RetainerOS Console
Contracts · Pricing · Invoices · Scope · Audit, generated from the kit rather than from scratch
By Munimen · something wrong or missing? munimen.help@outlook.com
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Your business (Provider) Shared across all clients

This is you, the side of the paperwork that never changes. You fill it in once and every contract, proposal and invoice the Console writes pulls from it. Nothing you type here is stored anywhere except this browser. The grey box further down shows you the exact sentence these fields produce, so you can watch the contract write itself as you type.

Identity

These five fields become the opening sentence of every contract you send, word for word. That sentence is what identifies you as a legal party, so it has to be your real registered details rather than a trading name.

Your legal name, or your company's registered name if you trade through one. It appears in the contract's opening line, at the top of every invoice, and above your signature at the end.

The contract reads "a [entity type] registered in [country]". If you are self-employed with no company, "Sole trader" (or the equivalent where you live) is the correct answer, not a blank.

These are two different numbers and a business can have one, both or neither. The registration number is what the company registry gave you. The VAT or tax ID is what the tax authority gave you, and it is the one an invoice legally needs: Article 226(3) of the EU VAT Directive asks for it by name, and in most of Europe an invoice without it can be refused by the client's finance team. If you are not registered for VAT, leave it empty and nothing about VAT will print.

Optional, and it appears on the invoice header only. Some finance departments will not chase a query by email, and an invoice with no phone number on it waits until somebody remembers to ask.

Your company number, or your tax or VAT number if you trade as an individual. It is printed straight into the contract as fact, so a wrong number is a wrong statement in a signed document. If you genuinely have no registration number, write what you do have, such as your tax ID.

Your registered or principal business address. The contract calls it your "principal place of business", and it is one of the two addresses formal notices can legally be sent to.

Legal & contact

Email is your ordinary working address. The Console prints it once, at the end of the Audit Findings Report, so the client knows who to reply to.

Notices email is different and it is worth understanding. It goes into Exhibit B of the contract, and Clause 20.7 makes it the address where formal notices count as delivered: a termination, a price increase, a breach warning. Once it is signed, a notice sent there is legally received whether or not you read it. Use an address you actually monitor. It can be the same as the one on the left; the point is that you choose it deliberately.

Which country's law the contract runs under, and whose courts hear a dispute. Clause 20.10 uses it twice. Put your own country here unless you have a specific reason not to: arguing a case under someone else's law, in their courts, is the expensive way to be right. A client may push back on this, and that is a negotiation, not a formality.

Payment

A short name for how you want to be paid, such as "Bank transfer (SEPA)" or "Wise transfer". It goes in Exhibit B.6 of the contract and as the heading of the payment block on every invoice.

The actual account the money lands in: account name, IBAN or account number, and SWIFT/BIC if the client is paying from another country. This block is printed on every invoice, so write it exactly as your bank gives it to you. Leave it empty and the invoice shows a placeholder mark instead of a blank line, which is the Console refusing to let you send an invoice nobody can pay.

A transfer from abroad usually loses money to the banks in the middle. Clause 4.5 of your contract puts that cost on the client rather than on you, and the FX reality check in the Invoices tab shows you in figures how much that clause is actually worth.

Payment links

These are optional, and they exist for one reason: an invoice a client can pay by clicking gets paid sooner than one that asks them to go and set up a bank transfer. Every link you fill in turns into its own button on every invoice you generate, and the buttons survive into the PDF you export, so they still work when the client opens the file. Fill in as many or as few as you like. The client picks whichever is easiest for them. Leave them all empty and your invoices simply show the bank details above instead.

Paste your plain PayPal.me handle, nothing after it. Each invoice then builds its own version of the link with that invoice's amount and currency already in it, so the client lands on a payment screen that is filled in rather than empty. If you paste a link that already has an amount on the end, the Console leaves it exactly as you typed it and does not touch it.

A Stripe payment link has its price fixed when you create it in Stripe, so the Console cannot change the amount and does not try. What it does instead is attach the invoice number to the payment as its reference. That is the difference between money arriving in your Stripe dashboard already matched to an invoice and money arriving as a deposit you have to identify by hand later.

Your Wise payment link is used exactly as you paste it. Unlike the two above, the Console adds nothing to it, so the client will need to enter the amount themselves on the Wise page. It is here because Wise is usually the cheapest route for a cross-border payment, which matters more on a large retainer than the extra step costs you.

Stablecoin wallet

Only fill this in if you can genuinely receive and convert what arrives. It stays hidden on every invoice until you switch on "Accept payment in a stablecoin" for that particular client in Contract Builder, so putting an address here does not offer it to anyone by itself. Clause 4.11 of the contract already places the exchange-rate risk on the client; this field is simply where they send it. Copy and paste the address out of your wallet. Typing one by hand is how funds get sent somewhere unrecoverable.

The sentence your fields are writing, live

This is the real opening line of your contract, rebuilt every time you type. Each ▮▮ mark is a field you have not filled in yet, and it prints as that same mark on the finished document, which is deliberate: the Console would rather hand you something visibly unfinished than something that quietly reads as blank. Read the sentence once. If it is not true about your business, neither is the contract.

Everything in this panel belongs to your business, not to any one client, so all your clients share it. The other side of the paperwork, the client's own name, address and fee, lives in the Clients tab.

Letterhead Shared across all clients

Upload your logo once and it appears at the top of every contract and every invoice the Console produces, including the PDFs you export. It is the difference between paperwork that looks like a business and paperwork that looks like a text file.

You do not need to resize or compress anything first. Whatever you upload is shrunk to letterhead size before it is saved, because a photo straight off a phone would otherwise fill most of the small amount of space this browser gives the Console, and there would be no room left for your clients. The image never leaves this machine; it is not uploaded to any server, because there is no server.

Storage health

The Console has no account and no server. Every client, contract, invoice and score you create is written into this one browser on this one computer, which is what makes it work offline and why nobody else can see your numbers. The trade is that nothing is backed up for you, so this panel exists to keep you honest about it.

It answers three questions. Is your work actually being saved right now, or is the browser silently refusing? How much of the small storage allowance you have is used up? And how long has it been since you last exported a copy that would survive this browser being cleared? If the first line ever turns red, stop and export a backup before doing anything else.

And that is meant literally. Open your browser's network tab while the Console is running and you will see it: this page makes no request to anything, anywhere. There is no analytics, no error reporting, no licence check, and even the typefaces are bundled in the download rather than fetched from anyone. Unplug the internet entirely and every tab still works exactly as it does now.

Backup & restore

A backup is a single .json file holding everything: every client, contract setting, invoice, audit score, logged month and drill result. It is the only copy that survives clearing your browser data, reinstalling the browser, or losing the laptop.

Export downloads that file to wherever your browser puts downloads. Do it whenever you have done work you would hate to redo, and keep the file somewhere that is itself backed up, like your cloud drive. Import reads one back in. That is also how you move your work to a second computer: export on one, import on the other. Importing replaces everything currently in the Console with the contents of the file, so the Console asks you to confirm before it does it.

The 19 documents you also bought

This app is only half of what you paid for. The other half is nineteen finished documents sitting in the same download folder, already drafted by someone who has had these arguments with clients before.

Most of them are not documents you sit down and read. They are documents this app fills in for you, which is why each row below tells you plainly which kind it is. Console generates this means you should never open the file by hand; pick the tab instead and the finished version comes out with your details in it. Console performs this means the app does the thing the document describes, so the file is there if you want the reasoning behind it. Read once means exactly that.

Who made this, and what to do if something is wrong

RetainerOS is built and sold by Munimen. It is one person, not a company with a support department, which has one advantage worth knowing about: the email below reaches the person who wrote the thing you are using.

