Design Studio Project Tracking

What is design studio project tracking?

Design studio project tracking is a system for managing creative work from brief to delivery — capturing every revision round, client sign-off, and billable hour along the way. It replaces the combination of email threads, shared drives, and ad-hoc Slack messages that most design teams use to coordinate client work.

Melororium's Design Studio Project Tracking template is built around the creative workflow, not the generic one. Columns are pre-set for creative work: Brief → Concept → Revisions → Approval → Delivered. Each task has a revision counter, a timer, and a link to the client CRM card — so your team never asks "which version did we last send to the client?"

Why design studios lose money on revisions

The most expensive line item in most design studios is untracked revisions. A client requests changes. A designer makes them. The change isn't logged, the time isn't tracked, and the invoice at the end of the month doesn't reflect the three extra revision rounds that added 8 hours to the project.

Multiply that across 10 clients running simultaneously, and a 5-person studio can lose $3,000–$5,000 per month in untracked revision time. The problem isn't that clients ask for too many revisions — it's that there's no system that makes revision rounds visible and billable.

How design studios track projects without losing creative flow

Revision rounds as first-class data

The template tracks revision rounds as a field on every task, not as a note in a comment thread. When a brief goes back to the client for approval and returns with changes, increment the revision counter. Filter by revision count at month end to see which clients are consistently over their contracted revision allocation.

Brief-to-delivery as a single thread

Instead of a brief in email, files in Dropbox, and feedback in Slack, everything lives on the task card. The brief is a task description. File attachments are linked. Client feedback comes in via the Client Portal add-on. Approval is a Kanban stage move. The complete history of a deliverable is on one card, visible to everyone on the team.

Time logged where the work happens

Designers start timers on the task they're actually working on. No context switching to a time tracking app. Hours accumulate per task, per project, per client. At the end of a project, pull a work report and see exactly how many hours each phase took — data that makes future estimates sharper.

Client approval as a workflow stage, not an email chase

The Approval column is a formal stage in the workflow. When a deliverable moves there, the designer is done; the ball is in the client's court. The Client Portal add-on lets clients see their deliverable status, leave structured feedback, and formally approve — without needing a Melororium seat or chasing them by email.

Design studio tracking vs. Trello + Toggl + FreshBooks

Trello costs $5/user/month. Toggl Track costs $10/user/month. FreshBooks costs $15–$55/month. For a 6-person design studio, that stack runs $1,200–$1,700/year — and still requires manual data transfer between all three tools.

Melororium replaces all three. Starter plan covers 4 users for $29/mo. Agency covers 10 users for $59/mo. One workspace with Kanban, time tracking, invoicing, and client CRM connected. The savings in the first year pay for multiple years of the workspace.