quietkeel.

You sold forty hours.You worked sixty-one.

Somewhere in your client list is an account that is quietly costing you money. Quietkeel reads your own time logs and tells you which one, by how much, in dollars — so you can finally do something about it.

See what you'd get Email me

Cade Oxley, Michigan State. I do the read myself. AI does the grinding — reading thousands of messy time entries without getting bored — and every judgment call is mine.

One retainer, twelve months Drag to use your own numbers
Hours you sold Hours you gave away

Work you delivered and never invoiced, in a year

$252,000

21 hours every month, on every account like this one.

You already suspect which client it is. You just can't prove it.

Every agency owner has one. The account that generates the most messages and the least relief. The one your best designer sighs about. The one where "quick call" appears in the calendar four times a week and nobody writes it down as scope.

You are not confused about which client it is. You are stuck because you cannot prove it. You cannot raise a price on a hunch. You cannot tell a client their scope has doubled without showing them where. You cannot decide which of two heavy accounts to fix when both of them merely feel heavy. So the conversation never happens, the retainer renews at the same number, and next year is the same year.

Over the last ninety days this retainer used 187 hours against the 120 you sold. That is $8,375 of work you delivered and never invoiced.

That sentence is the entire product. It turns a feeling into a fact with a number attached, and a fact is something you can put in front of a client, a partner, or yourself. Everything else Quietkeel does is arithmetic in service of being able to say it.

What you actually walk away with

Not a dashboard. Not a methodology. Four things you did not know on Monday and can act on by Friday.

Which clients are actually making you money

You priced every retainer on what you hoped it would take. This tells you what each one actually took. Most owners can name their worst account; what they get wrong is everything underneath it, where an "easy" client turns out to be the least profitable one you have.

"Client D looks like our biggest account. After hours, it is our fourth most profitable."

A repricing conversation you can actually win

Asking for more money without evidence sounds like you are struggling. Asking with ninety days of their own usage in front of you sounds like you are running a tight shop. Most agencies recover the cost of the read on the first renewal they reprice.

"We're moving you to 180 hours. Here is the quarter where you used 187."

Where your team is quietly drowning

Overrun shows up as a tired senior months before it shows up in the P&L. The account absorbing forty unbilled hours a month is absorbing them out of somebody's evenings. Seeing it by person and by client is usually the part that makes owners move fastest.

"Two people are carrying the overrun on four accounts. That is the retention risk."

Which accounts are safe to grow

Not every surprise is a bad one. Some retainers finish well under scope, which usually means they are underpriced for the value rather than overdelivered. Those are the ones to expand, and you cannot tell them apart from the problem accounts without the hours.

"Client C is 19 hours under. That is a conversation about doing more, not charging more."

Three steps, about a week, nothing for you to install

The hours are already written down. They are sitting in Harvest or Toggl or Clockify or a spreadsheet somebody maintains. What is missing is anybody totaling them against what each client actually bought, which is the kind of job that never makes it to the top of your list and never stops costing you.

You do not change tools, adopt a platform, or ask your team to track time differently. You export what you already have.

  1. You send an export

    A CSV from whatever you already use, covering the last ninety days, plus what each retainer was sold as: hours or scope, and the monthly fee.

    About fifteen minutes of your time

  2. I reconcile every entry against its contract

    Hours logged per client, per month, against hours sold, at your rates. Where entries are vague or missing, I mark those accounts unmeasurable rather than quietly filling the gap with an assumption that flatters the number.

    About a week, none of it yours

  3. We walk through it and you decide what to do

    One page per client and a summary. Which retainers ran over and by how much. Which are mispriced rather than mismanaged. What you would need to change to measure the rest. Then thirty minutes to talk through which conversation to have first.

    Thirty minutes, and it is yours to keep

Here is what lands in your inbox

The summary table from a sample read, built on invented numbers so you can see the shape of it. Click any row to see the kind of detail sitting underneath — because "you went over" is an argument, and "you went over on these seventeen entries" is a fact.

Sample read · 12-person brand studio Jul–Sep 2026
Retainer Sold Logged Variance At your rate
  • Unscheduled calls, 11 across the quarter14.25 h
  • Revision rounds beyond the two contracted22.00 h
  • "Can you just" requests under 30 min each16.75 h
  • Asset resizing not in the statement of work9.50 h
  • Reporting rebuilt after a format change4.50 h

None of these were worth invoicing on their own. That is exactly why they were never invoiced. Together they are a part-time salary.

  • Extra posts around a product launch4.00 h
  • Community replies over the agreed window2.00 h

Six hours over on ninety is noise, not a problem. Part of the value of the read is being told plainly which accounts to leave alone.

  • Retained hours unused across the quarter19.00 h

They are paying for capacity they are not using, which is stable until the day they notice. This is a growth conversation, not a billing one, and it is better had by you than by them.

  • Strategy time absorbed into delivery31.00 h
  • Third stakeholder added mid-quarter24.50 h
  • Monthly reporting, over estimate every month13.50 h

A scope that changed without the contract changing. The fix here is a conversation about the third stakeholder, not about working faster.

Client E · content75—untrackednot measurable
Delivered and never invoiced, one quarter $17,750

Invented numbers, for illustration. Client E is the honest part: when the entries are not there, you get told it cannot be measured yet and what to change so it can be — not a figure with a confident decimal point on it.

