The mystudio.ooo guide

Everything the app can do, in plain language — with little pieces you can actually click and try, right here on the page. Nothing here touches your real account.

mystudio.ooo is a calm home for a freelance studio: track projects, keep a client list, send invoices (and get paid by card), pencil dates onto a calendar that clients confirm in one tap, run a task board, and see the money side in analytics. It works on its own — no integrations to wire up — and your data is yours.

Creating your account

If you were invited to the beta, your invite email links straight to the sign-up page with your email filled in. Keep that email as-is — it's what unlocks free lifetime Pro.

1. Open the invite link, or go to the sign-up page and enter your name, studio name, email and a password (at least 8 characters).
2. Press Create account. We send a verification link to your inbox.
3. Click the link in that email to activate the account, then log in at the app.

You can also use Continue with Google to skip the password entirely — same result, and beta Pro is still applied automatically.

The first-run checklist

A brand-new studio greets you with a three-step checklist so you're never staring at a blank screen:

1. Add your first client — who you're working for.
2. Create your first project — a job with its dates, day rate and status.
3. Put a hold on the calendar — pencil in tentative dates a client can confirm.

Each step has a button that jumps you to the right place. Finish all three and you get a small "You're all set!" celebration. Not in the mood? Hit Skip (the ✕) and it disappears — it only ever shows while your studio is completely empty.

Explore with sample data

Want to see a fully-loaded studio before you type anything? On the empty Projects screen, click Explore with sample data. It fills the app with a realistic demo — clients, projects, invoices, calendar holds and tasks — so you can poke around every screen.

The dashboard & the privacy blur

Three summary cards sit above every screen: Total projects, Paid, and Outstanding. They're not just numbers — they're buttons:

• Total projects — shows quick filters for active projects, holds, and anything needing attention.
• Paid — click it to hide your money figures behind a blur (see below).
• Outstanding — click it to jump to Projects filtered to just the unpaid ones. Click again to clear the filter.

The privacy blur — the "Paid" card trick

Working in a café, or screen-sharing on a call? Click the Paid card and both money figures hide. But the cards don't go blank — each one answers the next question instead: when the last payment landed, and how long the oldest unpaid job has been sitting. Useful to you, useless to a shoulder-surfer. The little eye icon closes to show hiding is on. Need the number? Hover either card and the figure returns just for you — without turning the privacy off. Your choice is remembered next time you open the app.

Projects

Projects are the backbone. Each one carries a client, dates, a day rate, a running total, a status and a payment state. They're grouped into tidy Year → Month sections you can collapse.

Year & month sections

Projects stack into collapsible Year tabs, each holding its Month groups. Every year you have is listed, with the current one open and the rest folded — so nothing is ever hidden from you, it is just quiet. A year tab has two separate click zones:

• Click the year number to focus it — the other years slide away one-by-one so you see just this year. Click the number again to bring them back.
• Click anywhere else on the tab to open or close that year's projects.

Your choice is remembered — the focused year and any open tab are restored next time. The invoice archive works exactly the same way.

Creating & editing

1. Click + New project in the Projects toolbar.
2. Fill in the row inline — click any cell (name, description, client, dates, days, rate) and type. Changes save as you go.
3. Set the Status by clicking it to cycle Working → Paused → Done.
4. Set Payment by clicking Paid / Unpaid (marking it paid fires a little celebration — see Invoicing).

Finding things fast

The search box (Search project, client, payment…) matches more than names — it also finds amounts and day-rate numbers and payment status, so typing 2400 or unpaid narrows the list instantly.

Row actions

Each project row can: open an invoice (or create one from the project), duplicate the project or its invoice, open details, jump to a linked task, and archive it.

The cards view

Beside the search box there is a small list / cards switcher, the same pair as on Tasks. Cards show one tile per project, and the tile is built to be read without opening anything:

• The dot is money — grey until the project is paid, green when the money has landed.
• The badge is time — how long the job actually runs (its scheduled span, not the billed quantity), filled with the status colour: blue working, green done, amber paused. It is a switch, not a label — click it and the status cycles.
• The round button is the invoice — blue eye when one exists (with a count badge if the job has several — clicking it opens a picker so you choose which), yellow plus when the project has none yet, which starts one.
• Grouped projects share a tint, in the colour you gave the group, so a package reads as one thing at a glance.

Click a card and it expands in place — the neighbouring cards squeeze over to make room. The drawer shows the dates, the rate, the status with a clickable Paid / Unpaid pill (the same switch as the table's chip, linked invoice included), every linked invoice as its own row — each opens its invoice, and each row's paid badge is clickable too — and a Project Details button for the full editor. Click the card again to close it.

