How Allison+Partners Used Flexible Billing Models to Take on New Clients

About Allison+Partners

Allison+Partners has more than 20 years of experience working with organizations of all sizes. The agency develops comprehensive campaigns that combine traditional PR strategies with innovative digital tactics to reach audiences across multiple channels.

Notably, the agency was named by PRWeek as one of the Best Places to Work for four consecutive years and was also recognized as one of the UK’s Fastest Growing Agencies.

Allison+Partners operates in 34 markets worldwide and is organized around five practices: Consumer Brands, Corporate, Reputation Risk + Public Affairs, and Health and Technology.

Teams at Allison+Partners use ClickTime to log work hours to projects, manage employee resources, and ensure every client is billed accurately and on time.

Susan Canales, from Allison+Partners’ finance team, recently sat down with ClickTime to discuss how the platform helped grow their business by allowing them to easily leverage flexible billing models.

Challenges

As a leading PR agency, Allison+Partners knew they could grow their business faster if they offered clients flexible billing models.

Flexible billing models would empower clients to choose billing structures best suited to their unique needs. A client with a one-off project may ask for a fixed-fee price, whereas a client with ongoing projects might choose to keep the agency on retainer.

By offering flexible billing models, Allison+Partners would be able to service a greater variety of clients, take on more projects, and ultimately grow their business at a faster pace.

Canales explains, “We needed billing models that allowed us to offer flexibility to our clients. This change would allow them to choose a billing model best suited to their scope of work.”

Deploying Unique Billing Rates at Scale

While it was clear flexible billing models would benefit the business, the Finance Team needed a tool to help facilitate the process. Without one, the team would be drowned in administrative overhead, as they’d likely need to match each work hour to the correct rate card. Using spreadsheets, this process would become painstakingly slow.

Moreover, because the team needed to generate invoices quickly and efficiently every month, introducing flexible rates wouldn’t be practical without the right software solution.

Canales says, “We wanted to quickly introduce new billing rates without adding additional manual tasks to our plate.”

Lack of Time-Entry Compliance

Like every organization that diligently tracks project hours, Allison+Partners struggled to get consistent time-entry compliance from staff.

And Canales’ billing process was on such a tight timeline that it would be impossible to invoice clients accurately with late timesheets.

Canales explains, “On the first of every month, timesheets are locked exactly at noon. Immediately after that, our billers and finance teams start pulling reports so we can send invoicing drafts for approval. It’s critical we can access accurate and complete time-entry data for that work to be done correctly.”

Missing timesheets were a problem that, if not solved, would directly impact the agency’s cash flow and client relations.

Transparency into Employee Utilization

Lastly, Allison+Partners needed to monitor employee project workloads to ensure its staff was being utilized properly.

If the team could monitor work in progress in real-time, managers could prevent costly overservicing and unplanned overtime.

Canales says, “We wanted to closely track whether employees went over or under on their monthly time allocations. Monitoring that progress in real-time would help our managers prevent client overservicing and employee burnout.”

Solutions

Using ClickTime to Easily Manage Custom Billing Models

The first order of business was to create the custom billing models that Allison+Partners required. With help from ClickTime’s Customer Success Team, Allison+Partners configured the platform with three distinct billing models:

• Clients billed by retainer
• Clients billed by project (fixed fee)
• Clients billed by time and materials

By adding these billing models to their ClickTime instance, Canales’ team could easily invoice every client according to the precise specifications of their contracts.

She says, “Implementing custom billing models allowed us to tailor our rates to different contracts. We could now accommodate our clients better by billing the best way for their organizations.”

ClickTime’s Customer Success Team made the platform configuration a breeze. The team imported hundreds of new rate cards all at once, based on the spreadsheets Allison+Partners had provided.

Canales comments, “ClickTime was easy to work with and offered us meaningful guidance around the most efficient way we could add flexible billing models to our platform.”

With ClickTime’s custom rate cards, Allison+Partners could now bill flexibly—by project, employee, or task.

Canales comments, “Once our custom rate cards were entered into ClickTime, the system automatically kept track of every dollar we charged. It was such a simple process!”

Using ClickTime to Ensure Timesheet Compliance

The next order of business was to ensure that employees submitted their timesheets on time.

To accomplish this, the agency used ClickTime’s automated email reminders and time entry completion dashboard.

Instead of knocking on doors to chase down incomplete timesheets, Canales could now rely on the system to remind any forgetful employees.

She says, “It was so convenient that ClickTime automatically sent timesheet reminders to the team. The automation saved me hours of chasing down late timesheets, giving me back time to focus on my core tasks.”

Using ClickTime to Manage Resources

And finally, Allison+Partners leveraged ClickTime’s Resource Management tool to make sure that employees were assigned to the right projects, at the right time, for the right price.

Canales comments, “With Resource Management, our employees always know which projects they need to work on, and for how long.”

With Resource Management, Allison+Partners ensures that each of their clients and projects is being staffed appropriately.

Results

Increased Profitability for Every Project and Client

Allison+Partners chose ClickTime because of its robust time-tracking platform and highly customizable features.

The platform allowed the agency to easily store complex billing rates, ensure every project was billed correctly, and automate billing calculations.

This enabled the agency to take on more clients and projects, quickly bill their current clients, and ultimately grow their business without increasing administrative overhead.

With these gains over time, Allison+Partners has thrived—doubling its headcount since implementing ClickTime.