How to Automate Monthly Retainer Project Setup
Auto-clone boards, reset task statuses, shift deadlines on schedule. Eliminate 2–4 hours of monthly PM overhead per client, permanently.
The monthly retainer tax
Every retainer client requires a new project board at the start of each cycle. The PM duplicates last month's board, renames it, resets all task statuses to 'Not Started,' adjusts the deadlines to the current month, removes last month's time entries from view, and notifies the team that the new cycle is open. For one client: 20–30 minutes. For eight clients: 2.5–4 hours of PM time before a single client deliverable has been started. Zero value for any client. Across a year: 30–48 hours of senior PM time spent on administrative overhead.
"For one client: 20–30 minutes. For eight clients: 2.5–4 hours of PM time before a single client deliverable has been started. Zero value for any client."
What a recurring project means in Melororium
A recurring project in Melororium is a project with an automation rule: at a set date and interval, the system creates a new project by cloning the base project, resetting task statuses, shifting deadlines based on the new cycle's start date, and notifying the project team. The PM does not need to do anything. The new cycle's project exists and is ready for work when the team starts the first day of the new month.
What gets cloned and what does not
Understanding what is and is not carried over to each new cycle prevents confusion:
- Column structure, cloned exactly
- Task list, cloned with task names, descriptions, and custom fields
- Assignee roles, cloned; role-to-person mapping is preserved from the base project
- Task statuses, reset to 'Not Started' on every clone
- Deadlines, shifted based on the new cycle's start date and the offset logic set in the base project
- Comments, not carried over; each cycle starts with a clean comment thread
- Time entries, not carried over; each cycle's time entries are tracked independently
Flat-fee · No seat tax
Done paying per seat? Melororium covers tasks, time tracking, and client CRM for teams of 4–25 — one flat monthly price.
Step-by-step setup
Configure a recurring project in Melororium:
- Open the base project (build and clean it first, this becomes the template)
- Go to Project Settings
- Toggle Enable Recurring Project to on
- Set the next run date, when the first automated clone should be created
- Set the frequency, monthly, quarterly, weekly, or custom interval in days
- Save, automation is active from this point
Who gets notified when a new cycle starts
When a new cycle's project is created, notifications go to: all team members assigned in the base project (via their configured channels, email, in-app, Slack), the project owner (with a summary of what was cloned and the new deadline set), and the workspace owner (in-app notification only, for visibility). The notification includes a direct link to the new project, so team members can start work immediately without searching for the new cycle's board.
Monthly vs quarterly vs weekly cadence
The recurring project feature supports three standard cadences and a custom interval:
- Monthly: ideal for content retainers, SEO retainers, social media management, the most common agency retainer structure
- Quarterly: appropriate for brand reviews, strategic planning sessions, performance reports, lower frequency, higher scope per cycle
- Weekly: suited for paid media management, rapid-iteration development sprints, high frequency, minimal setup overhead per cycle
Which plan includes recurring projects
Recurring projects are included in the Agency plan: $59/month for up to 10 users, flat fee. The Starter plan ($29/month, 4 users) includes project management but not automated recurring project cloning. For agencies running multiple retainer clients, the recurring project feature alone typically saves more per month in PM time than the Agency plan costs.
Set up your first recurring project, eliminate monthly setup time permanently.
No credit card · 14-day free demo · Flat fee, whole team.
