Design-firm books
that reconcile themselves.
Design firms break normal bookkeeping. Client money you are holding but have not earned. Product bought on behalf of someone else. Sales tax owed to a jurisdiction you visited twice. Workroom keeps those straight where the work happens, then syncs to QuickBooks with the job attached — so month-end is a review, not a reconstruction.
Every account mapped once, then the month closes itself.
Trusted by the studios doing the work
Client funds are a liability until you earn them
A retainer is not revenue. It is somebody else's money that you are holding, and the moment it gets treated as income the books stop telling the truth — usually right up until a client asks for the balance back.
Workroom holds retainers as a credit on the client's account, allocates them to a project, and draws them down against invoices as work is actually billed. The balance you are holding and the balance you have earned are never the same number by accident.
- Held as client funds, allocated per project
- Drawn down against invoices as work is billed
- Products, services and split retainers tracked separately
- Available balance visible before you spend it
No retainers match this view.
Every trade bill knows which project it belongs to
A subcontractor invoice arrives as a PDF. In most firms it becomes a line in accounting with a vendor name and a date, and the connection to the project it was incurred on survives only in somebody's memory — which is why cost of work is always a month behind and always slightly wrong.
In Workroom a bill carries its project, the retainer pool it draws from, the contractor's own invoice number and the invoice itself. Drop the PDF and Walter fills the form, flagging anything it was not sure about rather than guessing.
- Project and retainer pool on every bill
- The contractor’s invoice attached, not filed elsewhere
- Submitted and approved, with who and when recorded
- Outstanding, due this month and 30+ days overdue at a glance
Close the books in days, not weeks
Most of what makes month-end painful in a design firm is not accounting. It is archaeology — working out which project a vendor bill belonged to, whether a deposit was ever applied, and why the client ledger and the bank disagree by the size of one sofa.
- Coded when it happens — every bill, invoice, payment and purchase order carries its project from the moment it is created, so nothing needs re-coding later.
- Two-way with QuickBooks — entries sync with the job intact, and the audit log shows what moved and when.
- No double entry — the operations record and the accounting record are the same event, not two people typing the same thing.
Quarter-end tax you did not have to wait for
Design firms owe tax in places they visited twice. The answer usually lives with an accountant, arrives a week later, and is impossible to check. That is the part of running a firm that quietly hands your authority to someone else.
Workroom shows what is owed, by jurisdiction, from the transactions that generated it — so you can see the number, see where it came from, and file it without asking anyone's permission to understand your own business.
“Month-end used to be archaeology. The coding already happened when the work did — I just review it.”
The books, specifically answered
Does this replace QuickBooks?
No, and it should not. Workroom is where the work and the money meet — estimates, invoices, purchase orders, bills, retainers and time — and QuickBooks stays your accounting system. The sync is two-way and carries the job, so cost of work is real without anyone re-coding entries at month end.
How are retainers handled?
As client funds, not revenue. Held as a credit on the client's account, allocated to a project, drawn down against invoices as work is billed. Products, services and split retainers are tracked separately so the available balance is always a real number.
What about sales tax in multiple states?
Tax is reported by jurisdiction from the transactions that created it, so the quarter-end number is traceable to the invoices behind it rather than assembled by hand. See the tax reporting →
We run multiple entities. Does that work?
Yes. Each company keeps its own books and its own QuickBooks file while the work still sits on one project record.
Can my bookkeeper have access without seeing everything?
Yes. Roles control what each person sees, so an external bookkeeper can work in the financial records without the client conversations, the margins on live proposals, or the rest of the studio's work.
Bring us your last month-end.
Tell us what you had to open and reconcile by hand, and we will show you which of it would already have been coded on the call.