Clients

Read time 10 min Level Beginner Prerequisites An active Buzzscribed login

In a nutshell: Clients & Brands is your CRM for the organisations you do PR for. A two-level hierarchy -- parent Brand with Sub-Brands beneath -- covers every relationship from a single agency client to a portfolio of marques. Six tabs (SEARCH, CLIENT BRANDS, CONTRACTS, EDM EMAIL GROUPS, ADMIN) cover finding, organising, filing paperwork, building marketing groups and housekeeping. The fee-bearing agreement lives in Account Management; this page is the CRM that organises every relationship around it.

What you will learn

How Clients & Brands organises the organisations you work with.
The Brand and Sub-Brand hierarchy and how to manage it.
The tabs: SEARCH, CLIENT BRANDS, CONTRACTS, EDM EMAIL GROUPS, ADMIN.
How the Brand record links to the fee-bearing Agreement in Account Management.
How the CONTRACTS tab files signed paperwork and how to invite a client into the Client portal.

The mental model

Clients & Brands is the CRM for the organisations you do PR for. The hierarchy is two levels deep: a parent Brand (for example Globex Industries) can carry one or more Sub-Brands (Globex Wellbeing, Globex Cloud). Each Brand record holds company details, billing details, contacts and a logo.

This page tracks who the client is. The commercial agreement -- dates, fees, scope, line items, e-signature, time logging -- lives on the Account Management page as an Engagement (also called a Business Flow). Two parallel things on one Brand: the Stories you run for them, and the Engagements that fund those Stories.

Find the page from BUSINESS > Clients & Brands.

The tabs

SEARCH: The default tab -- search across brands, contacts and emails. A stats bar at the top shows Parent Brands, Sub-Brands, Total Contacts and Active Agreements. Pick a brand and the stats swap to that brand's figures, with the Active Campaigns count alongside.
CLIENT BRANDS: The brand workspace. Open a parent brand to see its sub-brands, its contacts and its stats. From here you can Add Sub-Brand, Associate Existing Brand (attach a brand that already exists as a sub-brand of this parent), Merge Brand (fold a duplicate into the one you keep -- campaigns, contacts, contracts and documents all move across), edit the brand, upload its logo, add contacts and edit its tags.
CONTRACTS: The document repository for signed paperwork -- MSAs, NDAs, confidentiality agreements and other contracts. Each document carries a type, title, description, valid-from and valid-to dates, status and the file itself. The stats bar tracks total, active and expired contracts across the brand. The filing cabinet for legal documents.
EDM EMAIL GROUPS: Recipient groups for Client EDM, the agency's client-facing newsletter tool. Group your client contacts here and a Client EDM send targets them directly.
ADMIN: Housekeeping sub-tabs: Quick Add (paste-from-spreadsheet bulk add of brands, with columns including name, company number, client type, payment terms, sectors), Brand Merge, Group Merge and Blocked Emails.

The Brand record

Adding or editing a brand, the fields are:

Brand / Company Name and Company Registration Number.
Client Type -- NFP, Edu, Gov, Religious, Asn, Brand, or Agency.
Payment Terms (days).
Website -- plain text. Upload the brand logo separately via the brand-logo control on the card.
Billing Contact -- invoice contact name, invoice email, telephone, position.
Billing Address -- address lines, city, country, state or region, postcode.
Optional Company Size and Budget Band classification.
Sectors / Speciality tags and a separate client-tags editor with colour-coded reusable tags ("Public Sector", "Retail").

Client Type and the Sectors tags handle the industry side. Brand colours and the visual identity layer route through your Story and Report branding settings rather than the Brand record.

Where the fee-bearing Agreement lives

Buzzscribed separates who the client is (this page) from what the work and the terms are (Account Management). The dated, fee-bearing, scope-defined, time-logged agreement -- the Engagement / Business Flow -- is created on Account Management. Its lifecycle moves Forward Planning → Draft → Pending Signature → Active → Closed, and that is where purchase orders, line items and e-signature sit.

