Creating a client

A client in Studiohaus is someone who has signed — you're doing work for them now, not just talking about it. Clients have a profile, attach to projects, and can be given a login to your white-labeled client portal.

There are two ways a client lands in your CRM. This article covers both.

📸 Caption: the Clients page showing the table of existing clients and the "New client" button.

Path A: convert a lead

If the person started as a lead — most do — converting is the cleanest route. From the lead's detail page, click Convert to client (the terracotta button in the right-hand actions card).

What happens behind the scenes:

• A new client record is created, carrying the lead's name, email, phone, and project address straight over.
• The lead's status flips to won, with a timestamp.
• The lead stays in your history, linked to the client — its page shows "Converted to client [name]" with an Open client → link.
• You land on the new client's profile, ready to fill in anything else and start their first project.

Use this path whenever the person was already a lead. Don't hand-create a client and abandon the lead — you'd break the thread from the conversation that started it to the work that came out of it.

📸 Caption: the lead detail page with the "Convert to client" button in the right-hand actions card.

Path B: add a client directly

Use this when:

• You signed someone before they were ever in the CRM (a longtime client carried over from another tool).
• You're importing existing relationships during onboarding.
• The person never came through your inbound pipeline.

How

1. In the left nav, open Clients (it sits under Pipeline, next to Leads).
2. Click New client at the top right.
3. Fill in the dialog.

📸 Caption: the New client dialog with the fields below.

What each field is for

• First name and Last name (required) — both, so the client list stays scannable.
• Email — strongly recommended. Without it you can't invite them to the portal, and your invoices have no obvious "send to" address.
• Phone — optional. Handy for site-day texts.
• Address, City, State — relevant if you bill or ship to them. The route planner can pull a client's address in as a destination when you plan a trip.
• Birthday and Anniversary — optional. Some studios use these for the thoughtful touches: a card on a birthday, flowers on a project's first anniversary. There if you want them.

Click Create client. The dialog closes; the new client appears in your list.

What to do next

A fresh client is a blank slate. The natural next steps:

1. Start their first project. From the client's page, click New project — or head to Projects and pick them from the Client dropdown in the new-project dialog. See Creating a project.

2. Invite them to the portal. Your client gets a white-labeled portal where they can review the plans, contracts, and documents you share, browse Design Boards, approve the Designs you send over, see and pay their Invoices, message you, and follow the project Schedule. From any of their projects, the Client portal card in the right sidebar has Send invite email (mails the link to the address on file) and Copy magic link (a one-click sign-in URL). See Sharing the client portal.

3. Add internal notes. The Notes section on the client's page is for your team — clients never see it. Use it for context: "Allergic to mid-century anything," "Prefers texts over email," "Husband makes the budget calls."

📸 Caption: the client detail page after creation, showing the Projects, Invoices, and Notes cards.

Related

• Creating your first lead
• Creating a project
• Sharing the client portal