Dubsado for Interior Designers: Setting Up Your Studio’s Client Process

Dubsado setup for interior design starts with mapping your client process, phase by phase, before you build anything in the software. A design project runs for months, often includes purchasing on the client’s behalf, and asks the client to approve something at almost every step: the proposal, the concept, each round of revisions, every purchase. Most studios run all of that through email threads, PDFs and a spreadsheet, and it works well enough that fixing it never makes the to-do list.

This post walks through a typical design project from inquiry to installation, which Dubsado features handle each phase, and where Dubsado falls short for designers, which is mostly procurement. I’ve been a Dubsado Certified Specialist since 2020, and everything here is current for Dubsado 3.0, where workflows are now called Flows.

The interior design client journey

Before you build, write out what happens on every project. For most residential studios, it looks like this:

1. Inquiry and discovery call: the lead reaches out and you talk through fit.
2. Proposal, contract and retainer: they choose a service, sign, and pay to get on your calendar.
3. Onboarding: rooms, style, budget, photos and measurements.
4. Design presentation and revisions: concepts, feedback and final selections.
5. Procurement: purchasing approvals, orders, deliveries.
6. Installation: the install day and the reveal.
7. Offboarding: final walkthrough, photography and reviews.

If you offer more than one service, say full-service design and a one-room consultation, map each one separately. They share phases but move at very different speeds, and those differences decide how many Flows you actually need.

Inquiry and discovery call

A lead capture form is where every inquiry starts. When someone submits it, Dubsado creates a contact and a project for them automatically. Keep it short: name, email, phone, the service they’re interested in, and the project location and timeline if you need them to qualify the lead. Everything else can wait for the questionnaire.

On the Premier plan, the form can start a Flow the moment it’s submitted. If you offer several services, add a Flows element to the form. It’s a dropdown where the client picks a service, and each choice starts a different Flow, so a full-service inquiry and a consultation inquiry get different responses without you sorting them by hand.

For the discovery call, use the scheduler, which is also a Premier feature. You can require a form before someone books, so a lead capture form attached to a public scheduler creates the project at booking. Or send the scheduler from your Flow after the inquiry comes in, which lets later steps use appointment triggers: a prep email before the call and a follow-up after it ends.

Proposal, contract and retainer

Your services become packages in Dubsado, and packages go on a proposal. The client chooses what they want, signs the contract, and pays the retainer on one page. When they submit, Dubsado generates the invoice from what they selected.

Two details matter for design work. A proposal supports one contract, so if your full-service and consultation agreements are different, build a proposal for each. And payment plans are flexible enough for how designers bill. An installment can be a fixed amount, a percentage of the total, or an even split, and its due date can be fixed, relative to something like the contract signing, or TBD when you don’t know the milestone date yet. A design fee with a retainer at signing and the balance spread across project phases fits easily. Add a reminder to each installment, because Dubsado sends no payment notice for an installment without one. If you bill some design time hourly, Premier also includes time tracker invoicing.

Onboarding questionnaire for rooms, style and budget

Once the contract is signed, the onboarding questionnaire goes out. Design questionnaires run long, because they ask for a lot: which rooms are in scope, how the household uses them, style preferences, which pieces are staying, the budget for each room, and photos of the space.

The file uploader element lets clients add images and documents right on the form, up to 8 MB per file. That covers room photos, inspiration images and floor plans. Walkthrough videos usually run over the limit, so ask for a link to those instead.

In the Flow, put a Hold Actions Until step in front of the questionnaire so it waits until the contract is signed, and stack a second hold if you also want the retainer paid first. Then add a reminder that sends if the questionnaire still isn’t completed after a few days. My post on the Dubsado onboarding workflow covers this sequence in more detail.

Design presentation and revisions

Most designers present concepts in a meeting or in their design software, and that’s where the presentation should stay. Dubsado’s job is everything around it: scheduling the presentation, sending the revision form afterward, and following up when the client goes quiet.

Design work doesn’t move on a fixed timeline, so don’t time these steps to a date. Add a Create Task step for preparing the concept presentation, and set the next email to send after all previous actions are completed. That email waits until you check the task off. For any email you want to review before it goes out, turn on manual approval for that step, and the Flow stops there until you approve it.

