Timesheet Software for IT Agencies and Consultancies: Clients, Engagements and Approvals

A flat project list treats a retainer, a sprint and an audit as peers, with no link to the client who is paying for all three. When the same client has three live pieces of work, billing that client means adding up across projects by hand. When different managers own different clients, a single approver becomes the bottleneck.

The structure agencies need is simple: the client owns the engagements, and the manager of the client approves the hours logged against them.

Choose the Agency / consultancy business type at signup, or switch to it any time in Settings → Workspace, and the product speaks your language. A group of people working together becomes a Client, and the thing people log time against becomes an Engagement. Nothing else changes underneath, so everything works the same way as the other business types.

• Set up each client and pick the people who work on it.
• Add engagements under the client: the retainer, the build, the audit.
• Log time by starting a session on the engagement.
• Approvals go to the owning manager. The person who works across several clients has each batch of hours approved by that client's manager.
• Renaming and deleting. A client can be renamed. One that still has engagements cannot be deleted, so its hours history is not lost by accident.

The numbers are illustrative. An agency has a monthly retainer for a SaaS client, a six-week build for a retail client, and a day-rate security audit for a fintech client. Eight people work across them, and two of them touch all three.

Each client is a Client in the workspace, with the retainer, the build and the audit as Engagements under them. When a developer starts a session she picks the engagement. The retainer's hours go to the manager who owns that client, the build's hours to the delivery lead, and the audit's days to the principal. Nobody approves work on a client they do not manage.

At month end the three reports answer three different questions. For the retainer: are approved hours within the contracted ceiling? For the build: are we ahead of or behind the estimate, and by how much? For the audit: how many days do we bill? One data source feeds all three conversations.

Open Reports → Timesheet by engagement. It lists people against engagements, split into approved and pending hours, with a CSV download. For a retainer you compare approved hours against the contracted ceiling. For a fixed-fee build you compare hours spent against the estimate and see where it ran over. For a day-rate audit you read off the days.

Because sessions were attributed when the work started, the report is a summary of records, not a reconstruction. Our post on billable hours leakage explains why that difference is where margin is won or lost.

• Retainers. Compare approved hours with the contracted ceiling during the month, not after it. Overrun is cheap to address on day 15 and awkward on day 31.
• Fixed-fee builds. Track hours against the estimate weekly. The point is not to bill by the hour but to learn what the next quote should be.
• Day-rate work. Sessions give you the evidence behind the days you bill, which matters when a client asks for a breakdown.
• Internal and bench time. Keep an Internal client for meetings, hiring and training. If you do not, that time disappears into client engagements and every margin figure is wrong.

Approvals work best as a short weekly habit, not a month-end pile. Set a fixed slot, for example Friday afternoon, when each manager clears the pending hours for their clients. By the time you run the month-end report, almost everything is approved and the numbers are final. The pending column then shows only genuine exceptions to chase.

Many agencies run an HR attendance tool and a separate time tracker, and spend time reconciling them. Workclave keeps attendance and project hours in the same session record, so you do not maintain two sources of truth. That also helps if you need records for labour-law compliance; see the India Labour Code guide.

• Attribution at the start of the session, so there is nothing to rebuild at month end.
• Approval by the owning manager, so no single person approves everything.
• A per-client view with approved and pending hours side by side.
• Wording that matches your business, so new joiners understand it without training.
• free up to 3 users, then ₹199/user/month with no base fee. No base fee and no seat minimum, so you can start with one delivery pod. See pricing.

• Does the structure follow the client, or is it a flat list of projects?
• Does each client's manager approve their own hours?
• Can I see approved and pending hours side by side for one client?
• Is there a way to track internal time so it does not pollute client numbers?
• Does attendance live in the same record, or do I reconcile two systems?
• What does it cost for a team of 10, 25 and 50 with no minimum seats?

Workclave records, approves and reports hours. It does not draw up invoices, and it is not a project-management board. Keep your invoicing and your task tracker; use Workclave as the source of the hours that feed both. For a side-by-side look at agency tools, read our buyer's guide to agency time tracking.

• Start with one delivery pod and its two or three biggest clients.
• Agree what an engagement is, so retainers and projects are named consistently.
• Switch on manager approvals in week two.
• In week three, take the month-end billing sheet from the report instead of the spreadsheet.