically then ingests all that existing data and builds a solid structured knowledge layer.
This layer doesn’t have to be a maintenance-heavy dashboard. Over time, as the business unfolds, this layer gets richer and better. With each new time entry, message and document this layer auto-updates.
Your agency AI will know what you have billed for each retainer, how many hours you have this month, which clients are in the red and how you should structure your renewal proposals based on your real utilization. No report needed.
For the largest retainer portfolios this is key to manage. As already said, managing 5 clients with a simple spreadsheet is challenging. However, as soon as it goes up to 10 clients with different scopes, billing frequencies and team sizes, the challenges will mount up fast. A knowledge layer on top of real time data makes a huge difference with regards to decision making speed.
What good retainer profitability reporting looks like for a B2B marketing agency
Good retainer reporting gives account leads one answer to a specific question at any point in the month: "Where do we stand on this client right now?"
Use real time logged work, not estimates. Work logged in all channels, not just the project management tool. Before client asks, not in the middle of a panic.
For example, a strategist in a project might ask the AI if he or she can add an extra asset for a client in week three. Normally the strategist would ask the account manager who would then ask the finance person to pull a report. However, in this scenario the strategist asks the AI directly. The AI can answer this question in seconds by looking at this month’s logged hours, the contracted scope of work for the client and the average historical utilization for prior months.
It's a mundane example. That's the point. This kind of question happens a dozen times a week across an agency, and each time it gets answered by guesswork instead of data, there's a small cost. The cost of answering each of these queries on a guess as opposed to reference to hard data is relatively small. However, there will be some costs that manifest themselves as billing disputes and others that will result in clients feeling ‘ripped off’ because additional work outside of the scope of the brief has been included in the bill and charged at a high rate to the client. The majority of costs will however be borne by the account managers who are having to defend the scope of work as laid out in the brief against the client.
A connected knowledge layer closes the loop before it opens.
How B2B marketing agencies can get started this month
The fastest way to find out is to connect one tool and look for changes.
I can use QuickBooks and HubSpot for retainer billing and tracking client activity in parallel. I connect QuickBooks and HubSpot to LemonLime and then ask the AI after it has ingested the required data from the two systems a question that would normally require a report.
Three practical starting points:
Step 1: Connect your billing and project tools. The billing tool QuickBooks houses the invoices for all of your retainer clients. The project tool HubSpot or your CRM contains all of the activity for your clients on retainer as well as the scope of work for them. With these two tools connected, you will have a knowledge layer for the retainer questions.
Wait a week for the layer to build. The knowledge layer will grow in value as it is used more. After a week of a live data feed the layer will start to return answers based on the real patterns at the agency rather than the tool that has been used to build the knowledge layer.
AI powered prep for your next renewal meeting As an alternative to manually creating all this material, you can use AI to generate it for your renewal meeting. This tool for example will help you to find out the real utilization of your teams over the last 3 months, which of your deliverables takes up the most of their time and whether you have stayed within scope or not. This is much more useful than gathering all this information manually.
LemonLime is currently in waitlist. B2B marketing agencies that track multiple retainers and want better profitability visibility before renewal season are the type of customer LemonLime was built for. Start at lemonlime.ai.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is my agency's time tracking so inaccurate even when we have a tracking tool?
Time tracking software typically only logs time as users remember to add it to a single system of record. For teams that work across multiple tools including Slack, email and their project management tool of choice (Asana or Trello for example), time logged in any one of these tools will be incomplete. To accurately track time, all places where work happens must be tracked and pulled into one view or layer. As a knowledge layer, LemonLime automatically ingests time from all connected tools where work is being done, rather than having to log time in a separate system.
How do I know which of my retainer clients are actually profitable?
