Glossary
Retainer Burn
Also known as: Retainer utilisation
Retainer burn is the rate at which a client consumes the hours their monthly retainer purchases. A client on a 40-hour retainer who has used 34 hours by the 20th is at 85% burn with a third of the month remaining. Burn tracking is what makes a retainer a managed product rather than an all-you-can-eat subscription.
Over-burn is the obvious failure: the client consumes 55 hours of a 40-hour retainer, nobody notices until month-end, and the extra 15 hours are delivered free because retroactive billing conversations are miserable. Chronic over-burn is revenue leakage with a contract attached.
Under-burn fails more quietly. A client repeatedly using 20 of 40 hours is overpaying, and will eventually notice and either renegotiate down or leave feeling overcharged. Healthy retainer management surfaces under-burn early and converts the slack into planned work the client values — which is what makes retainers renew.
Burn only works as a live number. Discovering the burn position at month-end is accounting; seeing it mid-month, while the team can still slow down, speed up or trigger an overage conversation, is management. Rollover policy — whether unused hours carry forward, and for how long — should be written into the retainer, not improvised.
How Workclave handles this
Every Workclave session lands on its client and project as it happens, so the burn position is current by construction. Set the monthly allocation and both sides can see consumption against it — the overage conversation happens before the hours are spent, not after. billable hours calculator.
Related terms
Scope creep is the gradual expansion of what a project delivers without a matching change in its price or timeline. Each addition is small — one more revision, a extra report, a 'quick' integration — and none triggers a renegotiation. The scope grows; the fee does not; the margin absorbs the difference.
Read definition →Revenue leakage is value the firm earned but never invoiced: hours worked and not recorded, recorded and written off, covered by scope the contract never priced, or billed at rates that were never escalated. Unlike a lost deal, leakage is invisible — the work happened, the cost was paid in salaries, and the revenue simply failed to appear.
Read definition →Billable hours are the units of work time that can be charged to a client under a contract or engagement. They exclude internal activities like admin, training, or bench time that the client does not pay for. For services firms, billable hours are the direct link between effort and revenue.
Read definition →Utilisation rate is the percentage of an employee's available working time that is spent on billable client work. It is a core efficiency and profitability metric for IT services firms and agencies. A higher utilisation generally means more of your paid capacity is generating revenue.
Read definition →