Design studios need more than a task board.
Manage brand projects, track designer hours, share deliverables with clients, and know your margins — without the enterprise complexity.
Free forever. No credit card.
Built with input from agency owners who burned through Monday, ClickUp, and Basecamp before this.
Your portfolio is pristine. Your operations are held together with sticky notes.
Your designers produce beautiful work. But behind the scenes, timesheets get filled out on Friday from memory. Client feedback arrives via email, Slack, WhatsApp, and that one client who still uses Dropbox comments. You quoted a fixed fee for a rebrand six weeks ago and have no idea if you're still making money on it.
The tools you use were built for software teams or enterprise marketing departments. They don't understand creative workflows — concepting, iteration, revision rounds, client proofing. So you've bolted together Trello, Harvest, and a shared Google Drive folder labeled 'Client Assets DO NOT DELETE.'
You didn't start a design studio to spend half your week on admin.
Designers lose an average of 4.5 hours per week to administrative tasks. That's 234 billable hours per year — per person.
There's a better way.
The Old Way
Timesheets from memory — Designers batch-log hours on Friday. Data is late and inaccurate.
Email chains for feedback — "See attached v7_final_FINAL.pdf" with conflicting comments.
Fixed-fee guesswork — You find out the rebrand lost money after the final invoice.
Separate file sharing — Google Drive, Dropbox, WeTransfer — assets everywhere.
Manual status updates — Clients ask "how's it going?" because they can't see progress.
The Flowboard Way
Timer on every task — Designers track as they work. Accurate hours, no Friday guessing.
Client portal proofing — Clients view, comment, and approve in one place. No email chains.
Live project margins — See revenue vs. cost in real time. Adjust scope before it's too late.
Files inside the project — Attach files to tasks. Clients download from the portal.
Client dashboard — Clients log in and see progress. You stop writing status emails.
Track creative hours where the work happens.
Timer on every design task. Billable vs. non-billable. No more Friday guessing.
Your designers click to start, click to stop. Hours are tied to the project, the phase, and the client automatically. Billable vs. non-billable flags keep your data clean. At invoicing time, the numbers are already there — accurate and task-level.
Proofing, feedback, and approvals. One place.
Clients view work, leave comments, and approve — no email chains or Drive confusion.
Share work-in-progress through the client portal. Clients view designs, leave comments directly on tasks, and approve deliverables. No email attachments, no Google Drive version confusion, no 'which file is the latest?' conversations.
Fixed-fee projects don't have to be a gamble.
Set the project fee. Track hours with cost rates. See your margin in real time.
Set the total project fee as the budget. As your team tracks hours (with their individual cost rates), Flowboard calculates your margin in real time — revenue minus labor cost, updated with every tracked hour. Know whether a project is profitable before it ships, not after.
How Flowboard helps design studios
Visual project boards
Kanban boards designed for creative workflows — concept, design, review, revision, approved. Drag tasks through your actual process.
Time tracking for creatives
One-click timer on every task. Your designers track as they work, not from memory. Accurate data for invoicing and profitability.
Client proofing
Share designs through the client portal. Clients view, comment, and approve — no email attachments or Google Drive confusion.
Fixed-fee profitability
Set the project fee, track hours with cost rates, and see your margin in real time. Know if you're making money before the project ships.
“We used to quote fixed fees and hope for the best. Now we see the margin on every project in real time. Last quarter we caught two projects heading toward a loss and renegotiated scope before it was too late. That alone paid for Flowboard ten times over.”
James Whitfield
Creative Director, Hue & Co (8-person design studio)
Frequently asked questions
Run your design studio from one platform.
Start free. Track hours, share work with clients, and see your margins — in one afternoon.