Project Management Software for Marketing Agencies
A content calendar for eight clients at once, and the only proof anyone did the work is whether the hours got logged.
The retainer model runs on hours nobody logged
A marketing agency doesn't run one project at a time. It runs eight or ten retainers in parallel, each with its own content calendar, its own approval chain, and its own idea of what "urgent" means this week. The work is genuinely continuous, there's always another blog post, another ad set, another week of social scheduled, so there's rarely a natural pause where someone sits down and reconstructs where the last five days actually went.
That's the real cost. Not missed deadlines, though those happen too, but hours spent on a client's account that never make it into a timesheet, because the account manager was three tabs deep in a content calendar and logging time felt like admin for later. Later rarely comes. The agency ends up billing conservatively against work that genuinely happened, or discovers mid-month that a retainer is already over its scoped hours with two weeks still to run, a conversation nobody wants to have with a client who thought the fee was settled.
ShipSprint treats this as the central problem, not a footnote. Logging a day's hours takes about five seconds and sits right next to the task someone just closed, not in a separate app opened once a week. Everything else, the boards, the forecasts, the daily view, is built around keeping that habit alive across as many concurrent accounts as an agency can throw at it.
That matters more as the roster grows than most agencies expect. A three-client shop can hold the whole picture in one person's head. A twelve-client shop can't, and pretending otherwise is usually how a perfectly good account quietly turns into a bad one, weeks before anyone notices.
Built for a roster of clients, not one project
Six pieces that hold up whether an account manager is running two retainers or twelve.
Each retainer gets its own board with columns and WIP limits that match how that account actually runs, so a content-heavy client and a slow-moving strategy client aren't forced into the same rhythm. New requests land in a triage inbox instead of an account manager's messages, so nothing gets promised before it's been sized.
Logging a day's hours takes about five seconds and sits next to the task just finished, not in a Friday-afternoon timesheet nobody remembers accurately. When a day goes unlogged, the reminder goes straight to the person, not to their manager as a gap to chase down.
Delivery forecasts are calculated from the team's measured velocity as work moves through, so an account trending over its scoped hours, or a content deadline drifting, surfaces weeks early, while there's still room to have the conversation with the client rather than after the invoice is already wrong.
Everyone opens to a "my day" screen: today's items across every client they touch, a one-tap time log, and one tap to say "I'm blocked," which pulls in the right person with context already attached, instead of a message asking who owns this.
A built-in wiki keeps client brand guidelines, tone-of-voice notes and past approval decisions next to the work they affect, with page history, so nobody is working from a stale brief. Any sentence on a page can become a task.
The owner command center answers "where are we, across every client?" in one place, and a Monday digest lands without anyone assembling a status deck for the internal meeting first.
Content work doesn't spike, it just keeps coming
Unlike a single big campaign, a retainer rarely has one obvious deadline to rally around. It has fifty small ones a month, each easy to treat as not-quite-urgent until it is. That's a different failure mode from a launch that gets missed loudly, it's a slow leak of hours and attention that nobody notices until the account review.
- Per-column WIP limits stop one client's rush job from quietly eating capacity earmarked for everyone else on the roster
- A triage inbox means an "urgent" ask lands somewhere visible before it lands directly on someone's plate, unscoped
- Forecasts based on real velocity catch scope creep on a retainer while there's still budget left in the month to address it
- Leave-adjusted scorecards mean a heavy content week doesn't get compared unfavourably to a quiet one, since the record accounts for the mix rather than just counting activity
- Archived retainers keep their full history, so a client that pauses for a quarter and comes back doesn't force anyone to rebuild the board from scratch
Engineering, HR, marketing and operations each get their own templates and vocabulary on one subscription, useful for an agency running its own internal ops team alongside client delivery. ShipSprint also connects to Claude and ChatGPT, so an account lead can ask "what's overdue on the Meridian account" in plain language instead of opening five boards. Full plan details are on the pricing page, and what the product covers end to end is on the product overview.
Growing the roster without growing the chaos
The usual way an agency handles a new client is to make one person the point of contact and trust that the rest sorts itself out. That's fine for the third client. By the eighth or ninth, someone is tracking a retainer's hours in a spreadsheet only they update, and the account they're least personally attached to is quietly the one that starts slipping first.
Picking up a new retainer in ShipSprint is a template choice, not a system redesign. A new board takes the columns and WIP limits that account needs, and from day one it reports into the same owner command center and the same Monday digest as every other client, so growth doesn't mean someone has to build a new spreadsheet just to keep up with visibility.
Seasonal spikes are the other version of this problem, half the roster wants a year-end campaign in the same three weeks. Per-column WIP limits make that crunch visible as a capacity problem in November, while there's still time to hire, reprioritise or say no to one of them, rather than a string of late deliverables discovered in December.
The same applies in reverse. When a retainer ends, its board archives with full history intact, every hour logged, every approval, every brief, instead of disappearing along with whoever managed the account.
It also changes what a renewal conversation looks like. An account manager going into a renewal with accurate, five-second-logged hours has a real number for how much work a retainer actually took over the year, not a guess that's too low to justify a fee increase, or too high for the client to believe. Agencies that can show their working tend to win that conversation more often than agencies asking for trust.
Common questions
It's the reason time logging is built the way it is. Because it takes about five seconds and lives next to the task itself, hours get captured close to when the work happened, which is what makes an invoice defensible rather than reconstructed from memory at the end of the month, when nobody quite remembers whose day looked like what.
Yes. Boards, columns and WIP limits are set per board, so a design-heavy account and a copy-heavy account don't have to share a workflow that fits neither of them, while an owner still sees the whole roster from one screen and one Monday digest, rather than opening each client's tracker in turn.
Free covers up to 5 users and 2 projects, permanently. Team is ₹299 per user per month, or ₹2,899 a year, for up to 40 users, enough for most agencies running a dozen retainers. Business, at ₹599 per user per month or ₹6,499 a year, adds forecasts, scorecards and the owner command center. Every paid plan opens with a 14-day full-access trial on Business, sample project preloaded, no card required.
No. No screenshots, no keystroke logging, no activity tracking, only work outcomes: what got delivered and the hours the person themselves logged. Scorecards are leave-adjusted and visible to the person they describe, not just to their manager. More on how that's built is on the security overview.
Adding a client is a template choice, spin up a board with the columns that account needs, and it's visible in the owner command center from day one, no separate setup project required. When a retainer ends, its board archives with full history intact rather than being deleted, so past hours, approvals and decisions stay available if the client returns or a billing question comes up later.
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