Your choice of list or cards is remembered per device.

Grouping projects Pro

Hold Ctrl (or ⌘) and click project rows — each one you click is marked in amber. Let the key go and the marked rows fold into a single group row with a G badge, the member count and their combined value. Click the group to open it; the rows slide out beneath it and the caret turns.

• Rename — click the group's title and type. Enter saves, Esc cancels.
• Colour — click the group's colour dot (in the client column) and pick from the palette. The whole group row takes that colour, so it stands out while you scan the table.
• Reading the row — the member count sits under Description and the group's combined total under Total, lining up with the projects beneath it.
• Archive the group — the box icon archives every member at once. The bin beside it deletes the whole group permanently, after a confirmation.
• Ungroup — hold Ctrl and click the group row. It turns red while the key is down so you know what the click will do.

Grouping only changes how the table reads. Members stay ordinary projects everywhere else — in search, on the calendar, in analytics and on their invoices. Grouping, ungrouping and archiving are all undoable with Ctrl+Z.

The archive

The Total projects card shows an archived count next to the active one whenever something is archived. Click it to open the archive: the table shows only archived work, with a banner telling you how many there are and how many days remain before they are deleted.

• Restore — per row, per group, or Restore all from the banner.
• Delete permanently — only offered in here, and it still asks first, because this one cannot be undone.
• Emptying the archive — by restoring or deleting — returns you to the studio on its own.

Archived projects are left out of every headline figure: total, active, settled and outstanding. Money you have archived is not money you are still chasing.

Project details & images

Open a project's details for notes plus reference images Pro. The image viewer has a genuine annotation studio — draw, erase, drop text pins, and a wall/single toggle. See keyboard shortcuts for the viewer keys.

Reading the table

Hovering a project row lifts it with a soft highlight so your eye doesn't lose its place while scanning across the columns. Rows that are Working or Paused carry a gentle tint of their own, so an active job is obvious without reading the status column.

Reorder the columns Pro by dragging their headers into the order you actually work in — the layout is remembered for next time, and double-clicking a header resets it. Dragging the divider between two headers resizes a column; double-clicking that divider resets its width.

Adding images Pro

In the details panel, use + Add Images or just drop files onto it — you can even paste a screenshot straight from your clipboard (Ctrl/⌘+V). Boards, stills, references, mock-ups, motion frames — anything.

The viewer: Single & Wall

• Single view shows one image at a time — arrow keys move between them.
• Wall view (press W) tiles every image on one board you can pan and zoom across. Press Space over any tile to zoom into it, and again to zoom back out.
• Each wall tile carries a faint number in its corner, so you can say "look at 12" instead of counting across the board.
• Zoom with + / − (0 resets), and switch the board background between light and dark to suit the artwork.

Which images already have markup

Thumbnails — in the grid and on the wall — show small markers when an image already carries markup: one solid dot per ink colour someone drew with, and a hollow ring if it has pinned notes. Hover for the counts. So you can see at a glance which references have been commented on without opening them one by one.

The annotation studio

Mark up an image without touching the original:

• Draw (D) and Eraser (E) to sketch feedback, Ctrl/⌘+Z to undo a stroke.
• Hide drawings (H) flips your markup off and on without deleting it, so you can compare against the clean image.
• Clear all (C) wipes every stroke and pin on that image. It asks first — a keystroke should never lose your markup.

Text pins = a mini chat on the image

This is the collaboration heart of the app. Click anywhere on an image to drop a text note pin exactly where the feedback belongs. Each pin is a small conversation:

• Write the note (Enter saves, Esc cancels). It lives as a numbered pin on that spot.
• Anyone on the project can open the pin and Reply — a chronological thread builds up, each message stamped with who said it and when.
• Type @ to mention a teammate — pick them from the list. Mentions are highlighted, and the person gets a notification that links them straight to that exact pin.
• Pins are drag to move, click to open. You can edit or delete your own notes and replies; others' stay read-only.

Sharing details with collaborators Pro

If you've invited people to a project, they see this same details view — the gallery, your notes, and every pin chat. Members can add images and join the pin conversations; it all syncs back to you. So the image board doubles as a shared review room: drop a pin, @mention the retoucher, and they get pulled right to the spot you meant.

Clients

A simple, fast roster — and the usual starting point, since you bill and book against a client. The screen has the add/edit form on the left and your searchable list on the right.

