We have heard from many customers who need to track retainers in Harvest. You can invoice for a retainer today in Harvest – say, you invoice a client for $5,000. That works, but there’s no easy way to invoice the hours you worked, and draw from that $5,000 and keep track of remaining balance.

Today, we’re excited to announce a new feature to support retainers is coming this week. Here is what it will look like:

Our team has been hard at work on this feature for well over a month. The goal is to make it simple to track retainers, while at the same time offer enough functionality and information to make it useful.

How Will The Feature Work?

To start, there will be a new Invoices > Retainers section. You can create a retainer by creating a retainer invoice, and when you collect a payment on that invoice, the amount will go into the retainer funds.

To invoice the client later and draw from the retainer, you will simply create an invoice for the project hours, like you normally would. Harvest will show you a list of retainers to draw from. All you need to do is to choose the correct retainer, and Harvest will automatically draw from the funds, and update the retainer balance.

We’ll let you know when the feature is available later this week, and we’ll have a video showing exactly how to utilize it.