Marketing and creative agencies

Most of your studio keeps one working day, and a few people keep a moving one. Account managers hold client hours, while the production crew stays late in shoot week. Each group gets a named shift with its own start and end, assigned per person from a start date.

Say a launch pulls a designer onto a later window for a month. You assign the new shift with a one-month duration, and the assignment history shows who made the change.

Clients abroad move your day as well. Every client record shows that client's local time beside yours, so an account lead booking a review can see it's already evening on their side.

Overservicing. It's the hours your team gives a retainer client beyond what the scope you signed was sized for.

Your daily recap is where it starts. Your people log hours per project and a manager approves the week. A logging window stops anyone rebuilding a month from memory on its last Friday. By default, people can log the last five working days.

Set each retainer up as its own project flagged hourly, and each fixed-fee campaign as a project flagged fixed price. Utilisation reporting then splits your hours by project and by department, week over week. You'll see a client whose hours climb three weeks running well before the renewal call.

Pitches get a project too, flagged non-billable. New-business time is real work, and keeping it apart from client hours is what lets both your numbers mean something.

Meetings close the loop. With Fireflies connected, each of your client calls is filed against its project with notes and action items. A project also warns you when nobody has met that client in a while, on a threshold you set.