Collect revisions with a questionnaire instead of an email reply: what they love, what they’d change, and which option they’re choosing. The answers end up on the project where you can find them, and a completed form can trigger the next step in the Flow.

Procurement and purchasing approvals

Procurement is where designers expect more from Dubsado than it gives. It handles the money and the signatures around procurement well. You can create additional invoices on a project for furnishings deposits or a purchasing retainer, and since each project gets only one contract, sub-agreements are how you collect additional signed approvals, like sign-off on a set of selections.

What Dubsado doesn’t have is a place to track the products themselves. Every item on a full-service project has its own vendor, price, client approval, order date, lead time, shipping status and receiving notes, and nothing in Dubsado is built for that list. Packages and invoice line items describe what you bill for, and neither one tracks an order from approval to delivery.

Most studios run procurement in a separate tool. Some use software made for designers, and some use Airtable, which I like for this because each item can be tracked from selection to install and the client can see only what they need to approve. Dubsado stays the client-facing side: contracts, invoices, forms and communication. A client portal can include an external link, so the client reaches their selections from the same place as their invoices. I wrote more about splitting the work between the two tools in Dubsado and Airtable, and if procurement is the piece you need built, that’s an Airtable setup.

Installation

Installation is the phase with a real date, so put it on the project. Map a date-select field on a form to the project date, or set it yourself. Then project date triggers handle the timing: a prep email to the client the week before, a task for you to confirm deliveries, and a project status update on install day.

Offboarding and reviews

After the reveal, the Flow can send a thank-you email, a feedback questionnaire and a review request, then update the project status and archive the project once everything is wrapped up. If you photograph finished spaces, add a task to schedule the shoot so it still happens after the next project takes over your week.

The client portal

Each client gets one password-protected portal with their invoices, forms, appointments and project details. Invoices appear automatically, and forms appear once you send them or apply them to the portal. On a project that runs for months, that gives your client one place to look instead of searching their inbox for the last invoice.

Portals are off by default. Add an Activate Portal step to the Flow and follow it with an email that includes the portal link, because activating the portal doesn’t notify the client on its own.

Starter or Premier?

Dubsado’s two plans split on automation. Starter includes forms, contracts, invoicing, payment plans with reminders and autopay, and client portals, with one active lead capture form. Premier adds the scheduler, Flows, public proposals, unlimited lead capture forms and the Zapier integration. Every step in this post that runs on its own needs Premier.

When to hire a Dubsado setup

You can build all of this yourself, and if you know your process well and have the time, try it. Hire it out when the decisions are what’s stopping you: how many Flows you need, which services can share steps, and what should happen when a client pays the retainer and never fills out the questionnaire. Those are the questions a Dubsado setup starts with, in a process mapping session before anything gets built. You own the system when it’s done, and I make sure you know how to run it before I hand it over.

I haven’t published a case study for an interior designer yet. The closest one is Hobart & Haven, a wedding stationery studio. It’s a different industry with a similar shape: custom quotes, rounds of proofs, and client approvals at every stage. We mapped 146 steps across three services and automated 128 of them. If you want your studio’s process built the same way, start with Done-For-You Dubsado Setup.

FAQ

Is Dubsado good for interior designers?

It’s a strong fit for the client side of a design studio: inquiries, proposals, contracts, payment plans, questionnaires, Flows and the client portal. It isn’t built for product sourcing or procurement tracking, so most designers pair it with a separate tool for that.

Can Dubsado track furniture orders and procurement?

Not item by item. You can bill for procurement with additional invoices on the project and collect signed approvals with sub-agreements, but tracking each product’s vendor, order status and lead time takes a separate tool, such as Airtable.

Which Dubsado plan do interior designers need?

Premier, if you want the process to run on its own. The scheduler, Flows, public proposals and unlimited lead capture forms are all Premier features.

Can clients upload room photos in Dubsado?

Yes. Add a file uploader element to a questionnaire, proposal or lead capture form. Each file has to be under 8 MB, so photos, PDFs and floor plans work, and most videos won’t.