Adding a client

1. Open Clients from the top nav.
2. In the left-hand form, enter a first & last name and an email (the one field the form insists on — it's what reminders and invoice links are sent to), plus optional company, phone and address.
3. Company auto-find — start typing a company name and mystudio suggests matching companies, each with its logo. Pick one and it fills the company name and attaches the logo for you.
4. Press Save Client — they appear in the roster on the right straight away.

Working the roster

• Click any client to load them into the form for editing. Delete sits at the bottom-left of that form.
• Each client shows how many projects they have, so your busiest clients are obvious at a glance.
• Sort by company, contact name, or project count using the control above the list. The roster re-reveals itself row by row when you change it.
• On the Free plan the roster header shows a counter (e.g. 7/10) — see below.

How many clients you can add

The Free plan holds 10 clients. The counter in the roster header turns amber as you reach it, and clicking it opens the upgrade options. Pro is unlimited.

Company logos

Each client can carry a logo — it shows on their roster row, in the client picker, and on their invoices. There are three ways to set one:

• Auto-find — typing the company name (above) finds and attaches the logo automatically.
• Upload — click Upload logo and choose an image. It's trimmed and shrunk to a tidy round icon for you.
• Paste — copy any image (a screenshot, or a logo from a website) and press Ctrl / ⌘ + V while the client form is open.

Use Replace to swap it or Remove to clear it. Uploaded and pasted logos are stored with the client, so they always appear — no re-fetching needed.

Editing & finding

• Edit — click a client in the roster, change any field, then press Update.
• Search — the box matches name, company, email or phone, so a few letters find anyone.
• Delete — remove a client from their row.

The roster reads like a table — logo · company · contact · email & phone — so you can scan it at a glance.

Invoicing

The Invoices screen is split: the editor on the left (a three-tab pill), and a live preview plus your archive on the right.

1 · My Profile — set this once

The My Profile tab holds everything that's the same on every invoice:

• Studio info — company name, your name, email, registered address, and a logo Pro (PNG/JPG/WEBP/SVG, up to 1 MB).
• Bank details — account holder, account number/IBAN, routing/sort code, SWIFT/BIC, plus PayPal and Zelle. These print on the invoice so clients know where to pay.
  • Add your own fields. Banks ask for different things in different countries — an EIN or ABN, an intermediary bank, a beneficiary reference. Press + Add field, name it whatever your bank calls it, and it prints alongside the built-in rows looking exactly like them. A field only appears on the invoice once it has both a name and a value, so a half-typed row can never leak onto a client's copy.
  • Click a field's name to keep it off invoices. The name turns solid black with a small green dot when the row prints, and grey when it does not. Handy when you keep several sets of details on file but only send some of them — the ones you switch off stay saved, they just stop appearing.

2 · New Invoice — build the document

1. Pick a template (Studio / Foundation / Classic — Classic is Pro).
2. Choose the client.
3. Add line items — each row has a description, quantity and rate, with the line total computed for you. Drag rows by their handle to reorder; use + Add Row for more.
4. Set the date, due date and VAT % if you charge tax.
5. Press Create Invoice. Editing an existing invoice needs no button at all — changes save themselves in the background, and a small green dot beside the title blinks each time a save lands. Clicking the Invoice tab always opens a fresh, clean editor.

More options (worth knowing)

Expand More options for:

• Online card payment — a per-invoice toggle that shows a "Pay by card" button on the shared invoice. It is off by default; turn it on per invoice when you want it. Requires card payments to be connected (see Getting paid by card).
• Card processing fee — choose to absorb it ("client pays the invoice total") or pass it on ("add to client's total").
• Deposit / Progress / Final labels — tag an invoice, and for a Deposit split the total by 25 / 50 / 75% (or custom); the follow-up invoice is created for the remainder.
• Notes — a rich-text note area.
• Custom currency & amount — override the currency for a single invoice without affecting your main totals.

Splitting an invoice — deposits & staged payments

Big jobs rarely get paid in one go, so an invoice can be split into parts. Under More options, tag it Deposit, Progress, or Final and mystudio does the maths:

1. Choose Deposit and pick the split — 25 / 50 / 75%, or a custom percentage.
2. That invoice bills only that share (a 50% deposit on a $2,000 project charges $1,000), and the project total is preserved.
3. The follow-up invoice for the remainder is created for you automatically — send it when the work's done, tagged Final, with any Progress invoices in between.

Each part is its own invoice with its own amount and paid/unpaid status, but they stay linked to the same project — so you can collect a deposit up front and the balance later without re-entering anything.