If a document prints something odd, a figure looks wrong, or a clause does not fit how you actually work, write and say so. That is usually how the next version starts, and every update is free to everyone who has already bought it.

If you bought this and something is genuinely not right, the refund is fourteen days and no questions. Ask by email rather than through your card provider: an email is answered the same day, a payment dispute takes weeks and is decided by people who have never seen the product.

munimen.help@outlook.com Nothing in this Console ever contacts that address, or any other, by itself.

Start fresh

This deletes every client, contract setting, invoice, audit score, logged month and drill result in this browser and empties it completely, back to how it looked the first time you opened it: no clients at all, waiting for your first one.

You could delete your clients one at a time and arrive at the same empty roster. What that leaves behind is everything which does not belong to any single client: your business profile, your letterhead, your calculator settings, your pricing history and your drill scores. This button clears those too. So if you spent an afternoon clicking around with made-up numbers and now want a genuinely clean start before your first real client, this is the button rather than the delete key.

The button asks you to confirm once, and after that there is no undo. If there is anything here you might want later, export a backup from the panel above first. That file will still import perfectly afterwards, so a backup makes this button completely safe to press.

Your monthly recurring revenue, everyone added up
$0

The big number is every retainer fee on your roster added together, so it is what you earn in a normal month before anything extra. Single-campaign clients are left out of it on purpose, because a project that ends in six weeks is not recurring revenue and counting it would flatter the figure.

The three smaller numbers underneath are money that exists but has not reached you yet. Unbilled scope creep is work you have already done outside the agreed scope and never invoiced, which is usually the largest and most invisible of the three. Audit-recoverable spend is the waste you found in your clients' accounts while scoring them, which is the argument for your fee rather than income. Open invoices is what you have billed and are still waiting on.

Your streaks

Three habits do most of the work of never being paid late: chase on a schedule, warn before the due date rather than after it, and bill the extra work instead of absorbing it. These counters exist because habits are easier to keep when something is counting.

Nothing here is self-reported and there is no button to mark something done. Each streak is worked out from what is actually recorded in the Console: real invoices marked paid, real pre-due checks marked sent, real scope-creep entries billed. That means you cannot flatter these numbers, which is the only thing that makes them worth looking at.

Your roster, and which client needs you today

One row per client, with the five things worth knowing about each of them side by side. Click any row to make that client the active one, which switches every other tab to them.

The stars are a risk meter, and more stars means more risk, not more reward. Three things push a client up it: how many days since you last logged contact with them, how late their unpaid invoice has become, and how much work you have done for them off-scope without billing it. Hover over the stars to see which of the three is driving that particular client's score. The point is that a client rarely goes bad suddenly; they go quiet, then they go slow on an invoice, then they start asking for extras. This shows you that happening while it is still fixable.

Each client is scored out of 100 and the score becomes stars. Three things add to it, and nothing else does. Silence: nothing for the first week, then 15 points at eight days, 30 at fifteen, 40 at twenty-two. An unpaid invoice: 10 points for each stage it has escalated through, so 40 once it reaches the final notice. Unbilled extras: 5 points for one or two, 10 for three or four, 20 for five or more. Nought to nine points is no stars, then a star roughly every twenty points, and five stars needs almost all of it at once.

So a brand-new client shows five faint green stars and that is correct rather than broken: you have just spoken to them, they owe you nothing, and they have asked for nothing extra. Hover any meter to see that client's own arithmetic.

The last two columns come from other tabs, so they stay empty until you use those tabs. Unbilled scope creep is filled from the Scope Creep Ledger, and Audit waste found is filled from the Audit Score.

ClientRiskMRRInvoice statusUnbilled scope creepAudit waste found

Active client: who they are

In the Setup tab you filled in your side of the paperwork. This is the other side. Everything here belongs to one client only, the one currently chosen in the switcher at the very top of the page, so check that name before you start typing. If you have five clients, you fill this panel in five times, once each.

Under each field below you will find exactly which document it lands in and what it does there. None of it is guesswork or admin for its own sake. If a field is not printed anywhere, it says so.

Press that button on any day you actually speak to or write to this client. It does one thing: it resets their risk meter back to full health. Clients go quiet slowly and you rarely notice, so the Console counts the days for you and starts flagging them once a fortnight has passed with no contact logged. Nothing is sent, and the client never sees this.

Legal identity

These five fields become the second half of the contract's opening sentence, the part after "AND:". They exist so the agreement names a real, identifiable legal entity. A contract signed against a brand name that is not a registered company is a contract you may struggle to enforce, so ask them for these details rather than guessing from their website.

Their registered company name, not their trading name or brand. "Northwind Outdoor LLC", not "Northwind". It appears in the contract's opening line, on the "Bill to" block of every invoice, and at the top of every proposal and report you send them. It is also the name you will see for them everywhere in this app.

The contract reads "a [entity type] registered in [country]", exactly as it does for you in Setup. Country also matters commercially: a client abroad is why Clause 4.5 puts the bank charges on them, and why the Wise link on your invoice is worth having.

Ask for both and print what they give you. Their VAT ID is the one that matters on the invoice: Article 226(4) requires it whenever the customer is the one accounting for the VAT, which is exactly what happens when you invoice a business in another EU country. Without it on the invoice, the reverse charge is not valid and the invoice can come back.

Their company or VAT number. Ask for it rather than looking it up, because asking also tells you whether the person you are dealing with actually has the authority to sign. If they cannot produce one, that is worth knowing before you start work, not after.

Their registered business address. It closes the contract's opening sentence as their "principal place of business", and it prints in the "Bill to" block of every invoice, which is often what their finance team needs before they will process a payment at all.

Who you actually deal with

A company does not read your email; a person does. These four fields decide who gets addressed, who gets chased, and who is allowed to say yes. Getting the last one wrong is the most common way a freelancer ends up doing unpaid work.

The address that pays you. This is doing three jobs at once, which is why it matters more than it looks. Clause 4.4 of the contract commits you to issuing invoices to this exact address. Exhibit B is where formal notices to the client are sent. And every one of the five chasing emails in the Invoices tab is addressed here automatically. Leave it empty and the Console falls back to the approver's email below, which usually means your invoice lands with someone who cannot pay it.

First name only. This is the name the Console puts in the greeting at the top of anything it writes to them: your Retainer Proposal, your Audit Proposal, an early termination letter, and every one of the five payment reminders. Put a full name here and they all open with "Hi Sarah Chen", which reads like a form letter from a bank rather than a message from someone they hired.

Contact role is used in exactly one place, the signature block at the end of the Retainer Proposal, where it prints under "Title". It is there so the signed page records what the person who signed it actually was.

The one person who is allowed to approve work and sign things. Often the same person as your contact, and often not. Write down whoever agreed on the call to be the decision-maker, because the contract asks the client to nominate a single approver and then holds them to it: if that person does not answer within the agreed window, the delay becomes theirs rather than yours.

This name and email print in Exhibit B of the contract as the nominated approver, in the "Attn:" line of every invoice, and in the signature block of the Retainer Proposal. That is the whole point of naming them: when three people are on the thread and none of them will approve the creative, you have a document saying who was supposed to.

Your own memory, not theirs. This text appears in no document, no invoice, no proposal and no export you would ever send. Use it for the things you would forget by the next call: who really decides, what annoys them, what they said their budget ceiling was.

Where all of this ends up

You are typing into one panel, but it is not just this tab. What you enter here, together with the terms you set in Contract Builder, is what the rest of the app runs on. The Contract Builder writes their agreement from it. Every invoice takes its "Bill to" block from it. The Chase Queue addresses its emails from it. The Audit Score, the Scope Creep Ledger and the Performance ledger all keep their records against it.

