The complete guide to workspace data isolation for multi-brand agencies

Multi-brand agencies, holding groups and studios with separate business units share one problem: the same people work across several sets of clients, but the data for those clients must not mix. A designer may work for two brands in one day. The brand leads should each see their own clients and nothing else.

What data isolation means in practice

Isolation means each group of clients lives in its own space, with its own projects, tags, rates, rules and reports. Someone who is not a member of that space cannot see any of it, and a report in one space can never include time from another.

Isolation is not about hiding work from your own team. It is about making sure a report for one client can never contain another client's data.

Designing your workspaces

Before creating anything, decide what a workspace represents. Common choices:

• One per brand or business unit, when each has its own leadership and clients.
• One per major client, when contracts require strict separation.
• One for internal work, so studio overhead is tracked without touching client reports.

Fewer workspaces are easier to run. Split only where the separation is required by a contract, a client or a management boundary.

Roles per workspace, not per person

The key design choice is that a person's role belongs to the workspace, not to their account. The same person can be an Admin in one workspace and a Team Member in another, under a single sign-in.

Person: Priya (one account)

Workspace          Role          Can see
-----------------  ------------  ---------------------------------
Brand A            Admin         All Brand A time, rates, settings
Brand B            Team Member   Her own Brand B time
Studio (internal)  Team Member   Her own internal time

What each role is for

• Team Member: tracks and corrects their own time.
• Admin: runs the workspace day to day: projects, clients, tags, rules and the team's time.
• Owner: everything an Admin can do, plus ownership-level decisions for that workspace.

The exact permissions are listed in the role matrix and the who can do what section of the docs.

Keep the rules local too

Different brands often have different billing habits. One may require a task on every entry, another only a project. Put those rules in each workspace: which fields are required, what the client, project and task levels are called, the working week and the default billable rate.

Common mistakes

• Creating a workspace per project. Projects belong inside a workspace; workspaces are for separation.
• Giving everyone Admin to avoid permission questions. That removes the separation you set up.
• Tracking internal work inside a client workspace, which inflates that client's costs.
• Using different client names for the same client in different workspaces, which makes group-level comparison harder.

Choosing a time tracking tool for multi-brand studios

When you compare tools, test these points with real data during a trial rather than reading feature lists:

• Can one person belong to several workspaces with a different role in each, under one sign-in?
• Does a report or export in one workspace ever include time from another?
• Can each workspace set its own required fields, terminology, working week and default rate?
• Can an Admin of one brand see anything about another brand they are not a member of?
• Can you export every workspace's raw data on your own schedule?

How Tickr does it

In Tickr, each workspace is isolated: its own clients, projects, tags, rules, rates and reports. Roles are set per workspace, so one account can hold different roles in different places, and switching workspace never shows you data you are not entitled to. Read more in the architecture overview.