Billing a single invoice in another currency

Have one client who pays in a different currency? Under More options → Custom currency & amount, set the currency for that invoice only (e.g. EUR or GBP) while the rest of your studio stays in your default currency. A custom-currency invoice is excluded from your main totals, so your dashboard and analytics aren't skewed by exchange rates.

3 · Design — the invoice designer Pro

The Design tab turns an invoice into a branded document, with the live preview on the right updating as you change things. The panel is split into two tabs — Global (colour, logo, wording, graphic) and Sections (the building blocks) — so the section list never drowns in layout settings. Fastest way around: click any part of the invoice preview and the panel jumps straight to that section's settings, expanded and highlighted. The tour:

1. Accent colour — the colour used for headings, rules and totals. Set it to your brand.
2. Logo — show or hide it and scale it to the right size in the header (upload the file itself in My Profile).
3. Title & wording — rename the document title (e.g. "Invoice" → "Receipt") and edit the heading and footer text.
4. Decorative graphic — drop in a premium shape and tune its size, opacity, rotation and position. Drag a slider to preview live; it saves when you release.
5. Sections — the building blocks (Header, Bill-to, Line items, Totals, Notes, Bank details, Footer) can be dragged to reorder and toggled on/off, so each invoice shows only what it needs.

The design is saved to your studio's template, so once it looks right, every new invoice inherits it. Want a fast start instead? The New Invoice tab's template picker (Studio / Foundation / Classic) gives you a polished base to tweak.

Art layers: putting your own images on the invoice Pro

The Design tab carries an Art layers stack — up to 10 images you place anywhere on the sheet, in the order you choose. Each layer has its own name, size, rotation, opacity and blend mode (multiply, screen, overlay, difference, invert and the rest), plus horizontal and vertical flips. Drag a layer straight on the preview to position it; the list reorders with the arrows, and any layer can be duplicated or hidden without deleting it.

Masking crops a layer to whatever shape you want. Press Draw shape and click on the preview to drop points — drag a point to move it, right-click to remove one. The crop previews live as you work, and is baked into the image when you press Done so it prints and exports exactly as you see it.

Background fills the page behind everything: a flat colour, or a two-stop gradient with an angle. Text colours set the title, body, section labels and total independently, and reset back to the template in one click.

Export (next to Reset) downloads the whole design as one file — layout, colours, background and every layer image inlined — so you can keep a copy or send it on.

Splitting an invoice: deposit, progress, final

Under More options → Label, tag an invoice Deposit, Progress, Final or Custom. Choose Deposit and you can set a percentage — 50% of a 5,000 project rewrites that invoice to 2,500 and issues the balancing Final automatically.

The Final is never a number you type. It is always the project total minus everything else billed to it, so the plan stays honest:

• Split again at 25% and the Final drops to absorb it.
• Edit a deposit from 2,500 to 3,000 and the Final becomes 2,000.
• Delete a part and the Final takes that amount back.
• Uneven splits round onto the Final, so the parts always sum to the contract exactly.

Every invoice in the chain counts as outstanding until it is individually paid. One exception: a Final you have already been paid for is never rewritten — changing a collected amount would misstate what you have actually banked.

Colour tags

The circle beside the label pills sets a colour tag. Tagged invoices are tinted in the archive, so a project reads as one visual group at a glance. Tag any part of a split and the whole chain takes that colour. It is internal — the client never sees it on their invoice.

Sending, sharing & getting paid

• Share copies a hosted invoice link to your clipboard (the button flips to Copied ✓). Send that link however you like — the client opens a clean web invoice and can pay by card there if you enabled it.
• Viewed badge — the archive shows when a client has opened the link, and how many times.
• Download PDF renders a crisp A4 PDF named Invoice_<id>.pdf. A long invoice runs onto as many pages as it needs, and line items are never split across a page break.
• Mark settled / paid — flips the status and fires the celebration below.

Marking an invoice paid

When you mark an unpaid invoice as paid, the button turns green and a little burst of your currency symbol pops out. The amount also moves from Outstanding to Paid on your dashboard.

Calendar & holds

A hold is a tentative date you pencil in before a job is confirmed — no more double-booking. The calendar shows project bars and priority-coloured hold bars, with a month grid, an active-holds sidebar, a history deck of past holds, and a Gantt-style timeline.

Placing a hold

1. Click + New Hold — or right-click any day on the grid to start one already dated to that day.
2. Set the project/description, client, start and end dates, a priority (1st / 2nd / 3rd), and a confirm-by date.
3. Save. The hold appears on the grid and in the active-holds list, sorted by priority.