On Clients & Brands, Active Agreements is a read-only stat that mirrors what is happening in Account Management. To change a fee, add a PO or send an agreement for signature, jump to Account Management -- the same Brand is right there waiting.

Contracts: the document side

The CONTRACTS tab is the home for signed paperwork -- the MSA PDF, the NDA, the confidentiality agreement. Upload a document, give it a type, a title, a validity window and a status, and it files itself against the brand. Search and filter the portfolio (active or expired); see counts at a glance. The CONTRACTS tab is the filing cabinet for the legal record. The operational agreement that drives billing is the Account Management Engagement.

Inviting a client to the Client portal

On a brand's contact card sits an Invite to Client Portal action (an add-user icon). Click it, confirm, and Buzzscribed emails the contact an invitation. Once they accept, they log in to the Client portal and see every campaign for that brand, picked from a dropdown inside the portal. Invitation is per-contact; portal scope is per-brand.

What the client sees in their portal: the brand's campaigns and their coverage, talent on each campaign, downloadable assets, the signed brief, additional-budget approvals, the campaign budget, their invoices and a Journalist Intel snippet. The portal is a transparent client-facing view -- one of Buzzscribed's standout differentiators for agency-client trust.

[Screenshot placeholder -- a brand contact card on the CLIENT BRANDS tab with the "Invite to Client Portal" (fa-user-plus) icon highlighted, and a confirmation dialog reading "Send Client Portal invite to Jane Smith ([email protected])?".]

Inviting a brand contact to the Client portal. One click, one confirm, one emailed invite -- and the portal opens up every campaign on the brand.

Try this: Open a parent brand on CLIENT BRANDS. Add a Sub-Brand -- just a name is enough to start. Switch to CONTRACTS and upload the brand's MSA or NDA against the parent, with the valid-to date set to the next renewal. On a contact card, hover the add-user icon to read the "Invite to Client Portal" tooltip -- you now have everything in place to bring the client into their portal whenever you are ready.

Frequently asked

Where do I set a client's retainer fee and dates?: On Account Management as an Engagement (Business Flow). Clients & Brands shows the read-only Active Agreements count and links to it.
What is the hierarchy on this page?: Brand (parent) with Sub-Brands beneath. Campaigns and Engagements both attach to a Brand as parallel things.
What does the Website field do?: It captures the brand's URL as plain text. The brand logo is a separate manual upload via the brand-logo control on the card.
I have Acme Corp and Acme Corporation as two brands. How do I fix it?: Use Merge Brand on the brand card (or ADMIN > Brand Merge). Pick the one to keep; campaigns, contacts, contracts and documents move across to it and the duplicate archives.
How does a client reach the portal?: From the brand's contact card, click Invite to Client Portal, confirm, and Buzzscribed emails the invite. Once they accept they see every campaign for the brand and pick the one they want from a dropdown.
What does the client see in the portal?: Campaigns, coverage, talent, downloadable assets, the signed brief, additional-budget approvals, the campaign budget, invoices, and a Journalist Intel snippet -- the running picture of how your work is landing for them.
Do I need Admin rights to use this page?: CRM management on Clients & Brands is open to all roles. Add, edit, group and dedupe freely.

Key takeaways

Hierarchy is Brand (parent) with Sub-Brands beneath. Stories and Engagements attach to a Brand as parallel things.
The fee-bearing Engagement / Business Flow lives in Account Management; Clients & Brands carries Active Agreements as a read-only stat.
CONTRACTS tab files MSAs, NDAs and other signed paperwork as a document repository, with active/expired stats.
Brand record fields: Company Name, Number, Client Type, Payment Terms, Website (plain text), Billing Contact, Billing Address, optional size and budget band, Sectors and client tags.
Invite to Client Portal is a per-contact emailed invite; the portal then opens every campaign on the brand, with budget, invoices and a Journalist Intel snippet alongside coverage.