How to track prepaid support hours and retainers in Freshdesk

The short answer

Freshdesk records the time and can report it per customer. In the Freshdesk articles we read, the pieces are time logs and the Time Sheet Summary report. We did not find a built-in feature that holds the hours a customer bought, shows what is left, renews a package on a date, or warns at a percentage. Many teams close that gap with a spreadsheet.

The native way

1. Agents log time on tickets. The Time Logs widget lets agents start and stop timers, or enter time, a date and a note. Freshdesk advises ticking Billable so the entry is marked as billable time in timesheet reports (Keeping track of time spent). Which options you have depends on your plan.
2. Pull the time per customer. Freshdesk's answer to Total time spent on company tickets is the Time Sheet Summary report: choose the date and the customer in the filters and export it from Reports > Time sheet summary.
3. Read the report. The Time Sheet Summary report splits clocked time by charge type (billable or non-billable), date, ticket, agent, group and customer. It can be exported as a PDF to your mailbox, and the notes agents added when logging time can be viewed in the widgets.
4. Optionally schedule the report. Freshdesk can send reports on a schedule from the Garden or Pro plan onwards (scheduling reports).
5. Keep the balance yourself. A spreadsheet with one row per customer: hours bought, period start, hours used from the report, hours left.

Where the native way stops

Going by the articles above, and the plan you are on, this is where it gets manual:

• It reports time, not a package. Nothing in these reports knows that a customer bought 20 hours a month, that the period renews on the 5th, or that an emergency block takes over when the monthly hours are gone.
• The balance is not on the ticket. An agent working a ticket does not see the customer's remaining hours unless somebody tells them.
• Nothing warns anyone. The customer's hours can reach 100% and pass it without a message to the agent or the customer.
• Period edges are manual. Time zones and the last day of the month decide which period a time entry falls in, and the spreadsheet has to follow that by hand.
• The statement is something you assemble. For invoicing you rebuild the list of entries per customer and period from the report.

Option: Prepaid Hours, for Freshdesk users (coming soon)

Prepaid Hours works with Freshdesk and counts the time your agents already log against packages you define per customer company:

• Packages per company. Hours bought, renewing monthly, quarterly or yearly, or a fixed block with no renewal. Each package has a start day, an optional end date and a time zone, and counts billable time only or all logged time. Several packages for one company are used in the order you set, and anything beyond the last package is shown as over.
• Balance on every ticket. A sidebar panel shows the ticket's company, hours used, hours left, the period, and whether the package is on track, running low, used up or over.
• Alerts. The first time a package passes an alert level in a period (for example 80% and 100%), a private note is added to the ticket, and agents you list can be emailed. Optionally the customer contact you enter is emailed too. Each level is sent once per period.
• Period-end statements. For a package period or any dates you choose: every time entry with its local date, ticket, subject, agent, note and duration, the package it counted against and what went over. Download it as CSV or print it to PDF.

Limits. It is not an invoicing or payment system: it counts hours and builds statements, and does not create invoices or charge anyone. It counts only time entries logged in Freshdesk, and it works with Freshdesk only. It reads up to 4,000 time entries per company for the ticket panel and the packages page, and says on screen when the oldest entries were not read. A statement covers at most 400 days. The agent list that limits who can change packages applies to the app's own screens and is not a Freshdesk permission. Customer emails go through Freshdesk's outbound email, which records each as a closed ticket for that contact.

Status and price. Prepaid Hours is in Freshworks Marketplace review and coming soon on the Freshworks Marketplace. It cannot be installed by the public yet. The planned Marketplace price is $25 per account per month, billed by Freshworks.

About Prepaid Hours Read the documentation

Which route fits

• A few retainer customers: time logs, the Time Sheet Summary report and a spreadsheet.
• Many customers, several packages each, alerts and statements: an app such as Prepaid Hours once it is available.

Atesen Software is independent. Freshdesk and Freshworks are trademarks of Freshworks Inc., and this page is not affiliated with or endorsed by Freshworks. Freshdesk articles were checked on 12 October 2026; menus and plan limits can change.

Questions about this guide: support@atesensoftware.com.