How studios work..
Written from inside a working studio
Software for designers is usually written about designers. This page is the other thing: a plain account of one working week, written from inside a studio that runs on Studiohaus daily.
Monday, before the coffee is done.
The day starts on one quiet screen: which projects moved, what money is outstanding, which client wrote back overnight, what’s due. Not a report you assemble — the state of the studio, already sorted. The point isn’t the dashboard; it’s that nobody spends Monday morning reconstructing last week from three inboxes and a spreadsheet.
The site visit.
A walkthrough produces forty photographs, a half-page of notes, and two decisions that will matter in March. In most studios those live on someone’s phone until they don’t. Here they land on the project — site visits with their photo sets, notes in a communication log the whole studio can read, each entry dated and owned. At the end of any day, anyone can open one feed and see what happened on every job. That log is internal, always. Clients never see it.
The client conversation.
The concept goes on a design board — real products from your library, photographs, swatches, arranged the way you’d pin them to the studio wall. When it’s ready, you share it to the client’s portal with a note in your own words. They tap through the pieces, approve what they love, decline what they don’t, and leave comments on the item itself — so feedback arrives attached to the thing it’s about, not three paragraphs deep in an email. A shared board locks; revisions are new versions, not silent edits. The client always looks at exactly what they approved.
What the client sees is theirs: a portal in the studio’s own brand, with the boards, documents, invoices, and messages the studio chose to share — and nothing else. Pricing shows when you decide it shows.
The books.
Approved selections become line items; line items become invoices; invoices get paid online and reconcile to QuickBooks. Deposits, balances, and retainers keep their own lanes per project, so “what’s still owed” is a glance, not an archaeology project. Purchase orders trace what’s been ordered from which vendor, and the order tracker holds the freight chaos — because install day is a logistics problem long before it’s a styling problem.
The drive.
Studios drive. To sites, to showrooms, to the workroom that has the only upholsterer worth using. The route planner logs those trips against projects at the IRS rate, so tax season finds the mileage already kept — one of those small disciplines that returns real money for zero glamour.
The quiet parts.
Roles and permissions decide who can see margins and who can delete what. Templates carry your phases, milestones, and folder structure into every new project so the studio’s way of working is the default, not tribal knowledge. Every firm’s data is isolated at the database layer — not filtered by good intentions in the interface.
Why it holds together.
Most studio stacks are assembled: one tool for boards, one for invoices, one for files, one for client email, stitched with copy-paste. Studiohaus is composed — the board knows the product, the product knows the invoice, the invoice knows the client, and the client’s approval is attached to the exact item on the exact board. That’s the whole idea. Composed, not assembled.
Start a free trial or read the field notes for the longer versions of how we think about this work.