Every studio invents its own answer to this, and a lot of them regret it a year in, once the dropdowns are full and the history is scattered. The structure only has three levels, and each one has a test you can apply in a second.
The three tests
A client is whoever approves and whoever gets invoiced. One brand, one client, even when five different people write to you. The marketing manager, the brand director and the agency contact are all contacts of the same client.
A project is a batch of work with one brief — a campaign, a series, an event, a month of a retainer. If two videos would be briefed in the same meeting, they belong to the same project.
A task is one thing that gets approved on its own. If the client can say “this one is fine” about it separately, it is a task. If it can only be approved along with something else, it is a version or a subtask of that something else.
The three mistakes
Creating a client per contact person splits the same brand into three entries in the dropdown, splits the portal, and starts three unrelated video-code sequences. Contacts belong inside one client: see Add client contacts.
Creating a project per video turns the project filter into dead weight. Every project holds exactly one task, so narrowing the dashboard tells you nothing the task title didn’t.
Putting a whole campaign in one task is the expensive one. Six deliverables under one task cannot be approved separately, cannot carry their own deadlines, and share a single comment timeline, so the client’s “approved” stops meaning anything in particular.
Edge cases worth deciding once
When you deliver through an agency, the client is whoever signs off. Keep the end brand in the project name if you need to see it at a glance.
For a retainer with no natural end, open a project per month or per quarter, named something like Retainer 2026-Q1. A project that eventually closes gives you numbers for a period you can compare against the next one.
For internal work, make your own studio a client. Your reels and pitches then behave like everything else, and they stop polluting a real client’s metrics.
Important: Set the client’s Internal Code before the first task. It becomes the prefix of every video code for that client, and those codes are what the rest of your process hangs on: see Use the video code everywhere.
What’s next
Organize work with clients and projects walks through creating them.