That Save button exists only for new holds — editing an existing one saves itself as you type, with a green dot beside the title as the receipt. The editor's footer also carries a trash icon: delete removes the hold everywhere at once (and Ctrl+Z brings it back), while setting the status to Cancelled keeps it in History instead.

Putting a hold on your real calendar

Open a hold (click Edit on it) — the two export buttons sit bottom-left of the editor. They export exactly what the form currently shows, saved or not:

• Google Calendar — opens Google with the hold pre-filled as an all-day event across its dates. One click to save it.
• Apple / Outlook (.ics) — downloads a standard calendar file. Open it and it lands in whatever calendar app owns .ics on your machine — Apple Calendar, Outlook, anything.

The event carries the hold's name and its confirm-by date in the notes, so the hold exists in the calendar the rest of your life already lives in — not only in here.

Letting the client confirm

This is the magic bit — the client confirms with a single click, no phone tag:

1. On a hold, choose Send email. Pick a tone — Friendly, Professional, or Direct — and we pre-fill a message with the client's name, the dates and the confirm-by date. Edit anything, then Review & Send (or open it in your own mail app).
2. The client clicks confirm or decline in that email.
3. Their answer comes back into the app: the hold flips to Confirmed (green) or Cancelled, and a chip appears on your dashboard — ✓ confirmed / ✕ declined — pulsing until you acknowledge it.

Your public booking link

Producers can hold you without an account. Click the chain icon next to Sync (top-right of the calendar) to get your booking link — one URL you can drop in a DM, an email signature or your bio.

• Visitors see your next 12 weeks as free and busy days — no client names, no rates, light and dark mode. Held days use your calendar colours — yellow for a 1st hold, cyan for a 2nd, a split cell when a day carries both — so a producer instantly reads what's still possible.
• Request a hold is a small form: name, company, email, dates, an optional hold level (1st, 2nd, or first available), a note. The request lands in your Active Holds marked via link, matched to your client base when the email or company fits, and you get an email about it — plus a bell in the app, and the hold pops onto your calendar by itself within the minute.
• That email carries one-click Confirm hold / Decline buttons (they also appear inside the hold's editor). Accepting keeps the hold active and reserves the dates; either way the requester is emailed automatically under your name, and their reply lands in your inbox, not ours.

Open your own link while signed in and a private settings panel appears: click the big page title to rename it, and tick any project or hold to hide it from the public calendar. Producers never see that panel. Reset link in the modal kills the old URL if it ever leaks somewhere you did not want.

The hold ladder is automatic

Release or cancel a hold and everyone below it on the same dates moves up a rung — the 2nd hold becomes 1st, the 3rd becomes 2nd — with a notice telling you who moved. That is the ritual the industry runs on email and memory, done for you.

Tasks Pro

A lightweight board for the to-dos behind your projects. Each task has an ID, an optional project, a title, assignees, notes, a due date, a priority and a status.

Notes & images on a task

Task notes are a rich editor, and below them a task carries its own image gallery — up to 30, exactly like a project. Click to browse, drag files in, or just paste a screenshot straight from the clipboard while the editor is open (it works even while you're typing in the notes box). Remove all clears the lot — it asks once, in place, before it does.

Pictures are shrunk before upload, so a big camera shot is fine: what matters is the file you pick is under 25 MB, not what it weighs after. Anything larger is skipped with a note saying why.

Open any task image and you get the full annotation studio: draw, erase, and drop text pins that turn into comment threads. If the task belongs to a project, you can @mention that project's collaborators from a pin and they'll be notified — so feedback on a specific detail lives on the image instead of in an email chain.

1. Open Tasks and click + Add task — or press T over any project row to start one already linked to it.
2. Set a priority (None / Low / Medium / High) and a status by clicking them inline.
3. Filter by project or status along the top; use Edit statuses to add, rename or recolour your own columns.

List or cards

The switcher beside Edit statuses flips the tab between a list — dense, one row per task, best once there are a lot of them — and cards, where each task gets a tile carrying its priority, the first lines of its notes, its assignees and a progress bar. Switching plays the tasks in one at a time rather than snapping, so you can see what moved where.

Your choice is remembered. Coming back to the layout you left is the point; being put back in the other one on every load is what makes a setting feel broken.