Whether this is worth your time

It is a $500 decision, so it should take two minutes to make. If the first list sounds like you, send me a week of your data and I will tell you straight whether it is worth doing.

Worth doing if

  • You run an agency or studio of roughly 10 to 100 people
  • You sell retainers or monthly programs, not only projects
  • Your team tracks time, even badly
  • You have had the thought "I think that client is costing us money"
  • A renewal or a repricing conversation is coming up
  • Nobody internally owns this and nobody ever will

Not worth doing if

  • You work project to project with no ongoing scope
  • You already employ a finance director who does this monthly
  • You want software to log into — there isn't any
  • Nobody logs time at all, in which case start there first
  • You want a number that makes the agency look good rather than a true one

One price, and you get it back

Priced so that saying yes is a small decision, and so that I am not selling you software you then have to justify to someone. If you want the read run every month afterwards, the $500 comes off the first three months.

It is deliberately not free. A free audit gets a yes from everybody and tells neither of us anything — and a number you did not pay for is a number nobody acts on.

Before you pay anything, send me a week of your time export. I will tell you straight whether it is usable, and if it isn't I will say so rather than take the money.

Ninety-day retainer read

$500 one time

Credited in full if you continue monthly

  • Every retainer reconciled against what it was sold as
  • Overrun in hours and in dollars, client by client
  • Where the hours went, so the conversation is specific
  • Which accounts are mispriced rather than overworked
  • Which are under scope and safe to grow
  • What is unmeasurable today, and how to fix that
  • Thirty minutes to walk through it together
Start a read

Free usability check on a week of data first

Also still available

Two things I was doing before this one. If we have been talking about either, nothing has changed and the offer stands exactly as it was made.

Client-facing writing for agencies

The writing nobody has time for, in your agency's own voice. Agencies rarely lose clients because the work was bad. They lose them because the client stopped hearing about the work.

  • Case studies, built from published work and a short interview
  • Monthly reports, narrative plus recommendations
  • Short monthly update notes
  • QBR and renewal decks

I write what your agency sends its clients, never your clients' own marketing.

Ask about writing

Project write-ups for studios and makers

The page that explains what a piece was and how it got made, for workshops whose portfolios are mostly photographs. Closed to new inquiries, but every write-up already promised still gets written.

  • One project, written properly, in your voice
  • Built from your own site and a conversation
  • Yours to use or bin, nothing attached

If I owe you one, email me and it gets done.

Claim a write-up

Who you'd be working with

I am Cade Oxley, a senior at Michigan State studying advertising management, in East Lansing. I spent two years looking closely at how agencies run and kept finding the same gap: the work gets done, the hours get logged, and nobody ever adds them up against what was sold.

Quietkeel is me, not a team you will never meet. I do the reconciliation myself and use AI for the part it is genuinely better at, which is reading thousands of inconsistent time entries without losing patience. The judgment calls are mine, and when something cannot be measured I tell you that instead of producing a number to fill the space.

  • BasedEast Lansing, Michigan
  • Works withAgencies and studios, roughly 10 to 100 people
  • Needs from youA time export and your retainer terms
  • TurnaroundAbout a week
  • Reply timeSame day, most days

Questions people actually ask

Our time tracking is a mess. Does that disqualify us?
No. "Our tracking is a mess" is the single most common thing people tell me. Thin data still tells you which accounts you can measure and which you cannot, which is worth knowing by itself. Send me a week of it and I will tell you honestly whether it is usable before you pay anything.
Is this software? Do we have to adopt a tool?
No. Nothing to log into, no seats to buy, no change to how your team works. You send an export, I send back a read. If you want it every month, I run it every month.
What makes this different from our accountant or our PM tool?
Your accountant sees revenue and costs, not hours against scope per client. Your PM tool records the hours but will not tell you what each retainer was sold as or do the comparison. The gap between those two is the whole job, and it is why it never gets done.
How long does it take, and how much of it is our time?
About a week from the point I have your export, and roughly fifteen minutes of yours to pull it together. Then thirty minutes at the end to walk through what it found.
What exactly do you need from us?
A CSV of time entries for the last ninety days with client, person, date and hours. Plus, for each retainer, what was sold — hours or scope — and the monthly fee. That is the whole list.
Is our client data safe?
I only need hours, dates, clients and rates. If you would rather strip client names and send codes instead, the read works exactly the same. Nothing is shared with anyone, and I delete the export on delivery if you ask.
What happens after the read?
Often you reprice one or two accounts and stop there, which is a fine outcome and the one I see most. Some agencies want the same read monthly so the number never gets three months old again. Your call either way, and the $500 comes off the first three months if you go monthly.
What if you find nothing?
Then you have paid $500 to find out your retainers are priced correctly and your team is not absorbing unpaid work, which is a thing worth knowing and a thing most owners cannot currently say with confidence. It has not happened yet, but it is a real possible outcome and I will not invent an overrun to justify the fee.

Find out what last quarter actually cost you.

Send me one retainer — what you sold, and what got logged against it. I will come back with the variance in dollars, free, and you can decide from there whether the rest of your client list is worth looking at.

Email quietkeel.hq@gmail.com

One retainer, no charge, no call required.

That's a hire.

At that rate you are giving away about the cost of a full-time mid-level designer every year, spread thin enough that it never shows up as a line item.