Every one of those follows the switcher at the top of the page. Change the active client there and all nine tabs change with it. This is worth knowing before you wonder why a number moved: nothing here is global except your own details in Setup.

The two buttons on each roster row

Clone copies this client's contract terms, meaning the notice period, the late fee, the revision rounds, the AI clause switches and everything else you tuned in Contract Builder, into a brand-new client. It deliberately leaves out the money and the dates, so no fee, ad-spend band or effective date carries across and you cannot accidentally invoice a new client at the old one's price. It is for when your second client gets the same deal shape as your first, which is most of the time.

× deletes. It takes their invoices, contract terms, audit checklist, scope-creep log and logged months with them. You get one "Undo" on the toast that appears, and once that toast goes, it is gone. You may delete every client if you want to; an empty roster is a perfectly valid state and the Console will simply invite you to create your first one again. What deleting clients does not touch is anything that belongs to no client in particular: your own profile, your letterhead, your calculator settings and your pricing history. If it is a genuinely clean slate you are after, use "Start fresh" in the Setup tab instead. And export a backup now and then if you want a safety net that lasts longer than a few seconds.

Step 1. What it actually costs to be you for a year

Everything below is one year of costs, and the total is the number the whole tab is built on. Most freelancers price by looking at what other people charge. That is guessing. This works the other way round: it finds the number below which you are losing money, and then never lets you quote under it.

Fill these in honestly rather than optimistically. Every figure you shave off here comes back as a floor that is too low, which is how people end up working eighty-hour weeks and still feeling behind. If you are unsure of a number, guess high.

$

What you need to take home in a year to live: rent or mortgage, food, bills, everything. This is money in your pocket after tax, not what you invoice. Work it out from what you actually spend, not from what you would like to earn.

%

Roughly what percentage of your gross income goes to income tax and social contributions where you live. Your accountant knows the real figure. The Console uses it to work backwards from the take-home number above to what you must actually bill.

$

Ad tools, design, hosting, AI, storage: every subscription that keeps the business running.

$

Laptop or phone cost, spread across roughly 3 years.

$

Internet, mobile, electricity, and a desk or coworking membership if you pay for one. If you work from home, include the share of your bills the work is responsible for. These are small individually and add up to real money across a year.

$

Professional indemnity insurance, your accountant, any legal advice, and the fees your bank takes. If you are paid from abroad, the currency conversion losses belong here too, because they are a genuine cost of doing business this way.

$

Courses, communities, conferences. Staying sharp costs money too.

%

Buffer for a bad month. The kit's worked example uses 10%.

Step 2. How many hours you can honestly sell

You cannot sell every hour you work. Sales calls, admin, invoicing, learning and the hour lost to a platform outage are all real work that nobody pays you for directly. This step works out how many hours a year you can actually put on an invoice, because your yearly cost has to be recovered across those hours and no others.

Then it adds margin on top. Margin is not greed: it is what lets your business absorb a bad month, replace a laptop, or survive a client leaving without you taking the first bad deal that appears.

52 minus holiday, sickness and buffer. The kit's worked example uses 44.

Your real working hours, not an aspirational number.

%

Of the hours you work, what share can you actually put on a client invoice? Sales calls, admin, invoicing and your own learning are all real work that nobody pays you for directly. Working alone, 55 to 65 percent is realistic, and almost nobody holds above 65 for long. If you typed 80, you have not counted your own sales and admin, and the result will be a floor price too low to live on.

%

Without margin your business can't absorb a bad month, invest, or survive a client leaving. Add 25–40%.

How many hours you think this particular client will really take each month, including the calls and the emails, not just the work in the ad account. This is the number that turns an hourly rate into a monthly retainer, and it is also what decides how many clients you can hold at once.

Step 3. Your ceiling, and where in the band to sit

The first two steps found the lowest price you can survive on. This one finds the highest price you can defend, which is set by what the work is worth to the buyer rather than by what it costs you. Between those two numbers is your band, and the last slider decides where inside it you actually quote.

The target income figure does something separate and worth noticing: combined with your capacity it tells you whether the income you want is even reachable at the price you are charging. That answer is often uncomfortable and always useful.

$

What you want to earn across the whole year, before tax. This does not change your price. What it does is tell you the average retainer you would need across your realistic client count in order to get there, which is how you find out whether the income you want is actually reachable at the prices you are charging.

$

How much this client spends on ads each month. The Console uses it to look up what the industry typically charges at that spend level, purely as a sanity check on your own number. Never quote a fee to a client as a percentage of their ad spend, even if you used one to get there. It hands them an obvious objection, it invites an argument about the percentage instead of the value, and it makes you look like you earn more when they waste more.

$

Your honest estimate of the extra profit this client gets each month because you are running their ads rather than nobody. Extra revenue at their margin, or the waste you stop, or both. This is the strongest argument you have for a higher fee, because a price is easy to argue with and a return is not. Leave it at zero if you genuinely do not know yet.

%

This slider is the actual decision. Drag it to the left and you quote near your floor; drag it right and you quote near your ceiling. Near the floor is for when you have no case studies yet or you are entering a new niche, and you should write down the date you will raise it before you quote. The middle is where most work belongs: you have proof, the client is a normal fit, and you want a long relationship without friction. Near the ceiling is for urgency, difficulty, unusual demands like weekend availability or exclusivity, or a client with many stakeholders. Difficulty is a thing you are allowed to charge for.

Your floor, your ceiling, and the number in between

Everything you typed on the left arrives here. The floor is the lowest price at which this client is still worth taking. The ceiling is the highest price you could defend if they asked you to justify it. Quote anywhere between the two, and never below the floor, not for a friend, not for exposure, not for a logo. Below your floor you are paying for the privilege of working.

The letters in square brackets are not decoration. They match the steps in the Retainer Calculator document that came with your kit, so if you want to see the reasoning behind any line, open document 09 and find the same letter. Nothing here is a black box: every figure is arithmetic on numbers you entered, and the panel underneath shows which of the three ceiling references won and why.

The floor line marked [E] is not just displayed here, it is enforced everywhere a price gets set. The three proposal tiers below are checked against it and any that fall under are marked. The monthly retainer box in Contract Builder warns you as you type if you go below it. And the walk-away number you write before a closing call is compared against it, so you cannot commit in a calm moment to a price you would never accept in a tense one. Change any assumption on the left and all of those move with it, because they are all reading this same number.

How the ceiling was picked

Close-rate ceiling check 2026 method

The ceiling above is built from formulas, which makes it a reasonable starting point and nothing more. What people actually say yes to is better evidence than any formula, so this panel watches your real results instead.

Log every price you send a prospect, whether you won it or lost it. Losing ones matter most: a log of only your wins tells you nothing. Once there are a few in here, the win rate tells you something a formula cannot. If almost everyone says yes, you are priced too low and leaving money behind. If almost nobody does, and you are below 30 percent, the problem is usually not the price at all but how the offer was presented. Somewhere between 30 and 40 percent is where both sides feel they made a fair trade, and it is the range to aim at.

The three prices you put in the proposal

Never send one price. A single number is a yes-or-no question, and half the time the answer is no. Three prices quietly change what the client is deciding: instead of asking whether to hire you, they start choosing which version of you to hire.

Growth is your number, the one the slider produced, and it is the one you want them to take. Foundation sits below it to give a smaller yes somewhere to land instead of walking away. Scale sits above it so Growth looks like the sensible middle rather than the expensive option, and occasionally somebody takes it. All three move together the moment you change anything on the left.

Watch for a tier turning orange. Foundation is sixty per cent of the recommended price, so if you drag the band slider low enough it lands underneath your own floor, and a card marked below your floor is a price that would cost you money to accept. The Console checks all three against the floor it calculated for you and marks any that fall under it, because these are the numbers people copy straight into a proposal without looking back up the page.

