Editor Hours Reconciliation (Retention)

Editor Hours Reconciliation (Retention)

1. 01

   Freeze the baseline before the first AI-assisted edit ships

   Record editor hours, revision rounds, and accepted-deliverable counts for the prior 90 days on the same client retainer. Without a pre-tool baseline, any later productivity claim is unverifiable.

2. 02

   Tag every project with a single labor category at intake

   Separate cut-and-assemble work (silence removal, caption burn-in, clip selection) from judgment work (color, sound mix, narrative pacing). Only the first category is a candidate for measured reduction.

3. 03

   Log actual editor hours per deliverable, not per project

   A 12-video retainer hides variance. Track hours against each accepted file so a single hard deliverable cannot mask gains across the easy ones.

4. 04

   Count revision rounds and rejected exports as labor

   Correction time is where AI-assisted cuts often give back the savings. A clip that needs two extra passes to fix a mis-cut caption has cost more than a manual cut would have.

5. 05

   Reconcile accepted deliverables against the client's approval record monthly

   Pull the client's sign-off list, not the internal task board. Deliverables marked done internally but never approved are not productivity.

6. 06

   Compare the 90-day post period to baseline on both axes

   Report the change in accepted deliverables and the change in editor hours side by side. A category-wide multiplier is not a finding; the client-specific delta is.

7. 07

   Escalate any account where hours fell but rejections rose

   That pattern usually means review moved downstream to the client, which is a retainer risk rather than a saving. Flag it before renewal conversations.

8. 08

   Reset the baseline whenever the tool stack or the brief changes

   Swapping editors, adding a captioning service, or shifting the client's format mix invalidates the prior comparison. Restart the clock rather than blending periods.