Agencies & studios

Contracts signed, retainers charged, client sites watched

One system for the whole client relationship: contracts a client signs from a phone, a pay link that captures the card the retainer charges, hours that are checked against the bill, and a nightly watch on the client sites you point it at.

It is 9:40 pm on Thursday and you are closing out the week across five tools. The agreement you sent Riverbend Counseling on Tuesday went out as a PDF attachment, and its silence since could mean unopened, unread, or stuck on a question. The spreadsheet says two retainers should have billed this week, Stripe shows one, and somewhere in the time tracker sit the on-demand hours nobody moved onto an invoice. Then the text arrives: a client's homepage has looked broken since the morning's plugin update, and the client is the one telling you. KeyMetriq puts the whole client relationship on one screen: contracts that report when they are opened, retainers that charge the card on file, hours that are checked against the bill, and a nightly watch you set on every client site.

Contracts that tell you when they are opened

Turn on client contracts and you get a client directory, reusable contract templates with version history, and a send-for-signature flow that works from a public tokenized link. The link opens cleanly on a phone with the service, cadence and price shown right above the signature block, and the client signs with a consent checkbox and a typed name. Every contract records a timeline of created, viewed, checkout started, paid and revoked, each with a timestamp, so opened six times but not signed is an answerable question instead of a feeling. Clients who run their own KeyMetriq workspace accept in-app; everyone else signs from the link.

Example:Ridgeline Web Studio sends Fernhill Dental a $1,500-a-month care plan on Tuesday, sees it opened six times by Thursday, and makes the Friday call about a decision instead of a resend.

A pay page that cannot disagree with Stripe

Send a tokenized pay link and the client saves their card through Stripe Checkout, on your own Stripe account. The page shows the amount and cadence from the same record Stripe charges from, so what the client reads and what the card is charged can never disagree. From then on, recurring contract billing charges the stored card each cycle, and every billing line shows exactly which card it would charge.

Example:Bluestem Creative sends one pay link for a $2,000 monthly retainer; the client saves a card from their phone, and the retainer has charged that card on schedule every month since.

Retainers that watch themselves

Set a client agreement live and KeyMetriq materializes what should arrive each month: a fixed retainer snapshots the agreed amount, and time-based lines compute your rate times the billable hours actually tracked. A daily check then flags a month with no invoice issued, tracked work sitting unbilled, and any gap between what was invoiced and what the agreement expects. The retainer you forgot stops being a thing that happens.

Example:Harbor & Sage got the no-invoice alert on the Coastal Physio retainer while the month was still open, and the $1,800 went out three days before month end instead of never.

Hours that actually reach the bill

Turn on time tracking and the team logs hours on the task itself or runs the built-in stopwatch, with a live pill in the top bar showing the task and the running time. Every task carries a billable versus non-billable breakdown by person, and before you invoice, a check compares the hours logged against what each agreement expects and what was actually invoiced, with unbilled on-demand work listed by name. The two hours of Tuesday hotfixes stop quietly becoming free.

Example:Invoicing day at Alder Creek Digital starts with the unbilled list: nine on-demand hours across three clients, and the $1,080 that used to slip goes on the bills.

Find out before the client does

Turn on site capture and the WordPress plugin discovers a client site's deployed pages, captures them nightly, and runs visual diff checks with confirmation re-captures, so a page scrambled by a plugin update is detected instead of reported by the client, with a health badge on every page. The plugin can report backup health alongside. The asset register watches client domains too: automatic renewal detection with alerts escalating at 30, 14, 7 and 1 days, SSL certificate checks, and opt-in uptime monitoring with incident stats.

Example:A Thursday plugin update scrambled a dental client's booking page overnight; the nightly capture caught it, the re-capture confirmed it was real, and it was fixed before the office opened at 8.

Client projects without the marketing clutter

Client work runs in the same project workspaces marketers use for launches, switched to a client or internal type: the brief, timeline, tasks and deadlines stay, the marketing tabs disappear, and work moves through delivery phases of planning, build, review and delivery instead of a cart cycle. Set up recurring duties and maintenance work materializes into real tasks on schedule, so the monthly plugin pass exists as a task without anyone remembering to create it.

Example:The Marsh & Main site build at Bluestem sits in review with 12 of 15 tasks done, and October's maintenance pass for every care-plan client created itself this morning.

A login for the client, a link for everyone else

Available as a managed-client offering, each hosting or maintenance client can get their own trimmed KeyMetriq login: a dashboard, their service agreement and documents, their domains with uptime, and their tasks. The state of their site and their agreement stops being an email to you and becomes a page they check. And when a login is more than someone needs, A/B experiment reports and the brand guide you can switch on both have public tokenized share links that open with no account at all.

Example:The Coastal Physio office manager wonders about last month's downtime, opens her own login, sees one 4-minute incident, and the email to Harbor & Sage never gets written.

What changes in week one

Contracts signed from a phone, every open timestampedThe pay page and Stripe charge from the same recordA retainer month with no invoice gets flaggedUnbilled hours surface before invoicing dayA broken client page is caught the night it breaksDomain renewals flagged at 30, 14, 7 and 1 daysClients check their site instead of emailing you

KeyMetriq is opening soon. Join the waitlist and make the next contract you send the last one that goes quiet.

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