Pricing rationale (copy for a proposal email)

What their account is wasting every month

This tab is where the money in your proposal comes from. You work through a checklist of thirty-two things, mark what is broken, put a monthly cost against each one, and the total becomes the single number your whole price argument rests on. Nobody argues with "I charge $3,000 a month" as easily as they argue with it when the sentence before it was "you are currently losing $6,400 a month."

Be careful what this number means, because your client will read it closely. It is an estimate of spend that is currently producing nothing, worked out from their own account history. It is not a promise of extra revenue. Fixing these things should make the same budget work considerably harder, but recovering waste and generating growth are different exercises, and the report you generate says so in writing directly underneath the figure. That sentence is what protects you from the client who reads "$6,400 recoverable" and remembers "you promised me $6,400".

You do not need to copy anything by hand. Everything on this tab is already written into the Audit Findings Report and the Retainer Proposal when you generate them, so the first button is the one you normally want. The two copy buttons exist only for when you want a single line to drop into an email.

One rule matters more than any other here: be conservative with every cost you enter. A number the client can poke a hole in does not just lose you that number, it makes them doubt every other figure in a document you want them to trust. If you are torn between two estimates, use the smaller one. A defensible $4,000 beats an arguable $9,000 every time.

Your three biggest findings, most expensive first

These are ordered by what they cost, never by the order you happened to find them and never grouped by category. That is deliberate and it is the single most important formatting decision in the report. Attention is highest on the first thing a client reads, so your most expensive finding has to be there. Grouping by category instead buries your best finding on page nine, where nobody reaches it.

The 32 checks

Work down this list with their ad account open and mark what you actually looked at. All thirty-two rows get published in the appendix of the report, including the ones that passed and the ones you skipped, and that is the entire point. A findings section on its own is an opinion. A findings section with the full log sitting behind it is a method, and nothing in it can look cherry-picked because the client can see everything you examined.

How to mark each row

Pass means you checked it and it is fine. Partial means it half works, or works for some campaigns and not others. Fail means it is broken. N/A means you looked and the check genuinely does not apply to this account, which is a real decision and counts as assessed, unlike leaving a row untouched.

Choosing Fail or Partial reveals two extra controls on that row. The first is the monthly cost, in whole currency, of the problem you just found: your honest estimate of what this one issue wastes every month. The second is how confident you are in that number, and it is worth using properly. Pick High when you measured it directly from their data, Medium when you modelled or inferred it, and Low when it is an informed guess. The report publishes a conservative total made only of your high-confidence findings alongside the full one, so a client who challenges your headline number gets a smaller figure you can defend line by line rather than a retreat.

Leave a row untouched if you did not check it. Untouched rows count toward neither your score nor your total, and the report prints them as not assessed rather than pretending otherwise.

Those four figures are the answer to "what does this contract actually do for me". The protection score compares each setting you have chosen against the safest version the kit ships with, so 100 means you have not weakened anything and a lower number tells you exactly which clause you softened. Open the details line underneath to see each one and what it cost you. The liability figure is the real maximum you could ever be ordered to pay this client, worked out from your own fee, which is usually far smaller than people fear. The locked-in figure is what they owe you the moment they sign, because the initial term cannot be cancelled for convenience. The length is the document as it stands right now, so you can see a clause being added or removed as you switch things on and off.

Type & clauses

This is the shape of your relationship with this client, and it is the most consequential choice on the page. Monthly retainer means ongoing work with no end date, and it produces the Master Services Agreement. Single campaign means one project that finishes, and it produces the Addendum instead, which is a shorter document built around milestones rather than a monthly fee. The choice also decides whether this client counts toward your recurring revenue, how the first ninety days are scheduled, and which invoice buttons you get. Leave it set correctly and it stays put even while you draft one of the other documents below.

The day the agreement starts running, which is normally the day you both sign it. It is not cosmetic: the initial term is counted from here, the ninety-day calendar underneath is built from here, and it prints into the opening line of the contract. Leave it empty and that line shows a ▮▮ mark instead.

The kit ships with an explanation attached to the clauses that matter most, saying why the wording is what it is and where clients usually push back. Ticked, those explanations appear as amber boxes inside the document below so you can read them in context. They are written for you and not for your client, so untick this before you export anything you are actually sending.

You won't work with their competitors. A real concession, so charge 30–50% more for it.

You pay their ad spend yourself upfront. Real financial risk: avoid unless you're specifically set up for it.

Lets you show this client's name and work in your portfolio.

Client can pay you in a stablecoin. Only turn this on if you can actually hold and convert what lands.

No separate MSA exists, so this Addendum has to carry the full legal weight on its own.

AI & automation

This is the part of the agreement that changed most recently, and the part most freelance contracts still do not mention at all. Article 50 of the EU AI Act came into force on 2 August 2026. It binds whoever deploys an AI system, and a freelancer publishing AI-made creative on a client's behalf is one of those, with penalties reaching €15m or 3% of worldwide turnover. Separately, Meta has required AI disclosure on ads since March 2026, and undisclosed AI content is now a routine rejection reason. The five controls below decide what your contract says about all of it, and whether responsibility is allocated in writing or left for each side to assume the other handled it.

Printed into Clause 14.7, which turns "we select tools reputably" from a vague promise into something a client can hold you to. Say when you add a materially different kind of tool.

Meta and Google both run features that change your creative after you upload it: rewriting headlines, extending backgrounds, generating new variants. They are on by default, which means the ad your client approved is frequently not the ad that ran. Turn this on and the contract acknowledges that openly, treats the variants as part of what you deliver, and says you are not liable for a version you never saw. Turn it off and the contract commits you to disabling those features wherever the platform allows, and has the client agree in writing that delivery may drop as a result. That written acknowledgement is the whole point: without it, the drop becomes your fault at the next review.

This promises that you will not paste their confidential data, customer lists or performance figures into a free or consumer-tier AI tool, and that you will use business or enterprise tiers whose terms exclude your input from training. Any client with a legal department will ask for this eventually. Offering it first means the negotiation happens on your document rather than theirs, it costs you nothing if you already pay for business-tier tools, and it makes you look like someone who has thought about this before being asked.

These are two different things and the law treats them differently. A digital replica is an AI-made likeness of a real, identifiable person, and using one needs that person’s documented consent covering the specific use. A synthetic performer is a person who does not exist, and using one needs disclosure: New York has required exactly that since 9 June 2026 for any advertising reaching consumers in that state, no matter where the advertiser is based. Switching this on writes those permissions and conditions into the contract. Leave it off and the contract simply forbids both without your client’s prior written agreement.

This commits you to telling the client, before anything is published, which parts of a deliverable were made or materially changed by an AI tool and which tools you used. It is separate from any label the platform or a regulator requires. Worth knowing: the Subcontractor Agreement in this same kit already demands exactly this disclosure from anyone working under you. Leaving this off means asking more honesty of your subcontractor than of yourself, which is visible to anyone who reads both documents.

What you have given away, and what it is worth

Every switch and number above has a default that the kit considers safe. Whenever you move one in the client's favour, whether that is agreeing not to work with their competitors, accepting a longer wait to be paid, or turning off a protection, this panel notices and tells you what you just conceded.

It is not a warning that you did something wrong. Concessions are normal and often worth making. The point is that they should be traded rather than given away, and that you should know their price before the call rather than after it. Where a concession has a defensible premium attached, a button appears that raises this client's fee by that percentage in one click. It writes the new figure straight into the Monthly retainer box in the Money section below, or into the project fee if this is a single campaign, so the contract and every invoice after it carry the new number without you retyping anything.

If nothing is listed here, you are on the kit's defaults and have conceded nothing.

