Getting Started

A workspace is your agency. Everything else — people, client spaces, files, approvals — lives inside it, and most agencies never need a second one.

To create one, go to onbrief.online, choose Start a workspace, and give it your agency's name. That name is what your clients see at the top of every space you share with them, so use the name they know you by rather than the one on your registration documents.

The person who creates the workspace becomes its first owner. Owners can change billing, add and remove people, and close the workspace. You can appoint more owners later, and you should: a workspace with one owner is a workspace that stops when that person is on holiday.

Your workspace starts on a fourteen-day trial with no card and no seat limit, so the whole team can come in and try it before anyone decides anything.

Open People and choose Invite. Enter work email addresses, one per line, and pick a role for each:

• Owner — everything, including billing and closing the workspace.
• Manager — creates client spaces, invites clients, publishes updates, requests approvals.
• Member — works inside the client spaces they have been added to.

Roles can be changed at any time and take effect immediately. Start people as members; it is easier to widen access than to explain why someone could see a client they should not have.

Each person you invite takes a seat once the trial ends. Clients do not — they are guests, and guests are free.

An invitation is valid for seven days. If it expires, invite the person again from the same screen; nothing is lost and no duplicate is created.

A client space is one client's view of the work you do for them. Open Clients, choose New client space, and give it the client's name.

Inside it you will find four things, and you do not have to use all of them:

• Updates — short posts about what has moved. This is what most clients read.
• Files — anything you want the client to be able to download.
• Approvals — the things you need a decision on, with a yes or a no attached.
• Activity — a running record of what happened and who did it.

Add the people from your agency who work on that client, then invite the client's own contacts as guests. Guests only ever see the spaces they were invited to.

Do one client properly before doing ten. The first space you build tends to become the template everyone copies.

A short list, in the order that has worked for most agencies:

1. Day one — create the workspace, invite the team, build one client space end to end.
2. Day two — invite that client's contacts as guests and publish one real update. A space with nothing in it teaches a client nothing.
3. Day three — connect the tools your agency already lives in, so work does not have to be entered twice.
4. The rest of the week — move your remaining clients across, one a day rather than all at once.

The most common mistake is moving every client in an afternoon and inviting nobody. The second most common is inviting clients to a space with no updates in it.