When a retainer deal is marked as Won, the standard win flow opens: the same as for One-off deals, with one addition: a Recurrence setup step at the end.

👉 For the full overview of how to mark a deal as won, see Winning a Deal.

Step 1: Choose how to proceed

Create a new project: creates a new project and adds the recurring budget to it
Add budget to existing project: adds the recurring budget to an existing project under the same client
Create a budget: creates a standalone recurring budget without a project
Do nothing: marks the deal as won without creating a project or budget

In the following steps, we'll walk through creating a standalone budget. The flow is the same if you choose to create a new project or add to an existing one.

Step 2: Add budget details

Set the budget name, currency, subsidiary, owner, and document template.

Step 3: Budget data (appears only if the deal has time entries, expenses, or bookings)

Choose what to move from the deal to the budget:

Time entries: shows total count and hours tracked on the deal
Expenses: shows total count and amount
Move future bookings to the budget: checked by default. Future bookings will be moved to the recurring budget and split by period so each booking aligns with the correct budget.

📌 Time entries and expenses are transferred to the first recurring budget.

Step 4: Recurrence setup

The recurrence settings are inherited from the deal: review and adjust if needed before finishing:

Period and No. of periods: inherited from the deal.
Start date: editable, defaults to the deal's projected revenue start date.
End date: auto-calculated from period × no. of periods, not editable directly.
Copy PO number on each occurrence: carries the PO number into each generated budget.
Copy expenses on each occurrence: copies expenses into each new period.

Click Create budget to finish. A budget is automatically created for each period. From this point on, the recurring budget is the source of truth: further changes to the contract are made there, not on the deal.

👉 For more on managing recurring budgets, see Recurring Budgets.

What gets created

Once you click Create budget, Productive generates a separate budget for each period. You can see all of them in the Recurring tab of any budget in the series.