Term & termination

Everything is invoiced in this currency, and Clause 4.6 makes an overdue invoice accrue interest at this monthly rate, capped at whatever the law where you are allows if that is lower. The rate is a deterrent rather than an income stream: its job is to make paying you on time cheaper than paying you late. Clause 4.5 also puts every bank charge, transfer fee, intermediary fee and conversion loss on the client, so what you invoice is what should reach your account.

Commitment

Two different things, and both matter. The initial term is how long the client is committed for at the start, and during it they cannot cancel just because they changed their mind: Clause 3.4 says that if they try, the rest of the term becomes payable immediately. The notice period is what applies afterwards, and Clause 3.3 keeps your fee payable for the whole of it whether or not they keep using you. Three months and thirty days is the kit default because paid media genuinely needs about that long to show whether it is working, and a shorter term mostly guarantees you get judged on the worst month.

How many days past its due date an unpaid invoice can sit before Clause 3.6 lets you stop working. Worth understanding: pausing is not the same as cancelling. Your fees keep accruing while the work is paused, and you carry no liability for what happens to their campaigns during it. This is the clause that stops a non-paying client quietly receiving free work for a month while you keep hoping.

Price adjustment

A flat administrative charge you are allowed to add for each reminder you send after the second one, on top of the interest above. It exists because chasing is real work and unpaid invoices cost you time as well as cash flow. Clause 4.6 makes it enforceable, and it is usually more effective than the interest, because a fixed charge is easier for a finance team to understand and to want to avoid.

Clause 4.9 lets you raise the fee once in any twelve-month period, provided you give this much written notice. The cap is the other half of the deal: if your increase is bigger than this percentage, the client gets the right to end the agreement instead of accepting it. That is not a weakness, it is what makes the whole clause acceptable to sign in the first place. Without a cap, most clients strike the annual increase entirely.

Your fee assumes a certain level of ad spend, written into Exhibit B. If their spend climbs more than this percentage above that band and stays there for two months running, Clause 4.10 gives you the right to reopen the fee. This is the clause that stops the most common quiet loss in this business: the client triples their budget, the work triples with it, and the retainer never moves because nobody wrote down when it should.

Client responsiveness

How many working days the client gets to send you what you asked for or approve what you sent. It does two jobs. Clause 9.2 means that once this window passes, the delay is theirs: your timelines extend and your fee stays payable in full. Clause 9.3 lets you either treat a silent request as approved and carry on, or hold the work, as long as you tell them in writing which you chose. Three days is the kit default and it is deliberately short, because ambiguity about whose fault a delay was is where most engagements sour.

Legal protections

Two protections that outlive the engagement. Confidentiality under Clause 12.4 keeps running for this many years after you stop working together, which matters because you will have seen their margins, their customer data and their strategy. Non-solicitation under Clause 17.1 stops either side hiring the other's people for this many months after the end. It is mutual, which is what makes it fair to ask for, and it protects you as much as them if you ever bring in a subcontractor.

Force majeure covers the things neither of you can control: a disaster, a war, a government action, a platform changing its policy. Clause 19.1 excuses both sides while it lasts, and once it has run longer than this many days either of you can walk away rather than being trapped indefinitely. The dispute period under Clause 20.11 is the cooling-off requirement: before anyone can start legal proceedings, you both have to actually try to sort it out by talking, for this many days, followed by mediation if either side asks. Most disputes die in that window, which is exactly the point.

The exact window this campaign runs. Nothing is owed to either side outside it.

Money

Invoice due is your payment terms: Clause 4.4 makes an invoice payable within this many days of being issued. Short is normal here, and seven days is the kit default, because a retainer is paid in advance for work you are about to do rather than in arrears for work already finished.

Liability cap is the ceiling on what you could ever be ordered to pay this client if something went badly wrong, written as a number of months of fees they actually paid you. Clause 16.4 keeps their ad spend out of that calculation entirely, which matters enormously: without it, a client running large budgets through the account could argue your exposure is their whole spend rather than your fee. Three to six months is normal. If a client pushes for more, ask what specific risk they are pricing, because a higher cap costs you real money and buys them very little.

Anything the client asks for that is not listed in Exhibit A is chargeable, and this is the rate. Set it higher than your effective retainer hourly rate, because out-of-scope work interrupts planned work and interruption has a cost. The rush multiplier applies when they want something delivered inside 48 hours, and it is not a penalty: it is what compensates you for reshuffling everything else. Both numbers print into Exhibit B, so they are agreed in advance rather than negotiated in the moment when you have the least leverage.

The onboarding fee is a one-off charge for the setup work that happens before any campaign runs: auditing, restructuring, fixing tracking. Clause 4.3 makes it due on signature, before work begins, which is the point. It covers the most labour-intensive month of the whole engagement, and it makes the client’s commitment real.

The monthly retainer is the recurring fee, and Clause 4.2 makes it payable in advance, on or before the first of each month, with that month’s work not starting until the money has cleared. Both figures appear in Exhibit B and on every invoice. If you are not sure what to put here, the Pricing Calculator tab works it out from your real costs.

The Console watches this box as you type it. If the figure you enter falls below the floor the Pricing Calculator worked out from your own costs, a warning appears here immediately, saying how far below and what the floor was built from. It does not stop you, because there are legitimate reasons to take a client under your floor and only you know them. It just refuses to let it happen quietly, which is how it usually happens.

The monthly ad-spend range your fee was priced for, written into Exhibit B so it is on the record rather than in your memory. It is not a limit on what they are allowed to spend. It is the reference point that makes the renegotiation clause work: Clause 4.10 only lets you reopen the fee if their spend climbs above this band, so a band left at zero gives you nothing to point at when the work doubles.

Meta and Google routinely spend slightly more than the daily budget you set, then correct themselves later. That is how their pacing works, and no media buyer can prevent it. Clause 5.4 says variance up to this percentage is normal and is not a breach of the agreement. Without that line, a client who spotted a 3% overspend on a single day would have a contractual complaint about something entirely outside your control.

Your total fee, split automatically into 50/30/20 milestones, and the total ad spend for the window, funded directly by the client.

Hourly rate for any change to the agreed scope after signature.

Milestones (50 / 30 / 20) are computed automatically from the project fee.

Scope

The platforms this agreement covers, and nothing else. This list becomes Exhibit A.1, and Exhibit A.6 explicitly puts everything not named here outside the scope. That is deliberate: when the client asks in month three whether you could also run TikTok, the answer is a change order and a new fee, rather than an assumption that you would absorb it.

Revision rounds is how many rounds of feedback are included per deliverable before further changes become billable. Clause 10.1 defines a round as one consolidated set of feedback delivered at one time, and Clause 10.2 is the one that protects you: feedback arriving piecemeal, in three messages across two days, counts as three rounds. That sentence is what stops the client who never quite finishes commenting.

Your hours budget is a different kind of number and worth being clear about. It is not in the contract at all and the client never sees it, because Exhibit A promises deliverables rather than hours. It is your own private estimate of how long this client should take each month, and its only job is to feed the utilisation tracker in the Scope Creep tab, so that quiet overrun shows up as a number before it becomes a habit.

The ceiling on how many campaigns run at the same time, and how many new ad variations you will test each month. Both print into Exhibit A.2 as part of what you are committing to deliver. Numbers here are a promise in both directions: they tell the client exactly what they are getting, and they tell you where the line is when a request would push you past it.

How much creative is included each month. Exhibit A.3 spells out that video edits are made from footage the client supplies, and that original video production, photography and sourcing user-generated content are not included unless you add them. That distinction prevents the most expensive misunderstanding in creative work, which is a client assuming a shoot is part of the retainer.

