Recurring Retainers

How to Work with Classic Retainers in Clerk
How to Work with Recurring Retainers in Clerk

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Recurring retainers are suitable if you have a monthly/weekly/etc number of prepaid hours and need to charge extra if they are exceeded. The unused retainer balance is not moved to the next recurring period.

The best way to work with recurring retainers is to use the Invoice Generator.

Let’s look at the example of working with monthly retainers (recurring period could be any, 1 week, 2 weeks etc.):

1. You create one invoice template for the monthly retainer with one fixed price line, say USD 10,000. That amount covers prepaid hours.
2. You create another invoice template that will import time from Jira and generate the actual amount for the work done by your team. You put the retainer amount as a separate fixed price item with a minus sign -USD 10,000, so that prepaid amount will be deducted from the actual amount.
3. Then every month you generate 2 invoices from these templates: a retainer invoice and an invoice for work done.
4. If the generated invoice for the work done has zero or negative amount, then the retainer is not fully spent. You don’t need to charge the client.
5. If the generated invoice for the work done has an amount greater than zero, then the retainer is fully spent and there is extra work done. The invoice amount will reflect the amount to be paid by the customer.