Project Management Software for Marketing Agencies in Montreal

The retainer that quietly costs more than it pays

Most agencies don’t lose money on the big pitch. They lose it in the small things that never get logged: a second round of amends, a call that ran long, a “can you just resize this for Instagram” that took an afternoon. By the end of the month the retainer looks profitable on paper and nobody can say for sure whether it was.

ShipSprint puts each client on its own board, and on Team and up, logging time takes about five seconds, right beside the task someone just finished. Because the task already belongs to that client, the hours land on the right account without a spreadsheet in between. Timesheets collect the week per person, and a reminder about a missing day goes to that person, not to the studio manager.

When the numbers are real, the conversation with a client changes. Instead of absorbing another round of changes, an account lead can show what the last three rounds cost and talk about scope.

Briefs that arrive from everywhere

New work reaches an agency through email threads, chat, a call with the client’s marketing director and the occasional comment on a shared deck. ShipSprint’s triage inbox gives all of it one place to land. Someone decides whether it’s in scope, which client it belongs to and who has room, before it hits a designer’s day.

Per-column WIP limits on each client board stop one demanding account from eating the studio’s whole week while a quieter retainer slips. If you deliver campaigns in both French and English, each language version can be its own card with its own owner and review step, so one doesn’t ship while the other is still waiting on copy.

The built-in wiki holds each client’s brand notes and the decisions behind a campaign, with page history, and any sentence can become a task. When the client asks in October why the spring campaign used a particular tagline, the answer is still there.

Using ShipSprint from Montreal: four things to settle first

Who you’re buying from. The vendor is Quantuva Technologies Pvt. Ltd. of Hyderabad, India. There’s no office or local entity in Canada, and help comes by email and in-app chat.

Time zones. IST is 10 hours 30 minutes ahead of Montreal in winter and 9 hours 30 minutes ahead in summer. Support usually answers within the same Indian working day, so for a client launch, set the workspace up a few days early rather than the night before.

Billing. You pay per seat in Indian rupees via Razorpay, and your bank handles the conversion to Canadian dollars. Whether GST, HST or QST is owed on a service from a foreign supplier is for your accountant to confirm.

Data protection. Agencies here work under PIPEDA, with Quebec’s Law 25 adding provincial requirements. If you keep client contact lists or campaign audience details anywhere near your project tool, review the sub-processor list and the security overview against your obligations and your client agreements first.

Planning launches around the summer holidays

Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day on 24 June is a provincial holiday, and Canada Day on 1 July comes a week later. A campaign due at the start of July has fewer working days behind it than the calendar suggests. Capacity planning on Team and up counts those days and approved leave, and the same goes for Thanksgiving in October and the stretch from Christmas to New Year, which is often when clients want the January campaign signed off.