How many headline and body-copy variations you write for each creative concept, which also goes into Exhibit A.3. It is the cheapest testing available to you, since the same image with four different angles of copy often beats four new images, so this is usually a number worth being generous with.

Reporting & communication

How often the client gets a written performance report, and how many working days after the period ends it is due. Both become Clause 11.1, which is a promise you have made in writing. Note that it counts business days, not calendar days, and the Console counts them the same way. The reporting panel further down this tab is the only thing that checks whether the month that just closed was actually reported on, because this is the promise freelancers break most often and notice least.

Review call is the call included in each reporting period, capped at this length by Clause 11.2. Capping it is not meanness: an uncapped review call quietly becomes a strategy session you are not being paid for. Extra calls are chargeable as Additional Work under Clause 11.3.

Response time is how quickly you commit to replying to messages, and it prints into Exhibit A.5. Be honest here rather than impressive. One business day is a real commitment you can keep; promising same-day turns every unanswered evening message into a small breach of your own contract.

Conversion API or server-side setup is genuine technical work, so Exhibit A.4 records whether it is included or not. Marking it not included does not lose you the work: it makes it a separate, chargeable project rather than something the client assumed came free.

Working hours is the window the response time runs inside, and without it the promise has no edges: "within one business day" with no hours attached is a message at 23:40 on Friday that is late by Saturday lunchtime. It prints into Exhibit A.5 beside the response time.

Communication channel is where day-to-day messages happen, and it prints into Exhibit A.5. Naming one channel is what stops an engagement leaking into four at once: email, plus Slack, plus WhatsApp, plus comments on a shared document, with no record anywhere of what was actually agreed.

Internal name for this project. Appears throughout the Addendum.

One sentence: what this campaign is actually trying to achieve.

How long the client has to supply assets before delays become theirs, not yours, and when you can close the file and invoice what's left if they go dark.

How long you keep the campaign files after the end date before they can be deleted.

Document details

Section 2's whole table, including the Baseline column, is built from the Performance tab. What follows is the judgement, which is what the client is paying a person rather than a tool for. Leave any of it empty and the export will warn you before it prints blank.

Leave blank to report on the most recent month logged in the Performance tab.

One sentence. If the client reads nothing else, this is the thing they read.

One line saying how far these figures can be trusted. If there is a gap, name it yourself: a caveat you raise costs you nothing, and the same caveat found by the client costs you the whole report.

Name the thing that could go wrong before it does. This is the section that buys you credibility for the month it actually goes wrong.

Only appears in the report if you write something here. Use it for anything the client should not be surprised by later: a price change, a holiday you are taking, a platform outage that affected the month.

The baseline table, all thirty-two check results, the ranked findings and the recoverable-spend arithmetic come straight from the Performance and Audit Score tabs. These are the parts that require an opinion.

The single most important paragraph. Name the root cause, not the symptom, and say plainly whether it is fixable.

One sentence, and only one. The single highest impact-to-effort action. A client who reads nothing else reads this line, so it has to survive being the only thing they remember.

What must be protected while the fixes happen. Every audit creates the risk that somebody enthusiastically rebuilds the one thing that was working, and this is the sentence that stops it.

Section 5: the thirty-day plan

Performance usually dips after a tracking fix, because the algorithm is retraining. Saying so before it happens turns a panicked call on day five into a reference back to a paragraph they already read.

Name the limits of your own recommendations before the client finds them. It is also where the next engagement usually comes from.

Section 8: what you are offering

The report offers two routes: a fixed-fee sprint to execute the thirty-day plan, or the retainer. Offering only the retainer loses the buyer who wants the fix without the commitment.

Section 7: method and limitations

Section 4.1 of the proposal commits to a length. Every other number in that document is yours to set, and this one was not: it printed the default and could not be changed.

Section 7.4 tells the client the raw checks travel with the report, so any figure in it can be verified independently or the audit repeated later. Name the file you are actually attaching.

Stating what you could not verify is what makes everything you did verify credible. Never leave this blank to look more certain.

Sections 3, 4, 5, 7 and 11 build themselves from the Audit Score tab, the Pricing Calculator and your Exhibit A scope fields. What follows is only the part no tool can compute: the client's own words.

Completes the sentence "everything here is drawn from what you told me and from what I saw in ___".

Section 2: their words, not yours

The source document is blunt about this: Section 2 is the section that wins the deal and the one most people skip. Write it verbatim from your call notes, including their idioms. "Struggling with lead quality" is worthless. "You said the sales team is spending half its week calling people who thought they were entering a giveaway" is a signed contract.

Three to five sentences on their business, spend, channels and results, in their phrasing and with their product names.

Each line becomes its own bullet. State each problem the way they stated it.

Their stated goal, with their number and their timeframe.

A hire they cannot make, a target they committed to, a launch, a runway. This is the sentence that makes the price feel small.

Section 6.4: the honest version

The difficult conversation, put in writing in advance and on your own terms. The source document calls this your insurance policy and says not to soften it.

Section 7: the recommendation

Completes "Recommended for you: GROWTH, because ___". It has to be honest: overselling a tier they churn out of in month two costs more than the difference. The three prices come live from the Pricing Calculator.

Section 8: why you

Specific, not adjectival. If you have no case studies yet, do not invent them: say you are deliberately taking few clients so each gets senior attention, and that the person they spoke to is the person doing the work. That is true, and buyers respond to it.

The day the NDA starts, and how many years each side must keep the other's information confidential after it is shared. This runs on its own clock, separate from the confidentiality period in your main contract, because an NDA is usually signed before there is a contract at all.

A unique reference for this change (e.g. "CO-01", "CO-02") and the date it's issued.

Plain description of the extra work, in the client's own words if possible.

Point at the exact clause or Exhibit A line that this request falls outside of. This is what makes the extra fee defensible later.

The concrete deliverables for this change, one per line.

The hours you think this change will take, and your standard rate for work outside the agreed scope. The Console multiplies the two for the estimated total the client signs off.

Who on the client side asked for this, and when.

Whether this pushes back any deliverable already committed elsewhere.

The date this letter is sent, and the date you and the client actually agreed to end things.

Whether the client is paying the full remaining balance under Clause 3.3/3.4, or you've agreed a reduced settlement to end things now. This flips which paragraph of Section 2 the letter prints.

Only used when Outcome above is set to negotiated settlement.

Only used when Outcome above is set to full enforcement.

How long after payment the Account Access & Handover Agreement's transfer steps must be completed.

One genuine, specific sentence about the work you did together. This is a real relationship ending, and people remember how it was ended. A form letter closes the door harder than it needs to.

One asset per line, with six columns separated by the | character: the asset, the platform it lives on, its identifier or ID, who owns it, how access is granted, and what happens to it when the engagement ends. The Owner column is the one that decides, because Clause 2.2 makes it govern ownership for every purpose under this agreement and under the MSA. The Access route column is where Clause 3.2 expects the words Provider-hosted (Client-owned) to appear on any asset built inside your own Business Manager.

The thirteen rows arrive with the identifier column empty, and that is deliberate rather than unfinished: nobody but the client knows their own Business Manager or ad account numbers, and a plausible-looking invented ID on a handover agreement is worse than a visible gap. Each blank one shows as ▮▮ until you fill it, which is exactly the point. The source document asks you to complete this during onboarding week rather than later, and Clause 2.1 expects you to update it in writing whenever an asset is created, transferred or retired.

How often access permissions get reviewed, and how fast either side must flag a Platform restriction, strike or security incident.

Where the source file transfer lands, and how long the Client has to confirm receipt before it's deemed accepted.

Rate for any help you agree to give after handover, and how fast personal data gets deleted afterwards.

Which platform(s) this audit actually covers, e.g. "Meta Ads" or "Meta Ads + Google Ads".

