How to Automate Streamtime

Studio hours are the only thing a design business sells

Streamtime is job management software for creative businesses: design studios, digital and branding agencies, in-house teams and architects. It is built in Sydney and it has a point of view, which is that a studio should be able to see its money without making its people fill in timesheets.

The unit of work is a job. A job carries a plan, the items and hours the studio expects to spend, and that plan is the same object that becomes the quote. Time is logged against it by dragging on a schedule rather than typing into a grid, and at the end the job becomes an invoice that carries through to Xero, MYOB or QuickBooks.

The reporting is what makes an owner log in. Work in progress, client profitability, team capacity, how much of a job's cost was actually recovered. A Kanban board shows the stage each job has reached, and weekly check-ins ask the team how the week felt, which is an unusual thing for project software to care about.

Between the brief and the launch sits a lot of waiting

A studio's plan is accurate right up until it meets a client.

The proof went over on Monday and nothing has come back. The second round of amends turns into a fourth, and none of the extra rounds were quoted. A quote sent a fortnight ago has been neither accepted nor declined, just left. A site is meant to go live on the first and nobody has checked whether the DNS is ready for it.

Then the work that arrives long after the invoice. A client's domain renews in eleven days and the studio holds the account. A certificate expires over a weekend. A launched site's contact form quietly stopped sending and the first anyone hears about it is a phone call. Final files sit in a folder waiting on a payment nobody has confirmed.

None of that is designing. It is a designer working as a switchboard.

Streamtime

Renewals that surface themselves Domains, certificates and hosting for every client the studio looks after, read at the registrar and matched to the job they belong to.

Revision rounds counted honestly Feedback rounds tallied where they actually arrive and set against what the quote allowed, so the fourth one is a conversation rather than a write-off.

Launches checked on the live site The go-live list run against the site itself once it is up: pages responding, forms sending, redirects behaving, analytics recording.

Logging time and billing a job already look after themselves

Much of that is already answered by the software the studio is paying for.

A job plan is built from items and hours and turned straight into a quote, so what was sold and what is being made are the same list. Time tracking runs off the schedule, and drag-and-drop planning shows who has unscheduled hours next week and who is buried. Invoicing bills by job plan, by quote, by time or in instalments. Reporting covers work in progress, client profitability and job cost recovery, and a burn-up chart shows a job eating its plan before the overrun turns into a write-off. Job posts keep the conversation attached to the work instead of in somebody's inbox.

The edge of that circle is the studio itself. Streamtime knows what your team planned, logged and billed, and reasons about it well. It has no view of the registrar holding your client's domain, the review tool where feedback is being left, the staging site that either works or does not, or the client's accounts portal deciding when your invoice gets paid.

A job that keeps learning things after it ships

The job can go on being useful after delivery, if it is allowed to look at the site it produced.

Domains, certificates and hosting for every client the studio looks after, read at the registrar rather than remembered, matched to the job or retainer they sit under, so a renewal is a note in week one instead of an outage on a Sunday.

Revision rounds counted where the feedback actually arrives and set against what the quote allowed, so the fourth round becomes a conversation before it becomes a write-off. Proofs sent and not approved, ordered by launch date rather than by age. The go-live list run against the live site itself: pages responding, forms sending, redirects behaving, analytics recording.

Quotes that went quiet chased with a draft the account lead only has to read. Invoices checked in the client's own payment portal before final files are released, so nobody hands over a website and then has to raise the money afterwards.

The line stays where it always is. Reading, checking and drafting run unattended. Sending a quote, releasing files or telling a client their scope has changed belongs to a person.

The registrar and the review link still need opening

All of it is browser work, which is why it lands on whoever in the studio looks least busy that afternoon.

WebRun is an agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens the registrar, the review tool, the staging site or a client's payment portal, reads what is there, and either notes it against the job in Streamtime or hands the studio a short list.

Nothing has to be integrated first, which matters when a studio's stack is whatever each client already had. It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, you can watch a run and stop it, and anything that reaches a client waits for you.

The workflows below are already built, and each one names the sites it opens.