Collaboration Made Faster and Easier with Studio Designer

Collaboration is an essential hallmark of interior design—whether it is working with a client on an exciting creative vision, interfacing with vendors and tradespeople to get products made just right or working as a team with colleagues to meet project timelines and achieve company goals.

At Studio Designer, we consistently focus on making enhancements that enable design professionals to collaborate with all of their project stakeholders without missing a detail. Our latest update boosts the collaboration tools of the platform with enhancements including increased transparency on the history of designers’ documents, expanded options on managing multiple items, and improved ability of designer clients to make Client Portal payments.

Detailed History in a Project Workflow

Tracking activities and communications with clients can be a time consuming and arduous process, making collaboration difficult. Our latest release allows designers to see if a client or vendor has viewed or clicked on a document sent from the Studio Designer platform—whether designers sent it via the Client Portal, as an Interactive Document, or as a static PDF.

When we introduced Item History to the platform, we wanted our clients to see each and every action taken on an Item in chronological order with date and time stamps. When we later added Document History—a similar tab in every Proposal, Order, and Invoice—it enabled designers to track in order who and what in their company internally made an action on a document. Now, we are pleased to enhance this with read receipts in the Document History timeline. This feature informs designers if a client or vendor has viewed their document. Plus, designers can rest assured that if an email address is invalid, designers can see an email bounce warning in the same timeline.

Enhanced Item Management

Sourcing and procuring items is a deeply collaborative process in interior design and it is the reason why Studio Designer has been an item-based system since its inception. The ability to manage items with granular detail is one of the most valued aspects of our program. We’re pleased to add more functionality to the way designers can manage items. If designers need to update multiple items, we have new enhancements that can help.

Designers have been able to add multiple items to Proposals, but they can now can add multiple items to Orders and Invoices. In the items screen, check all of the items to update, then click on the “three dots” icon to open up a dropdown menu, choose to either “Add Items to Order” or “Add Items to Invoice,” and then select the existing document number to update. Other expanded bulk item actions include the ability to track when multiple items have been shown to a client with the “Set Presented Items” and being able to remove multiple items all at once with “Remove Items.”

Client Portal Enhancements

Many Studio Designer clients rely on the Client Portal as a vital collaboration tool to conduct swift and efficient business by being able to view projects, approve proposals, and pay invoices all in a secure online location. We are always making improvements to the Client Portal to make this collaboration easier for designers and their clients. Now payments can be processed faster than ever as designer clients can now immediately make a new payment immediately after making a first payment. Plus, clients can now make payments on all of the proposals—even the ones that are unapproved.