Drag a card to move it. Pick one up and the card you are holding stays in the grid as a dashed ghost, sitting in the slot it would land in, while the others slide out of its way — so you are looking at the arrangement you are about to get rather than guessing from a line. Drop it to keep that order, or press Esc to throw it away. Ctrl/⌘+Z undoes a reorder like anything else.

There is one order, not one per layout — what you arrange in cards is the order the list shows too. Reordering while a filter is on only moves the cards you can see; everything the filter is hiding keeps its place.

Working the list

• Click a row anywhere to open it. The priority and status badges still work inline without opening the editor.
• Shift+click a row to delete it immediately. No confirmation — Ctrl/⌘+Z undoes it.
• Delete also lives at the bottom-left of the task editor.
• A new task isn't created until you press Save, so cancelling leaves nothing behind.

Archive

Finished tasks don’t have to sit in the list forever. Open one and press Archive, beside Delete in the editor, and it leaves the list without being destroyed. An Archived button appears next to the view switcher — click it to see what’s in there, and Restore to bring anything back.

• Archive is reversible, Delete isn’t. That’s why Archive is the quiet button and Delete is the red one.
• Ctrl/⌘+Z undoes an archive, the same as any other change.
• Archived tasks are cleared for good after 30 days — the same grace period as archived projects. Restore anything you want to keep before then.
• The Archived button only appears when the archive isn’t empty, so it stays out of the way until you’ve used it.

Archiving is a tidying tool, not a storage one. What actually takes up room in a studio is images, not task records — if you’re clearing space, the image galleries are where to look.

From a project row

Every project row has a stripe at its left edge. It's coloured when the project has tasks (taking the colour of its most important one) and a quiet + when it doesn't. Click it — or press T while hovering the row — to see that project's tasks in a small list, with a + Add task at the bottom. Opening a task from there keeps the Tasks tab filtered to that project.

Tasks can be assigned to collaborators, and assignees can update status from their Shared view (below).

Licenses Pro

If you license work — artwork, footage, music, plugins — the Licenses tab keeps every deal in one place: what is licensed, for whom, the terms, the fee, and when it runs out. It's optional: switch it on or off under Profile → Show Licenses tab.

• No Save button. A new license creates itself the moment it has a name, then every edit auto-saves — the little green dot in the title confirms each save.
• Renewals chase themselves. Set Remind me before (30 days by default) and the tab shows an amber count of licenses inside their renewal window; expired ones go red. You also get a nudge email when one enters the window — a renewal is the easiest money in the business.
• Artwork on the license. Drop an image into the editor — click the frame or just paste with Ctrl+V. It becomes the face of the license.
• Two views. The switcher by the title flips between a compact list (the artwork ghosts in behind each row) and an image-led card wall where each card takes its picture's own shape. Try the demo — the sample studio ships with a few licensed classics.
• Importer-aware. The CSV importer recognises license spreadsheets — name, client, terms, price, dates — and maps the columns for you.

Sharing & collaboration Pro

Invite people to a project and work together without giving up control.

• Invite by email from a project's details, with a role of Member or Manager. Pending and accepted invites are tracked; you can resend, cancel or remove.
• Invitees see a Shared tab (it only appears once something is shared with them) listing projects other people own, with your role badge.
• Members can add project images and update the status of tasks assigned to them; Managers can change any task. Everything syncs back to the owner.
• Shared tasks come in the same list or cards layouts as your own, with their own switcher and its own remembered choice — these tasks sit inside project cards, so the layout that works here isn’t always the one that works on your Tasks tab.
• You can step back out on your own. Unassign me takes you off a single task and leaves you on the project; Leave project removes you from the whole thing, after a confirmation. An image you added, you can also remove. Nobody has to chase the owner to be taken off something.

Invited to someone else's project? See Creating your account — your invite link brings you to sign-up if you don't have an account yet.

Month timeline

Under the calendar, every project in view gets one bar across the month — a quick read of what overlaps what.

• Hover a row and its dates, length in days and status fade in right on the bar (a bar at the month's edge slides out just enough to fit the text). At the same time that project lights up in the calendar above and the other chips fade back.
• Click a row and it stretches open for a bigger read — click again (or another row) to fold it back. Clicking the title on the left opens the project itself; on hold rows it opens the hold editor.
• Drag a bar to slide the whole booking to new dates, or grab an edge to move just the start or the end. Ctrl+Z undoes a date change.
• Bars that run off the edge carry a small count — +28d→ on the right, ←12d on the left — so a project ending on the 31st is never confused with one running to mid-September.
• Archived projects are gone from both the calendar and the timeline, so a tidied month actually looks tidy.