Fixed fee, paid upfront, and how many business days until the report is delivered.

If the client signs a retainer within this window of the walkthrough, the full audit fee is credited against their first invoice.

This one document is between you and a subcontractor, not between you and a client. It ignores whichever client is active and is shared across your whole business, so you fill it in once.

What the subcontractor actually does for you, and exactly which accounts they get access to. Keep the access list to the minimum the work requires: it is far easier to grant more later than to explain a breach.

How often the subcontractor invoices you (e.g. "monthly, in arrears"), and how fast you pay a correct invoice.

How long after this ends the subcontractor is barred from taking your end clients directly, and how long the general confidentiality duty runs.

The first 90 days, as a calendar

Downloads a calendar file you can drag into Google Calendar, Outlook or Apple Calendar, so the promises in this contract become reminders you will actually see. It maps out the first ninety days: when access and approvals are due from the client, when each phase should be complete, when reports are due, when the initial term ends and the renewal conversation should happen, and when to send each invoice reminder. Billing dates use your real invoices for this client if any exist, and are projected from the effective date if not.

Your reporting promise (Clause 11.1)

Clause 11.1 of the contract you just wrote promises the client a written report within a set number of business days after each month ends. It is the easiest promise in the whole agreement to break quietly, because nothing chases you for it and the client rarely mentions it until renewal. This panel is the only thing in the Console that checks whether the month that just closed has actually been reported on. Mark it when you send the report and the counter resets.

Where this client stands, in eight numbers

Everything on this tab belongs to whichever client is selected at the top of the page, so check that name before you read the numbers. These eight figures answer the question you actually care about: how much has this client been billed in total, how much of it has arrived, and how much is still sitting somewhere unpaid.

Total outstanding is the one to watch. It is money you have already earned and already delivered work for. The two received figures split it by calendar period so you can see this month against the whole year, and the paid / open / void counts tell you how many invoices sit behind those totals. Void means an invoice you cancelled, and it is excluded from every total here rather than deleted, because an invoice number that simply vanishes is exactly what makes an accountant ask questions.

How fast this client actually pays

Your contract says one thing about payment terms. This panel tells you what the client actually does, which is often a different number and always the more useful one.

It counts the days between when each invoice was due and the date you recorded it as paid, so a negative average means they pay early. That date is yours to set: the Paid on field appears the moment you tick Paid, filled in with today. If you are catching up on a month of invoices, correct it, because everything in this panel is measured from it and not from the day you happened to tick the box. It grades them from A to D on the share of invoices that arrived on time, and it shows the fastest and slowest they have ever been. All of it appears only once you have marked at least one invoice as paid, because it is measured from your real history rather than assumed.

There is one more figure worth reading properly: the interest you were entitled to charge under Clause 4.6 but never actually billed. It is not a bill and nothing is sent. It is there so you can see the running cost of a client who is quietly always two weeks late, which is a cost most freelancers absorb without ever putting a number on it.

What is still unpaid, and how late it is

Your collections list, oldest first, so nothing quietly slides past thirty days while you are busy. Each unpaid invoice is sorted into a stage based on how far past its due date it is today, and those stages match the five-email reminder sequence exactly: not yet due, then a gentle nudge, a firmer reminder, a suspension notice, and a final notice.

The stage is worked out fresh from today's date every time you open the Console, so nothing here can go stale. If an invoice has moved into a new stage, that is the Console telling you the next email in the sequence is now the one to send.

Create an invoice for this client

Which buttons appear here follows this client's engagement type, because the three kinds are not interchangeable and offering one that does not apply would only invite a wrong invoice.

Retainer appears for a monthly retainer. It bills in advance under Clause 4.2, and says so on the invoice. Milestone appears for a single campaign instead, and splits the project fee into the Addendum's own 50/30/20 schedule from Section 3.2. You will never see both, because a client has one contract or the other. Standard is always here: it is the one for anything outside the regular cycle, such as additional work you agreed to bill separately or a scope-creep entry you have decided to charge for.

Every invoice for this client

The reminder to send today

Schedule the whole chase once, then never chase again

This is the part that removes chasing from your week entirely. Pick an invoice and the Console writes all five reminder emails for it: the pre-due check that goes out before the money is even late, then four escalating messages afterwards. Each one is already filled in with the invoice number, the amount, the dates and your late-fee rate, and each one is already dated from that invoice's own due date.

You open them in your mail client and use Schedule send in Gmail, or Delay Delivery in Outlook, which are schedulers you already have and pay nothing for. Five minutes of work on the day you invoice covers the entire collection. From then on the chasing happens whether or not you feel like chasing, which is the point, because the reason freelancers get paid late is almost never that they forgot the invoice existed. It is that sending the third reminder feels rude.

Tick each one off as you schedule it. If the client pays early, the Console tells you exactly which of the scheduled emails to go back and cancel, so a chaser never lands after the money has already arrived.

Make the five emails yours

The reminders ship written, and for most people the shipped version is better than what they would write on day thirty with an unpaid invoice in front of them. But they go out of your mailbox, in a voice your client already knows, and a sentence you would never say out loud is worse than a good sentence you would. So they are yours to change.

Three things are worth knowing before you start. Anything you leave alone stays on the kit's wording, which means it keeps improving when the kit is updated rather than freezing on the day you first opened this panel. Every stage carries the reasoning behind it from the Payment Reminder Sequence, shown while you edit rather than buried in a document you would have to go and find. And the Console checks your draft before it saves: a field name it cannot fill would print a black block inside an email to a client, and it says so rather than letting you discover it afterwards.

It will also tell you when you have removed one of the specific lines that document singles out, and why that line was there. It will not stop you. Some of those sentences will not suit your market or your voice, and that is a real reason to cut them. The point is that you cut them on purpose rather than by accident.

FX reality check

When a client pays you from another country, the banks in the middle take a cut before the money reaches you, and it comes out of your invoice rather than their account. This panel turns that into a number instead of a vague worry.

The reason it happens is a setting on their end. International transfers carry an instruction about who pays the fees. SHA, which is what most banks use by default, means the sender pays their own bank and you absorb everything after that, including whatever any intermediary bank helps itself to. OUR means the sender pays the whole chain and you receive the full invoiced amount.

Enter a figure and an estimated fee percentage, or press Use active invoice to pull the real amount from the invoice you have open, and it shows you what actually lands and what the same gap costs you across a year of monthly retainers. Ask your bank what a typical inbound transfer costs you if you want the percentage to be exact rather than indicative.

How much of your month this client is eating

The ledger further down only ever records an explicit ask, which means it catches scope creep after it has already happened. This panel catches the quieter version: the ordinary in-scope work that simply takes longer every month until the client is no longer profitable and you never noticed the moment it turned.

Type the hours you have actually worked on this client this month into the box below. Nobody sees this and it is not in their contract, because Exhibit A promises deliverables rather than hours. It is measured against the hours budget you set for this client in Contract Builder, and once a full week of the month has passed it also projects where you are heading by month end.

Log something they asked for that is not in the contract

Write it the way they said it, not the way you would summarise it. "Can you just take a quick look at the landing page?" is more useful six months later than "landing page review", because the whole value of this ledger is being able to show a client their own words. This text becomes the line item if you ever bill it, so a vague entry now is an awkward invoice later.

Two ways to price it. Put in hours and the rate is multiplied by them. Leave hours at zero and the rate box becomes a flat amount for the whole job, which is usually the honest way to log something that took twenty minutes of your attention but half a day of your focus. The rate starts from the Additional Work rate on your contract.

Logging this does not bill anything and nothing is sent to the client. It creates the written record that Clause 2.3 is built around: work outside Exhibit A is not owed until both sides agree a fee in writing, and the Provider is under no obligation to accept it at all. This is where you write down what was agreed, or what you did anyway.

