Running an agency means juggling five jobs at once: knowing where the time goes, knowing who is away, keeping clients and retainers on track, keeping a team in several time zones talking, and bringing new people up to speed. The agency owner, the operations manager and the team leads each carry a different part of that, usually across a different set of tools.
Jasper is one workspace for those jobs: chat and calls, mail, time and timesheets, leave, a wiki, staff training, uptime monitoring and AI code review. It is built by Shakewell, an Australian agency, which runs on it. Below is what each job looks like in Jasper, and where Jasper stops.
Time and utilisation
Who cares most: the owner, who needs to know whether the agency makes money on its time, and the operations manager, who chases the timesheets.
People start a timer in the browser or the desktop app, or add time by hand, against a client and, if you like, a project and a ClickUp task. In the desktop app, idle detection asks what to do with time when someone steps away. Each project sets whether its time is billable by default, and only owners and admins can change the flag, so the billing decision stays with them.
At the end of each week, fortnight or month, people submit a timesheet. An approver approves it, rejects it with a reason or asks for changes. Reports group hours by client, project or person, and people with billing access see billable amounts by client and project on screen. Exports go to CSV or PDF for your accounting tool.
Where it stops: report exports carry hours and a billable flag, not rates or amounts, and there is no invoicing screen. Our utilisation guide and utilisation calculator show how to work out utilisation from an export.
Leave and capacity
Who cares most: the operations manager, who keeps balances right, and the team lead, who needs to know who is around before agreeing a date.
People request full or half days on the web or in the desktop app, and Jasper works out the hours from the work week and public holidays. Requests go to a group of approvers in turn, or to your owners and admins. Leave policies accrue leave on a schedule up to a cap, balances carry over in full into the new leave year, and each office's public holidays are assigned to its group. Approved leave and public holidays can become time entries, so a short week isn't missing hours.
The team leave timeline shows approved and pending leave with public holidays, by day, week or month, and exports the leave to CSV and iCal. On a separate page, the team calendar holds work schedules: shifts typed in by hand, with on-call, overtime and other types.
Where it stops: leave only appears when time tracking is switched on. There is no resource forecasting, and schedules don't pick up approved leave. Holidays and opening balances are entered by hand, and there is no payroll integration. Our capacity planning guide and leave-aware capacity planner fill the gap.
Client work and retainers
Who cares most: the owner and the account leads, who need to see a retainer burning before the client does.
The Client Hub keeps each client's contacts, master service agreement, engagements, retainers and hosting agreements in one profile, with money values shown only to people allowed to see them. Retainers can be monthly or annual and draw down from the time logged on the projects you link to them. Monthly retainers keep a ledger and warn before hours expire; annual ones show burndown and pace.
In the desktop app, mail from a client's domains files into that client's folder, with your own hours on that client beside the email and, with ClickUp connected, its open tasks. For development work, a pull request whose title carries the ClickUp task ID is linked to the task, and the task gets the review summary.
Where it stops: there is no client portal, so clients can't log in to see hours, tasks or a retainer; you send them a report export. There is no CRM, no proposals or estimates, and no invoicing. The client panel in mail shows your own hours, not the team's. Read retainers vs projects for how to structure the work.
Communication across time zones
Who cares most: team leads with people in more than one office, and anyone who works with clients overseas.
Chat has channels, threads and direct messages, with huddles and video calls of up to 25 people and screen sharing in the desktop app. Each person's profile shows their local time, and statuses show when someone is on leave or in a call. Schedule a chat message or an email to arrive in the other person's morning, set reminders on messages, and ask for a reminder if an email gets no reply. In the desktop app, huddles and screen clips replace a lot of short meetings, and Catch me up summarises what you missed overnight.
Tools that post to a Slack incoming webhook can post into a Jasper channel instead, and our team can import your Slack history.
Where it stops: there are no mobile apps. There are no guests or shared channels, so clients can't join your chat or calls. Mail is in the desktop app only, and Microsoft 365 and Outlook.com mailboxes aren't supported. Signing in with Google, calendar sync and shared inboxes aren't open to other companies yet. See our guide to running one team across Sydney, London and New York.
Onboarding and training staff
Who cares most: the operations manager, and the team lead who has to get a new starter productive.
The wiki holds your processes and a workspace for each client, with search, favourites and version history. Jasper Learn runs induction and yearly refresher courses: build them in Jasper or import SCORM packages, assign them with rules so new starters are enrolled, issue certificates, and export completion evidence when a client asks. On team plans, the intranet carries announcements, company events and policies people confirm they have read.
Where it stops: the wiki and learning are in the web app only, with no offline mode. Learners and wiki readers must be members of your organisation. Our client onboarding checklist is a good first wiki page.
For development and support teams
If you build or look after software for clients, Jasper reviews GitHub pull requests with Anthropic's Claude and posts inline comments, and your developers can ask follow-up questions with slash commands. On team plans, uptime monitoring watches client sites, APIs, domains and scheduled jobs, and alerts you by email, Slack or webhook. Every workspace gets 250 free AI credits a month for reviews; reviews are GitHub only.
Where Jasper stops
- No client portal and no guests. Clients can't log in to see hours, tasks or retainers, or join your chat.
- No invoicing screen. Exports carry hours, not money, and invoices are made in your accounting tool.
- No mobile apps. Jasper is in the browser and the desktop app for macOS, Windows and Linux.
- No CRM, proposals, estimates or resource forecasting.
- No Microsoft 365 or Outlook.com mail, and no calendar sync, Google sign-in or shared inboxes for other companies yet.
- No single sign-on (SSO) or SCIM provisioning.
- Leave only appears when time tracking is switched on.
What moving across involves
- Start free. Create a workspace and invite your team. Chat and calls, mail, the wiki, learning and AI code review with 250 free AI credits a month cost nothing.
- Turn on the team features. Talk to us about a team plan for time tracking, leave, the Client Hub, uptime monitoring, the intranet and ClickUp.
- Add clients and projects. Add them in Jasper, or create projects from your ClickUp spaces once ClickUp is connected.
- Bring your time history. There is no self-serve import from Clockify, Harvest or Toggl. Talk to us about moving your history, and keep the old tool for past reports until then.
- Set up leave. Create leave types and policies, add each office's public holidays to its group, and set each person's opening balance by adjusting it.
- Move chat. Our team can import your Slack export with its channels, direct messages, reactions and files. Point your alerts at Jasper channels by swapping the webhook address.
- Connect mail and code. Each person adds their own mailbox in the desktop app with its password, or an app password for Gmail, iCloud, Fastmail or Zoho. Install the Jasper GitHub App on the repositories you want reviewed.
- Run both for one timesheet period. Check the timesheets and leave balances match before you switch the old tools off.