time tracking for marketing agencies
Toggl tells you how long something took. An agency needs to know what it cost, what it was worth, and whether the retainer can absorb it.
Time tracking for a marketing agency has to answer a question a generic timer cannot: how much of this client's retainer each department has used this month, and whether the team is on pace. Verbial tracks time against projects and departments and paces every entry against the client's monthly budget. Timesheets route through approval, and the same approved hours feed invoices, payroll and margin.
Time Tracking for Marketing Agencies, done properly.
Timers, entries or weekly sheets
Start a timer, log an entry with natural language ('2h SEO audit for Acme yesterday'), or fill a weekly grid. Rounding and required notes are yours to set.
Retainer pacing by department
Each project's monthly allocation is split across departments. Every entry moves a pacing bar; burn-rate alerts reach the account manager and the department director before the overage.
Approvals and locks
Weekly or per-entry approval, auto-locking periods, and an audit trail on every edit after submission.
Hours for the team, dollars for the leads
Members and managers see hours only. Account managers, directors and admins see the money. One entry, two languages, never a leak.
Utilisation and capacity
Weekly targets, billable expectations and department views show who is over capacity before the deadline slips.
Straight into billing
Approved time becomes invoice lines for hourly clients, usage statements for retainer clients, and cost lines for payroll and profitability.
What a generic tool cannot model.
Budgets are per department, and they move
Retainers reshuffle month to month. Allocations are editable inline, never a hard cap, and history is kept per period.
Flat-rate work is tracked, not billed
Fixed-fee projects keep their hours for utilisation and margin, and never leak into an invoice.
Media spend is not time
Influencer and paid-media departments track external spend alongside hours, with gross profit per campaign.
Frequently asked questions
- What is the best way to track time in a marketing agency?
- Track time against a client project and a department, not just a task, so every hour can be paced against the client's monthly retainer allocation. Approve timesheets weekly, lock periods after 30 days, and let the same approved hours drive invoices, payroll and profitability rather than exporting to a spreadsheet.
- Can team members see billing rates?
- No. Members and managers see hours only. Dollar values, rates and margins are visible to account managers, directors and admins, and compensation data is visible to admins only.
- Does it import from Harvest, Toggl or Clockify?
- Yes. The migration hub imports clients, projects, tasks and time entries from Harvest, Toggl Track, Clockify, Everhour and Productive.io, matching people to your team by email.
- What happens when a retainer is used up?
- The account manager gets a burn-rate alert before it happens. If more work is needed, the client pre-pays an overage, the cap rises for that period only, and it resets at the next period.
Try time tracking for marketing agencies on your own clients.
Free trial, no card. Import from your current tools with a dry run and rollback.