Hours and money. That's it.

We have a strong preference for time and materials basis for billing. For some agencies, project-based billing can work. Others prefer retainers. Tidy supports all of these cases. But in all of these cases, you are still spending hours and dollars to deliver the work.

That's the principle. No matter how you bill — time and materials, fixed project, retainer, whatever — it always comes back to hours and money on your side of the ledger. The billing model is a packaging decision. The underlying math is always the same: how many hours did your people work, at what rates, and did you get paid enough to cover it?

This is why Tidy is obsessive about client balance.

The client balance

This is the feature most agency tools don't have, and it's the one that matters most.

Forget individual invoices for a second. The fundamental question you need to answer about any client is: what is the overall balance of this relationship? How much money have you received from them, minus how much labor have you given them? And how will that balance track over the coming weeks?

Tidy shows you this front and center for every client:

The point isn't to dictate how you bill. The point is that no matter how you bill, you are tracking hours and dollars on the backend. And if you're not watching the client balance — the real, net position of each relationship — you're guessing. Agencies that guess eventually get burned.