Product Spotlight: Retainer Insights & Profitability

It's no secret, running a thriving small business (SMB) is challenging, especially when only half of SMBs make it to their fifth birthday. Just think about all the things that go into it. For SMBs specifically in the service business industry, you have to ensure you're consistently cash flow positive, you've staffed an all-star team of employees who work efficiently, the service you provide is of the highest quality, and you establish and nurture strong ties with both prospective and existing clients.

Your existing clients are priceless to the stability of your business. Not only can they be a referral and speak to the quality of your service first-hand, locking them in for retainers is ideal for your service business' financial health. Ongoing work with them supplements project-based income and helps you secure consistent revenue streams.

But handling retainers can be a difficult feat when it comes to managing their billing and details. Accelo's Retainer module and the launch of the newest Retainer Insights update is here to the rescue! The newest product update gives you a deeper financial understanding of your retainers to maximize company profitability.

Watch the video to learn more about what Retainer's and the insight on profitability can do for you and your business:

Accelo's Retainer module

Our Retainer module is designed specifically for service businesses and it makes it easier to automate recurring work or repeating blocks of time for your clients. It decreases administrative headache, helping automate essential aspects including the creation of budgets or allowances, repeating tasks, materials, and invoicing.

With your team tracking time, materials, and expenses to a retainer, the billable value and cost of their efforts begin to influence profitability, which is where smart alerts and reports help you monitor in real-time.

What's new? Retainer Insights advantages

Our existing Retainer module already provides plenty of useful financial data in the retainer and period exports available from our list/report screens, but with the latest launch, there are several stand-out enhancements that provide managers and executives even deeper insight across the life of the retainer, particularly around profitability:

• Informative financial breakdown to make adjustments when necessary: Get a breakdown of revenue, cost and profit for the services and materials you've provided, plus any expenses your team members have attributed to the retainer from the initial period all the way to present day. This can help you make financial discoveries such as a low-profit margin on your materials that needs to be addressed.  

• Insight into your team's utilization: Track your team's efforts, ensuring each member is logging a positive ratio of billable hours, and change it up as you deem fit. 
• Ease of an interactive profit graph: With the graph, monitor and plot the cost and revenue over time, tracking the resulting profit. At a quick glance identify periods where costs were significantly higher than normal or revenue was off-beat. 
• Leverage toggling abilities for your own reassurance: Toggle to compare the Expected Revenue with the actual Invoiced Revenue for each period, which can give you the confidence in knowing that work being completed is also being billed for.

With Accelo's newest Retainer Insights update, you have the power to not only maintain your recurring client work and retainers with ease, as a manager or executive you can confidently stay-up-to-date on your finances, monitor and adjust billable resources within each retainer, and increase profitability. If you're new to Accelo, sign up today!