Automatic time tracking for agencies, so you know what every account actually costs to service.
Lotus captures your team's time as the work happens, accurately, against the right client and project, without anyone filling in a timesheet from memory on Friday. See the real cost of a retainer while there's still time to do something about it, price projects from what the work actually takes, and bill rate-card work with confidence.
The retainer is fixed. The work isn't.
Underneath the fee, a retainer is a volume of hours. It's priced on how much time will be dedicated to this client's work each month, and what sits inside that time can shift: a heavier campaign one month, more strategy the next. That variation is normal, and part of what a client is buying.
What makes the arrangement work is knowing how much of that time has been used while the month is still running, so delivery can be paced to stay inside it. That's the piece most agencies don't have. The hours get consumed, but nobody is watching them against the budget until the month is already closed.
Then reality arrives on top: the extra revision round, the “can you just” on a Friday afternoon, the strategy call that runs ninety minutes, the deck that gets rebuilt because the brief moved. None of it is unreasonable. All of it is delivery effort, and none of it changes the invoice, so nothing tells you it's happening. The fee stays flat while the hours climb, and the effective rate on the account drops month by month, without a number anywhere that says so.
That's only visible if the hours are recorded, and in most agencies they aren't, not effectively. Timesheets get filled in at the end of the week from memory, and recall of detail drops sharply within a day of the work and keeps falling through the week.3 What survives is the big obvious blocks. What disappears is exactly the small, scattered, out-of-scope work that's doing the damage.
On project work the same thing happens inside a fixed price: the revisions that weren't scoped, the round of amends after the brief moved. On time-and-materials work the hours are billable in principle, but when the invoice comes in higher than expected, the easiest way to keep the relationship comfortable is to discount it, and the work quietly becomes free anyway. Scope evolving beyond what was agreed is the norm in agency work, not the exception.
The project or retainer that was profitable when you signed it.
Nothing announces the month it stopped being.
An account rarely fails in an obvious way. It's won at a healthy margin, delivery starts well, and then the scope quietly evolves, a little more each month, none of it worth arguing about in isolation. The fee never moves. Six months later the account is being serviced at a fraction of the rate it was priced at, and the only people who know are the ones doing the work at nine o'clock.
Retainers: the least visible loss
Sometimes over-servicing is a deliberate call to protect a relationship; sometimes nobody notices at all. Either way there's rarely a moment where someone asks what it costs. A write-down gets recorded as a write-down; time given away sits in the P&L as a lump of salary cost, never at a level that shows which client absorbed it.
Projects & T&M: it lands late, or at the invoice
On a fixed-price build the reckoning comes at the end, by which point the margin went weeks earlier. On time and materials the hours were billable all along, but an invoice higher than expected creates an awkward moment, and the path of least resistance is to trim it. The discount protects the relationship and costs the agency the difference, every time.
Hardest with the clients who matter most
Your biggest accounts are usually your most demanding, and the instinct is to say yes, fast, without making it a negotiation. What rarely happens is anyone asking what saying yes costs, and whether your most important client is still one of your most profitable. Resourcing and the next pitch then get planned on that same false number.
And it costs the wrong people: over-servicing shows up in the evenings and weekends of the team absorbing it. When a client genuinely has grown the scope, the case for repricing needs evidence: what was delivered, how much sat outside the agreement, over what period. Without an accurate record, that conversation either doesn't happen or becomes an argument about impressions.
Capture the real hours, without asking your team to be diligent about it.
The outcome is an accurate picture of what each account, project and deliverable actually consumes, so a retainer's true margin is visible while there's still time to act on it. Here's how Lotus gets there.
A lightweight agent on the desktop captures time automatically as your team works. It reads the labels around the work, never its content, and builds each timesheet in near real time, allocated to the right client and project. Design, production, strategy, account management: the day gets recorded as it happens rather than reconstructed later.
