Retainers

Written By Timothy Murenzi

Last updated About 2 hours ago

What a retainer is

A retainer is money a client pays you in advance, held as a credit balance that you draw against as you invoice work. In Workroom, every retainer is tied to one project and one client, and each retainer is backed by its own invoice (numbered RET-<PROJECTCODE>-###). You collect the money by having the client pay that retainer invoice; later, you apply the balance to regular invoices on the same project.

Where to find Retainers

Studio-wide: left sidebar → Finances → Retainers. A cross-project ledger of every retainer with its status, amount, received, disbursed, and remaining balance.
Inside a project: open the project → Finances → Retainers tab. This is where you'll do most of your work — it shows per-pool balance cards (Products / Services / General), the retainer ledger, and a disbursement activity feed. The Request Retainer button lives here.

The retainer types (and their limitations)

When you create a retainer you choose one of four types. The type controls which kind of work the money can be spent on. Workroom tracks two "pools" of money — Products (FF&E, OSE, art purchasing) and Services (design time, labor, consulting) — and the type decides how a retainer feeds those pools.

Type	What it's for	How the money can be applied	Key limitation
Products	FF&E, OSE, and art purchasing	Draws against the Products pool	Applying it to services work is flagged as a cross-pool draw (allowed, but noted)
Services	Design time, labor, consulting	Draws against the Services pool	Applying it to product purchases is flagged as a cross-pool draw
Split	A single payment that covers both	You enter a Products amount and a Services amount at request time; each feeds its own pool	Total must be greater than $0; the split is set when you create it
General	A flexible advance	A single flexible bucket you can apply to either pool; you decide per-draw	Never treated as cross-pool — it's flexible by design

There is also a fifth, internal-only type, Legacy. You can't create these — they appear automatically when older, pre-upgrade retainer credits are carried into the current system. A Legacy retainer isn't yet assigned to a pool; edit it and set the correct type (Products/Services/General) once you know what it was for.

Rules that apply to every type

Project-scoped. A retainer always belongs to one project and its client. You cannot spend a retainer across a different project.
Cross-pool is allowed but labeled. If you apply, say, a Services retainer to a product purchase, Workroom lets you do it but tags the draw "Applied across pool types — verify with your accountant" in the disbursement log (and in the QuickBooks sync). General and Split retainers never trigger this.

Auto-created retainers from contracts: If a contract includes a retainer and the client pays that contract's retainer invoice, Workroom automatically creates a General retainer named "Contract retainer" on that project — you don't have to create it by hand.