Studio Designer’s Blog for Design Business Excellence

High Point Market is the world’s largest home furnishings trade show, held twice a year in High Point, North Carolina. To make the most of it: plan your showroom appointments in advance, group your days by building or district, wear broken-in sneakers, pack a light backpack with a phone charger and water, schedule real rest and lunch breaks, and photograph each showroom’s signage before you shoot its products. Don’t try to see everything — pick your top 10 showrooms and build in time to network. 

Studio Designer exists to keep every part of a design firm connected, from the first spark of an idea to the final invoice. This month’s release focuses on three things that shape daily work the most: sourcing and presenting design concepts, tracking time accurately, and giving both firms and clients more control at checkout. Here’s what’s new.

Studio Designer exists to help interior designers run their firms with less friction and more polish, and this month’s release leans hard into both. The centerpiece is a fully rebranded checkout experience that finally lets your client-facing payments look like your firm instead of a generic payment form. Beyond that, Payroll firms get long-awaited PTO tools, time tracking gets a redesign and a mobile app, Quebec firms get proper tax support, and Catalog products now carry full manufacturer specifications through to the project. Here’s what’s new. 

Employees skip or split time logging because they’re forced to enter hours in two different systems, one for client billing and one for payroll. That extra step creates friction, and firms that grow up on disconnected tools like Harvest, Excel, ADP, and QuickBooks tend to stick with them out of habit even after adopting project management software. Studio Designer solves this by making time entry a single action that feeds both billing and payroll, with cloning to duplicate entries instead of retyping them. 

The biggest struggle is visibility. As design firms grow, they end up running Excel, Harvest, ADP, QuickBooks, and Studio Designer all at once, and none of those systems talk to each other. That makes it nearly impossible to see a unified view of profitability, which means firms can’t tell where they’re actually losing margin or when they genuinely need to hire. The clearest signal that gets buried in this mess is utilization: designers consistently running at 100-130% capacity with no time left for anything but billable work. 

A firm doesn’t outgrow its purchasing process all at once. It happens gradually, one missed tracking number and one confused client call at a time, until the cracks are impossible to ignore.