Not everything leaves a digital trail. The client call, the internal review, the twenty minutes talking a designer through a change: when someone returns to their desk, Lotus surfaces the gap in the day and prompts them to account for it while it's fresh. For time out of the office, at a client's or on the move, the mobile app captures it in the field.
Your team reviews, adjusts and approves before anything is final, adding notes against an entry as they go. Nothing is guessed, and nothing is finalised without a person confirming it. Time then flows to the systems that bill it, with Lotus as the accurate source of truth for time.
On what this isn't
Lotus captures metadata about the work (which application, which document, which window), never the content. No screen recording, no keystrokes, no reading files, no live location. It records what's needed to build an accurate and defensible timesheet, and nothing more. It doesn't rate anyone's output or judge anyone's work; it shows where the time went.
What accurate time gives an agency.
Resourcing based on real capacity.
When you know what accounts genuinely consume rather than what they were priced to consume, staffing and capacity planning start from reality: which accounts need more people, and which are quietly absorbing them.
A clearer view of where time and work stand.
Lotus tracks tasks and deliverables against their due dates, and shows how much effort a project is consuming against its budget, live. It won't tell you whether the work is good; that stays with you. But it will tell you what's outstanding, what's due, and where the effort is going, while there's still time to act. The mobile app keeps your team's own time in their pocket, captured, reviewed and submitted from wherever they're working.
A lighter load on your team.
Timesheets are the task creative teams most resent, and the one most likely to be done badly at 6pm on a Friday. Big-Four research argues productivity is better measured through passive data than self-reported hours, and that the manual version quietly costs wellbeing.2 Automatic capture removes the chore, and the accurate picture it produces is what stops over-servicing landing on the same people's evenings.
Questions agencies ask.
Our creative team hates timesheets. Will they actually use this?
There's much less for them to do. Lotus captures the day automatically and asks people to review it rather than to remember and rebuild it. The task changes from an end-of-week reconstruction to a quick confirmation.
Is this surveillance? Are you monitoring output?
No, on both counts. Lotus captures metadata about the work (application, document name, window title), never the content, and never screenshots or keystrokes. It doesn't rate anyone's work or judge the output. It records where time went so the agency can price and resource properly.
We work on retainers, not hourly. Does this still apply?
Especially on retainers. The fee is fixed, so the only way to know whether an account is profitable is to know what it costs to deliver. Lotus gives you the effective rate on every account, while there's still time to have the scope conversation.
Can it capture time against clients, projects and deliverables?
Yes. Time is allocated to the right client and project as it’s captured, and your team confirms it before anything is final. You use your own account and project structure, and your own language for it.
Does Lotus replace our billing system?
No. Lotus is the accurate source of truth for time. Your billing system draws the time data it needs from it, and you decide what flows where.
What about work done off-site or at a client's office?
The mobile app captures time in the field, including client meetings, shoots and calls on the move, so time away from the desk is recorded while it’s fresh.
See what your accounts really cost.
A short demo shows Lotus capturing time, building timesheets, and the reporting on top, with the data behind it. Twenty minutes, no obligation.
- American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A's), Billing Rate Benchmark Survey: analysis of over 36,000 data points across 886 agency rate cards, establishing US agency billing-rate benchmarks.
- Deloitte, Measuring Workforce Productivity: argues workforce productivity is better measured through passive data than self-reported hours, and that traditional hours-based metrics can miss wellbeing.
- On memory and delayed recording: H. Ebbinghaus, Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology (1885), replicated in J. M. J. Murre & J. Dros, “Replication and Analysis of Ebbinghaus’ Forgetting Curve,” PLoS ONE 10(7), 2015: recall of new detail decays sharply within the first day and continues to fall over the following week.
The effective-rate calculation divides the monthly retainer fee by the hours actually delivered, and compares that with the fee divided by the hours the retainer was priced to cover. The gap, annualised, is the illustrative cost of over-servicing on that account. Rate references are anchored to published agency billing-rate benchmarks (ref. 1). Results depend on the accuracy of the delivered-hours input, which is the argument the calculator is making.