Analytics

The money picture, per year. You get a Performance card with year-cumulative, paid and pending-pipeline tiles, and a line chart of Paid vs Total by month with hover tooltips.

• Everyone can view the analytics.
• Exporting an income summary to PDF or CSV is Pro.

Settings & appearance

Click your avatar in the top-right corner to open your Profile page. From here you can manage your plan and billing, import data, connect card payments, sign out, and delete your account. The Appearance & preferences section is where you make the app yours:

• Theme — Light, Dark or Auto.
• Colours — pick your accent, background and tab colours, or hit Reset to brand defaults.
• Text size — nudge everything up or down.
• Currency — a dozen options (USD, EUR, GBP, JPY, and more).
• Language Pro — English, Español, Português, Deutsch, Italiano, Українська.
• Backup & export Pro — download your whole studio as JSON, or import a backup.

Your details on invoices

Under My profile, the Studio / Company name field has a Company only tick beside it. Invoices normally print your company name with your personal name beneath — tick this and only the company name appears. It applies to new invoices from that point on; already-issued ones keep the details they were created with, so your records stay accurate.

Importing from another tool

Import data brings in spreadsheets or exports from Monday, Airtable, Notion and Trello (xlsx / csv / xml) with a column-mapping step and a preview before anything is added.

Desktop app Pro

Pro users can install mystudio as a desktop app — it runs in its own window with a dock/taskbar icon, no separate download or setup. It stays fully in sync with your account, since it's the same studio you use in the browser, just running standalone. Click Install desktop app in Settings, or use your browser's install icon in the address bar (Chrome & Edge on desktop).

Uninstalling — it removes like any installed web app, with no leftovers:

• From the app window — click the ⋯ menu in its title bar and choose Uninstall mystudio.ooo.
• Chrome / Edge — go to chrome://apps (or edge://apps), right-click mystudio, and pick Remove/Uninstall.
• Windows — it also appears in Settings → Apps → Installed apps, where you can uninstall it like any program.
• macOS — remove it from Launchpad or ~/Applications/Chrome Apps.

Uninstalling only removes the app window — your studio and all its data stay safe in your account and are still there in the browser.

Security & sign-in

An invoicing tool holds the most private numbers a freelancer has: your bank details, your clients' contacts, and what you charge whom. Everything below lives in Profile → Security, a card that stays folded until you open it. The padlock beside its title is the status at a glance — grey until two-factor is on, green once it is.

Two-factor authentication

A password can be guessed, leaked in someone else's breach, or reused. Two-factor adds a second thing to know: a 6-digit code from an authenticator app on your phone, which changes every 30 seconds.

1. Open Profile → Security and press Enable two-factor.
2. Scan the QR code with any authenticator — Google Authenticator, 1Password, Authy, Apple's built-in Passwords, whichever you already use.
3. No camera to hand? Press Copy key and paste the secret in manually. It reveals itself with a scramble animation so it is never sitting on screen as plain text longer than it needs to be.
4. Type the current code to confirm. Nothing is switched on until a real code proves the app actually has the secret — otherwise you could lock yourself out with a key nobody saved.

Backup codes

Turning two-factor on hands you eight one-time codes. They are shown exactly once — save them somewhere that is not the phone running the authenticator. Each works a single time, at sign-in or to switch two-factor back off, and the card tells you how many are left.

Trusted devices

Entering a code every time you open your own laptop gets old fast. When the code prompt appears there is a Trust this device and don't ask for a code again box, ticked by default. Enter the code once and that machine stops being asked for as long as you keep using it. You can forget any device from the Security card.

• It never skips your password — that is still required every single time. Only the second factor is skipped, and only on a device that has already passed it.
• What is stored is a random token in a cookie the browser will not let scripts read. Your password and your authenticator secret are not in it, and nothing in it could rebuild either.
• Untick the box on a machine that is not yours. A shared or public computer should never be remembered.
• Forget trusted devices in the Security card clears the lot, and every device is asked for a code again next time.

Signed-in devices

The card lists every browser currently signed in — what it is (Chrome · Windows, Safari · iPhone), roughly where it is, and when it was last seen. Hover the location to see the address it came from.

• Sign out on any row you do not recognise. It fades in as you hover the row, and the device it belongs to is signed out on its next request.
• Sign out everywhere ends every session but the one you are using, in one click.
• The location is worked out from the address your connection arrives on, so it lands on your town or the nearest one your provider routes through — close, not exact.

