How to manage clients, projects, and invoicing

The Clients page is your single source of truth for every account you bill, whether you're running a two-person agency or freelancing solo.

• Each client record stores a name, contact name, email, and phone number, so you're not digging through email threads to find who to call.
• Status moves through a simple pipeline: Lead → Active → Paused → Churned, so you always know which relationships are live.
• Log where the client came from with the Source field (referral, cold outreach, inbound, etc.) to see which channels actually bring in work worth keeping.
• Add free-form Notes to capture context that doesn't fit anywhere else: renewal terms, points of contact, past friction.
• One client can have any number of Projects underneath it, so agencies with both retainer and one-off relationships don't need duplicate client records.

Every piece of billable work lives inside a Project, tied to exactly one Client.

• Status covers the full lifecycle: Not Started → In Progress → On Hold → Completed → Cancelled, giving you an honest read on what's actually moving.
• Priority uses the same Low / Medium / High / Urgent scale as Tasks, so a project that needs urgent attention carries the same visual weight everywhere else in BrandOps.
• Every project has a Billing Type: Fixed fee, Hourly, or Retainer, which determines how its invoice gets calculated.
• An optional Budget field sets the amount for Fixed and Retainer projects.
• Hourly projects add one more field, Hourly Rate. Without it set, BrandOps won't let you generate an invoice from logged time.

Hours are logged directly on a project's detail page. No separate timer app, no CSV import.

• Each entry records a date, a number of hours, and an optional note describing what the work was.
• The project detail page totals everything up: total hours logged all-time, and how many of those hours are still unbilled.
• "Unbilled" simply means the time entry hasn't been pulled into an invoice yet. Once it is, it's excluded from future totals, so you never double count it.
• Time tracking only feeds invoicing for Hourly projects. Fixed and Retainer projects can still log hours for your own internal tracking, but their invoice amount comes from the Budget field instead.

BrandOps generates invoices two ways, so ad hoc client billing never needs a workaround.

• From a project: click Generate invoice on the project detail page. For Hourly projects, BrandOps sums every unbilled time entry, multiplies by the hourly rate, and marks each of those entries as billed so they can never be pulled into a second invoice. For Fixed and Retainer projects, the invoice amount is simply the project's Budget.
• From the Invoices page: create an invoice manually for anything that doesn't map cleanly to one project, such as a one-off consulting call, a flat retainer top-up, or a reimbursed expense.
• Every invoice gets a sequential, human-readable number per brand, INV-0001, INV-0002, and so on, rather than a random ID, because these numbers go in front of clients.
• Status moves through Draft → Sent → Paid, or Overdue if it passes its due date unpaid. Marking an invoice Paid records the payment date automatically.
• Deleting an invoice doesn't delete the underlying work: any time entries it had claimed are released back to unbilled, so they're picked up by the next invoice you generate for that project.

Clients, Projects, and Invoices aren't shown to every brand by default. They only appear once your brand is set up for delivery-based work.

• Go to Settings → Brand tab and set Business Type to Consulting or Freelance.
• The sidebar adds Clients, Projects, and Invoices links immediately once that's saved. Ecommerce and SaaS brands see their own dedicated modules in place of these.
• Nothing about your existing tasks, content, or team data changes when you switch. Business Type only controls which extra modules appear.
• You can change Business Type again later if your business model changes. Existing Clients, Projects, and Invoices data is never deleted by a Business Type change.