Running a 30-client agency on ProTasks: an operations playbook

The chaos that comes with scaling

At 5 clients, anything works. At 15 clients, your tools start to creak. At 30+ clients, you either have systems — or you have burnout.

Here's an operations playbook for running a multi-client agency on ProTasks. Steal what works.

One board per client. Always.

Don't try to put all clients on one master board with a "Client" custom field. It always falls apart. One board per client gives you:

• A clean client view to share
• Per-client time reports
• Independent automations
• A natural archive when the engagement ends

Use a consistent naming convention: [ClientName] - [ProjectScope]. Example: Acme Co - Website Redesign 2026.

Standardize columns across boards

Every client board should have the same columns:

1. Inbox — new requests, not yet scoped
2. Up next — scoped and prioritized
3. In progress — active work
4. Internal review — your QA (hidden from client)
5. Client review — awaiting client approval
6. Done — shipped

Why consistency matters: when your team jumps between client boards, they don't have to relearn the layout. Cognitive overhead drops to zero.

Use board templates

ProTasks lets you save any board as a template. Create your "Agency Client Template" once, then spin up new clients with one click. Columns, automations, and custom fields all carry over.

Label discipline

Use the same labels across every board:

• design / dev / copy / strategy — the discipline
• revision — client-requested change
• urgent — self-explanatory
• client-blocker — we're stuck waiting on them

This lets you slice across the whole agency: "show me every client-blocker task across all 30 clients."

Custom fields for billing

Add two custom fields to every client board:

• Estimated hours (number)
• Billable? (checkbox)

Mark both as internal-only so clients don't see them. Now at the end of each week, you can pull a per-client billable-hours report in 30 seconds.

Automations every agency should run

• When a card moves to Client review → notify the client (via the client view; they'll see it instantly)
• When client-blocker label is added → notify the account lead in Slack
• When the same task sits in Inbox for 5+ days → bump to urgent
• Weekly digest of every client's In progress to your studio's Slack channel

Sharing discipline

Every client gets exactly one share link, sent in the kickoff email and pinned in your client comms doc. Don't email screenshots. Don't write status reports. Send the link.

The result

Agencies that adopt this kind of system tell us:

• 60–80% fewer "what's the status?" emails
• Weekly reporting goes from 4 hours to 30 minutes
• Onboarding a new account manager takes a day, not a month
• Margins improve because billable hours are actually captured

The tool is only half of it. The other half is the discipline to run consistent systems. Both compound.