Is this getting worse or better?

One bar per month for the last six, oldest on the left. A single month tells you almost nothing, because every client asks for something occasionally. What matters is the shape: a client whose requests are climbing is a client whose contract is drifting away from what they are actually paying for, and that is a conversation to have at renewal rather than a resentment to carry.

Underneath, the Console compares the most recent half of that window against the earlier half and tells you plainly whether it is worsening, steady or improving.

Your argument for a higher fee at renewal

This is the panel that turns a year of small favours into a number you can actually say out loud. Once there are at least two months of history behind it, the Console works out what you have been giving away per month on average, expresses it as a percentage of what this client currently pays you, and shows you what their fee would be if you simply charged for it.

It also goes looking for the other half of the argument. If you have captured a baseline and logged at least one month in the Performance tab, it pulls in what happened to their cost per result and what that improvement is worth to them each month at their current volume. A fee increase argued on both together, more work than agreed plus better results than before, is a different conversation from one argued on either alone.

Nothing here is sent anywhere and nothing changes your fee until you choose to apply it.

What the pattern says about this client

The full record

Every request, newest first, with what it was worth and whether it was ever invoiced. Rows that have been billed are marked and cannot be deleted, because they are attached to a real invoice.

This list is the point of the whole tab. When a client asks why the fee is going up, or says that nothing extra was ever requested, this is the document that answers them, in their own words, with dates against each one.

The account as you found it

A baseline is a photograph of the account on the day you took it over, before you touched anything. It is the single most valuable thing on this tab, and it has a deadline: the moment you start fixing things, the account you inherited stops existing and cannot be reconstructed. Platform reporting windows roll off, attribution settings get changed, and a baseline pieced together three months later is a baseline the client can argue with.

It earns its keep twice. It becomes Section 2 of their Audit Findings Report, headed with the numbers as they were before any change was made. And it becomes the Baseline column of every monthly report you send them for as long as the engagement lasts, which is what turns twelve separate documents into one continuous argument that you are worth the fee. Capture nothing and those reports still generate, but the Baseline column prints as a dash, and the strongest thing you could have said about your own work is simply missing.

Write down exactly where the conversion number came from, in enough detail that someone could check it: which event, on which platform, reconciled against what. Something like "Purchase event, Meta pixel, reconciled against GA4" rather than just "purchases".

This matters more than it looks. Every number you put in front of a client eventually gets questioned by someone, often by a person above your contact who was not in any of your meetings. A conversion count that nobody can trace back to a source is a number that person can dismiss, and once one figure is dismissed the rest of the report goes with it. Naming the source in advance is what stops that conversation ever starting.

The five raw numbers

Five numbers, and only five. Everything else on this tab is calculated from them: cost per result is spend divided by conversions, ROAS is revenue divided by spend, click-through rate is clicks over impressions, cost per thousand impressions is spend over impressions, cost per click is spend over clicks, and conversion rate is conversions over clicks.

That is deliberate and it protects you. If you typed in the derived figures as well, one of them would eventually disagree with the others, and a client who spots two versions of the same number in your paperwork stops trusting all of it. This way the arithmetic is done once, the same way, everywhere. A derived figure shows a dash rather than a zero when the numbers behind it are missing, because zero would be a claim and a dash is honest.

Account structure at baseline

The five numbers above tell a client what the account produced. These five tell them how it was built, and they are what turn your findings from opinions into observations. "Your creative is stale" is an assertion. "Your newest live creative is 94 days old and you have four unique assets running" is something they can go and verify, which is exactly why it lands.

They fill the structural half of the baseline table in the Audit Findings Report, and they are what make any finding about creative fatigue or ad sets stuck in the learning phase concrete.

Log this month's numbers

Once a month, the same five numbers as the baseline, for that month only rather than running totals. This is what the Monthly Performance Report is built from: the table, the comparisons and the trend all assemble themselves from what you log here.

Pick the month first, then fill it in. You can go back and log an earlier month at any time if you are catching up, and the Console will tell you in the integrity panel if the sequence ends up with a gap in it.

What good looks like

The two numbers you and the client agreed count as success. They fill the Target column of the monthly report, and the report says plainly when a month came in under them rather than quietly leaving it out.

Leaving either at zero means no target is set, and the report simply omits that comparison rather than treating zero as a target you missed. Set them only once you have genuinely agreed them, because a target invented by you alone is a stick you have handed someone to hit you with.

Every month against the baseline

Every month you have logged, oldest first, each one measured against the baseline rather than only against the month before it. Movement is marked as good or bad according to which direction actually helps for that particular metric: a falling cost per result is a win, a rising ROAS is a win, and spend, clicks and impressions are reported without a verdict attached because more budget is not an achievement and less is not a saving.

This is the table you open on the day someone above your contact asks whether the retainer is still worth paying for. Answering that question with a year of your own recorded numbers is a completely different conversation from answering it with an opinion.

The most recent month, broken down

What your reports are allowed to claim

This panel is the honesty check that runs before you send anything. It looks at what you have actually recorded and tells you which claims your documents can and cannot support: whether there is a baseline to compare against, whether the conversion source is named, whether there are enough months to call something a trend, whether the sequence has a gap in it, and whether every month has your own commentary attached.

Nothing here blocks you from generating a report. It exists so that you know what is thin before a client does.

Your live co-pilot for the closing call

A closing call is not a pitch. By the time you dial, the audit has already done the selling, and this call exists to confirm a decision the client has largely made. The framework is explicit about the prerequisite: never run this call cold, because a call that has to do the persuading as well as the closing does neither.

What follows is that call broken into seven phases with a time budget on each, adding up to forty-five minutes. Tick each phase as you finish it so you can see where you are while talking. This client’s real findings, real prices and real numbers are already filled in below, so you are never hunting for a figure mid-sentence, which is the moment most people lose the room.

The five rules behind all eight scripts

Every script on this tab is an application of these. Learn the five and you can answer an objection the kit never wrote a script for.

  1. Answer the concern, not the sentence. Every objection has a fear underneath it. Address the sentence and you lose; address the fear and the sentence dissolves.
  2. Never move the price. Move the scope. A discount is permanent and travels to every referral they make. A scope change is reversible.
  3. Be willing to lose it. Not as a tactic. Actually. The moment you need a specific deal, you will concede terms that make it worth having, and you will resent the client for eleven months for something you did to yourself.
  4. Stop talking. After the number, after the answer, after the close. Whoever fills the silence is negotiating against themselves.
  5. Some deals should be lost. The client who grinds you on price before you have started will grind you on scope, on timelines and on invoices. Declining that work is the highest-return decision available to you, and nobody ever regrets it.

Rehearsal: practise the eight objections

You will hear the same eight objections for the rest of your career. The difference between a freelancer who holds their price and one who does not is almost never the argument itself, it is whether they had said it out loud before the day it mattered.

Press Draw an objection and one arrives with a client persona attached and a 45-second clock. Say your answer out loud, actually out loud, before the time runs out, then reveal the written script and see how close you were. Rate yourself honestly from 1 to 5 afterwards, because that rating is what the Console uses next time.

The draw is not random. Every objection carries a weight built from how often you have drilled it and how you rated yourself, so the ones you have never touched and the ones you rated badly come up far more often than the ones you already handle well. The persona shifts it further: whichever of the five clients you draw makes their own objections much more likely. It is designed to keep finding your weak spot rather than to feel fair.

Boss Round deals three in a row at 30 seconds each with no pause to check your answer in between, which is much closer to how a real call actually goes.

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Ready when you are

Press Draw an objection for one round with a 45-second clock, or Start Boss Round for three in a row at 30 seconds each, with no pause to check your answer between them.