Signing in with Google

If you use Sign in with Google, Google's own two-factor already protects the account. Should you want ours on top, tick Also ask for a code after Google sign-in in the Security card. Switching it back off needs a current code, so nobody who borrows an open laptop can quietly lower the drawbridge.

If you lose the authenticator

In order:

1. Use a backup code — at sign-in, or in the disable flow to turn two-factor off and set it up again.
2. Still signed in somewhere? A trusted device or an open session gets you in without a code.
3. Out of both, get in touch. Identity is checked by hand and the reset is done from the admin side. There is deliberately no self-service way to strip two-factor off an account — a button that did that would be the easiest way in for everyone else.

What protects the data itself

• Encrypted at rest. Your studio — clients, invoices, bank details — is stored AES-256 encrypted. A stolen database file or a leaked backup is ciphertext.
• Honest about the limit. This is not end-to-end encryption: the key lives on the server, because the server has to read your data to render an invoice. It protects a stolen file, not a fully compromised machine, and anyone claiming otherwise about a web invoicing tool is overselling.
• Brute force, throttled. Repeated wrong passwords lock the attempt down with escalating cool-offs, per account and per address.
• Reset links are single-use, expire in an hour, and are stored only as hashes.
• Changing your password signs out every other session automatically.

Plans & billing

Two tiers. Here's the short version of who unlocks what:

The Upgrade modal (or any locked feature) offers Pro at $7/mo or $60/yr — yearly gives two months free. Checkout and Manage billing run through Stripe.

Getting paid by card

Let clients pay an invoice with a card, straight from its shared link.

1. In Settings, choose Set up card payments Pro and complete the Stripe onboarding. When it's done you'll see Payments connected · LIVE.
2. On any invoice, open More options and turn on Online card payment (it's off by default).
3. Share the invoice. The client's web invoice now shows a Pay by card button, and paid invoices update automatically.

Payouts, fees and refunds are handled by Stripe under your own connected account — mystudio just shows the button and records the result.

Keyboard shortcuts

These make daily work much faster. Shortcuts pause while you're typing in a field.

Anywhere in the app

Projects list

Tasks list

Image viewer & annotator

Date picker

In most inline edit fields, Enter saves and Esc cancels.

Hidden gems & tips

Small touches that make the app nicer once you know they're there:

• Privacy blur — click the Paid card to hide money; hover to peek. (The one at the top of this guide.)
• Outstanding shortcut — click the Outstanding card to jump to just the unpaid projects.
• Search finds money — type an amount like 2400 in project search, not just names.
• Now — the button beside your avatar clears everything away and shows only today: what's in production, tasks, holds about to expire, money to chase, and what deserves attention. Every card is clickable. Esc closes it.
• Drag to reorder — invoice line items reorder by dragging their handle, and the projects table columns reorder by dragging their headers. The order is remembered; double-click a header to reset it.
• Double-click a column divider in the projects table to reset that column's width.
• Undo — deletes don't nag you with a dialog. They just happen, and Ctrl/⌘+Z (or the toast) puts them back.
• The stripe beside a project name is its task indicator — coloured when tasks exist, a quiet + when they don't. Either way it's one click to that project's tasks.
• Filters show everything at once — turn on Active or Outstanding and the month tabs step aside for one combined list of every match in the year.
• Solo a year — click any card in Analytics and the other years fold away. Click again to bring them back.
• Right-click an image in the viewer for a context menu.
• Odometer counters — your dashboard figures roll like an odometer when they change.
• Jump & flash — clicking a notification smooth-scrolls to the item and flashes it so you can't lose it.
• Email read receipts — hover a hold's send-status line to see exactly when the client opened it.
• Reorder the three top cards — drag any of Paid, Outstanding or Total projects sideways and drop it where you want. A dashed outline shows the slot it will land in.
• Restyle a card with the mouse wheel — hover one of the three and scroll sideways (a tilt wheel, Shift+wheel, or a trackpad swipe) to dim or lift it. Hold Ctrl/⌘ while you do it and the whole card takes a colour instead — keep going and the hue wraps all the way round. Middle-click a card to put it back to stock.
• Merge two cards — drag a card by the small corner grip toward its neighbour and the two join into one wide card, each half keeping its own figure.
• Focus one project row — scroll sideways over the projects table to set how far the other rows fade back while you point at one. At full strength a busy month reads as a single row.
• Follow a project across the month — hover a row in the Month timeline and that project lights up everywhere it appears in the calendar above, while every other chip drains away.
• Everything remembers — theme, accent colour, text size, currency, the privacy blur and your filters all persist between visits.

Troubleshooting