How Do You Keep an Overview of Multiple Clients at Once?

Ask an agency how project management is organized and you'll often hear the same answer: every client gets their own board. Ask a freelancer with multiple clients and you'll hear something similar: a separate list for every client. Sounds tidy. Ten clients, ten boards, everything neatly separated. Until you ask yourself the simplest question there is: what needs to happen first today? No single board can answer that, because the answer is spread across all ten.

The board-per-client problem

A board per client feels logical the moment you create it. The client is the unit you think in, so the client becomes the unit you organize around. With two or three clients, that works fine too.

But an agency with ten clients doesn't have ten separate workdays. There's one team, one schedule and one day. Koos works on a campaign for one client in the morning and is in the copy for another client in the afternoon. His work runs straight through all the boards, but no single board shows that.

The result: everyone builds their own shadow administration. A to-do list in a note, a sticky note next to the keyboard, a list in their head. Exactly what you wanted a project tool to prevent.

Ten boards means switching ten times a day

Anyone in a board-per-client setup who wants to know how the agency is doing has to go through every board. Open, scan, remember what you saw, next board. And because you can't remember it, you do it again tomorrow. That's not an overview, that's a daily inspection round.

The creeping problem is that every switch costs attention. You were just in the context of client A and now have to reload the situation of client B into your head. Do that ten times a day and not much of your focused working time is left. Not because anyone is lazy, but because the structure forces you to switch. If you're a freelancer working alone for five clients, that switching isn't any less, you just have nobody to complain to about it.

That's how it looked at Evertising too. Every client had its own board or tool, and switching between those systems all day was overhead that added nothing. Nothing connected, and we never really had an overview across all clients at once.

Why priorities don't stop at the client boundary

The biggest objection to separate boards isn't even the lost time. It's that priorities across clients become invisible.

Say the board for Hokuspokus B.V. has a task due Friday. The board for Aurelius B.V. has one too. Which comes first? You can only judge that if you see them side by side. In separate boards, you never see them side by side, so the client who shouts loudest or emailed last wins. That's not prioritizing, that's reacting.

The same applies to your team's planning. Whether Bep is overloaded this week doesn't show up on one client board. Her week is made up of pieces from five different boards. As long as those pieces never come together, you only discover an overloaded week once it's already going wrong.

What one board with all clients solves

Flip it around: one project board with all your clients on it, showing per task which client it belongs to. Then something fundamental changes:

• One glance instead of ten rounds. You open one board and see what's happening today and this week, across all clients.
• Priorities become comparable. Two Friday deadlines sit next to each other, so you can choose instead of guess.
• Workload per person becomes visible. You see that Koos is fully booked and Sjef has room before the week starts, not after.
• Nothing falls through the cracks. A task that's stalled stands out, even if it happens to be a small client nobody thought about that day.

You can still filter down to one client whenever you want. That's the nice part: going from one board to client level is one filter, going from ten boards to a total overview is manual labor.

How to set it up

We ran into this ourselves so hard that we built Wecooking differently from the start: one project board with all clients on it, and filters when you want to zoom in. No separate tool or integration needed for that, because the board is directly connected to the CRM. I described how that combination works in combining CRM and project management.

Something that also helps in practice: you enter tasks by typing them or just speaking them, and Wecooking turns them into an automatic daily schedule that runs alongside your Google calendar. So the question "what am I doing today" isn't something you have to reconstruct from ten boards every morning yourself.

And the client who calls in between to ask how things are going? They follow along through the client portal and see the progress themselves. That saves switching too, because every status question from Truus is one you no longer have to look up.

If you're currently working with a sprawl of boards and tools side by side, also read why agencies use too many separate tools. The solution is almost never an eleventh board.

Want to see what one board with all your clients looks like, whether you work with a team or juggle multiple clients on your own? Try Wecooking for free. It's free to use right now since we're in beta, so you can easily run it alongside your current setup.