Retainer tracker for law firms and solo attorneys.
Law firms bill clients on retainer advances — typically $2,000–$15,000 per month — and clients consume those hours by calling with questions, reviewing contracts, responding to discovery, and attending hearings. The billing office knows the balance. The client doesn’t — so they call to ask. HourTab gives every client a live URL showing their retainer balance and every time entry that consumed it, updated as you import your weekly CSV. No phone call required.
Free forever for your first retainer · no credit card.
Why law firm retainer tracking breaks down
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Clients phone the billing office to check their balance.
In a busy litigation or transactional practice, the billing office fields the same question dozens of times per month: “How much retainer do I have left?” Every call interrupts billing staff who are already managing invoices, collections, and trust accounting. The client isn’t being unreasonable — they’ve paid a significant advance and want to know what they’ve consumed. But there’s no place for them to look. HourTab creates that place: a bookmarkable URL that shows the client their balance and every entry that affected it, without routing through the billing office.
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Legal billing software doesn’t offer live client-visible balances without a full portal.
Clio, TimeSolvePro, and Practice Panther are powerful platforms built for attorney workflow, matter management, and billing compliance — not for quick client-facing balance checks. Giving a client access to your billing portal means giving them access to far more than a balance: invoices, trust account history, billing codes. HourTab is narrow by design. It shows the client their hours balance and work log for one retainer. Nothing else. No login, no portal, no training the client on your billing software.
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Trust erodes when clients see a bill at month-end without mid-cycle visibility.
Legal billing has a transparency problem that predates software. A client who receives a $4,200 invoice having paid a $5,000 retainer and receives no visibility during the month will scrutinize every line item on the bill. They question descriptions, challenge time increments, and dispute entries that felt unclear in isolation. When clients have seen the running balance all month — when they watched 3.5 hours go in for the deposition prep and 1.2 hours for the contract review — the invoice is a confirmation, not a surprise. Transparency mid-cycle prevents billing disputes at end-of-cycle.
How it works for law firms
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Set up the retainer. Enter the client name, retainer advance amount (converted to hours at your billing rate), and the billing cycle reset date. For a $5,000 retainer at $250/hr, that’s 20 hours. You can also track purely in hours if your retainer is hour-based rather than dollar-based. Takes under two minutes per client.
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Import from your legal billing software’s CSV export. Export time entries from Clio, TimeSolvePro, Practice Panther, or your internal time-tracking tool as a CSV. Paste it into HourTab. Each entry populates the work log: date, matter description (e.g. “Contract review — vendor MSA”), attorney or paralegal, hours billed, and updated balance. Your billing workflow stays unchanged.
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Send the client their link. Each retainer gets a unique public URL. Drop it in the engagement letter or the first invoice email. The client bookmarks it and checks their own balance when they want to. They see entries as they appear — real time as you import — without calling the billing office. The billing office handles exceptions, not routine inquiries.
Your billing workflow stays exactly the same. You add one CSV import step and eliminate a recurring category of inbound calls.
“Clients often call to ask ‘how much retainer do I have left?’ — this is a very common billing question in law firms.”
— Legal billing guide from Clio
A live retainer URL means clients check for themselves — the billing office handles exceptions, not routine inquiries.
Frequently asked questions
How do law firms typically track retainer balances?
Most law firms track retainer activity inside their legal billing software — Clio, TimeSolvePro, or Practice Panther — or in a spreadsheet. The problem is that clients have no visibility into that data without a full portal login or a call to the billing office. HourTab adds a public share URL on top of your existing billing workflow so clients can check their own balance at any time.
Can clients see itemized entries or just a total balance?
Both. HourTab displays a running balance alongside a full work log: date, matter description, attorney or paralegal, hours billed, and the balance remaining after each entry. Clients see exactly what consumed the retainer, which reduces disputes and surprise conversations at billing time.
Does HourTab work with Clio, TimeSolvePro, or Practice Panther?
Yes, via CSV export. Clio, TimeSolvePro, Practice Panther, and most legal billing platforms let you export time entries as CSV. Paste that CSV into HourTab and the entries populate automatically. Your internal billing workflow stays unchanged — HourTab only adds the client-facing layer.
How do we handle matter-level billing vs. client-level retainer?
Many law firms bill multiple matters against a single client retainer. In HourTab you can include a matter description field in your CSV entries — each line item shows the matter name (e.g. “Contract review — vendor agreement”) alongside the hours. The retainer balance tracks the aggregate across all matters, while clients can see the breakdown by matter in the work log.