Most agencies that work on retainer measure profitability based on the hours put in to work versus the hours billed, times rate. This information is typically very difficult to come by in the middle of the month for two main reasons. First, the hours worked, the hours billed, and the retainer scope are stored in three different systems. Second, most of that data is unstructured and therefore not easily connectible. LemonLime connects data and builds a structured representation of it. As a result, you can now ask LemonLime for your current profitability on any retainer for which you have set up LemonLime to track.
What's the best way to catch retainer scope creep before billing?
See retainer status for the entire month instead of all end of month surprise conversations. Knowing where you are against scope for each retainer by day 15 of the month allows for time to fix before having a proactive conversation with client instead of a surprise surprise. Agencies that track scope creep early are all connected and current w/ time and scope info vs. relying on historical info to recreate.
Why does my team resist logging hours consistently?
Two reasons, usually. First, the logging itself does not bring any end value to the team using the tool. Second, and more importantly, the tool already adds enough friction to an already very full workflow for the team. Instead of adding more rules to already non-value-added data, making data from logged hours more useful is about tying that data to ends that your team can already see. They improve when the data gets used visibly, when the team sees that logged hours produce better renewal conversations and clearer scope boundaries. Connecting the tools your team already works in reduces the friction side of that equation.
How do I report on retainer utilization across multiple clients without building a spreadsheet every month?
Instead of creating a system to pull and report data from a database that is updated from a ‘master’ spreadsheet the agency’s need to pull data from systems of record where the data resides (billing, project management, email, etc…) in real time and then structure it so it can be retrieved at a later date. This is what LemonLime does for the marketing agency, building the knowledge layer from the existing data in their chosen tools and keeping it up to date automatically. Therefore using the data to report on the agencies utilization becomes a question of using the system as opposed to having to create a report from scratch every time.
Is my client data safe if I connect my agency's tools to LemonLime?
Security is a critical check point before connecting any client facing systems. The current and authoritative details on how LemonLime handles your data are published at lemonlime.ai/security. Review what you have against your own needs and your customers’ needs before connecting anything.
Jordan Zietz, Founder @ LemonLime. Updated July 2025. 7 min read.
Tags: agency billable hours tracking retainers, retainer profitability, B2B marketing agency, time tracking, agency AI, client retainer management.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do I keep losing money on retainer clients even though my team is logging hours?
The problem usually isn't how much work gets done — it's that logged hours, billed amounts, and contracted scope live in three separate systems. Decisions get made without current data: approving extra deliverables, renewing at stale rates, absorbing out-of-scope work. Each small leak feels harmless, but together they quietly erode your margins over a full retainer year. LemonLime connects those systems into one knowledge layer so you can see profitability in real time, not after the invoice goes out.
How can I see where all my retainer clients stand mid-month without pulling a manual report?
Most agencies can't answer that question mid-month because the data is scattered across Slack, HubSpot, QuickBooks, and project tools — none of which talk to each other. You end up reconstructing the picture at renewal time, which is too late to fix anything. LemonLime ingests data from all your connected tools and builds a live knowledge layer, so you can ask the AI exactly where any retainer stands today — hours used, scope remaining, billing status — without generating a single report.
What's actually causing scope creep at my agency — is it a process problem or a data problem?
More often than agencies expect, it's a data problem disguised as a process problem. Work gets absorbed mid-month because the team has no live view of where the retainer stands. By the time the scope overrun is visible, billing has already gone out. That's not a discipline failure — it's a visibility failure. LemonLime gives your team a real-time knowledge layer so scope questions get answered against actual data, not guesswork, before the work gets approved.
Do I need to migrate my agency's data or involve IT to start using LemonLime?
No migration, no scripts, no IT project required. LemonLime connects directly to the tools your agency already uses — HubSpot, Slack, QuickBooks, Google Workspace, Microsoft, and others — and ingests the existing data from there. The knowledge layer builds automatically and gets richer over time as new entries, messages, and documents come in. You can start by connecting just two tools, like QuickBooks and HubSpot, and begin asking the AI retainer questions within a week. Join the waitlist at lemonlime.ai.