There is an embarrassing amount of "cover your ass" in agency work. It's unbecoming. But it is also necessary, and pretending otherwise will cost you. Agencies are costly, and they live outside the organization. That's what makes them easy to fire — a good thing — but it also means you operate somewhat outside the main nervous system of the org.
There are decision makers you don't know. There are meetings and initiatives you aren't privy to. Priorities shift without you hearing about it. The person managing you is replaced. And then you get to the end of a big project and a boss swoops in and says, "what are we even paying you for? This isn't what I wanted!" That is the death knell of a good relationship, and one of the fastest ways to get fired.
The agency keeps the record
It is on the agency to maintain the official written record of what happened, when, who made the decision, and why. Nobody else is going to do it for you. The client has a thousand other things on their plate; the record is your job.
We typically handle this in one big monolithic doc shared with the client. It shows what we accomplished each week, and what the client agreed we should work on next. For any key decision or change in direction, we show who made the call, when they made it, and the reasoning behind it. This might sound like bureaucratic waste. It isn't. It has saved us on many occasions.
Uncomfortably explicit is the point
The real value of this record isn't defensive. It's that it forces you and your client to say things out loud that would otherwise hide under cover of implicit assumptions. "We're deprioritizing the reporting work so we can ship the new onboarding flow first" feels uncomfortable to write down. Write it down anyway. The discomfort is the signal that you're making something explicit that used to be vague — and vague is where misunderstandings grow.
How we do this in Tidy
In Tidy, we enable this workflow through our client check-ins feature. When you create a check-in, Tidy automatically pulls in the notes and links from the timesheet entries for the dates you specify. You layer on your own narrative, the decisions made that week, and what's next — and send it off as an official check-in.
The client gets an email, and they can always access the archive of previous check-ins from their client portal, right next to their invoices, payments, and agreements. This kind of transparency of progress and decisions has worked wonders for us — for building trust, and yes, for covering our ass when it matters.