Whatever stage your business is in, HoneyBook provides a one-stop-shop to establish and nurture lasting client relationships. We’ll cover some of the key tools for client management below.

In HoneyBook, a client is someone who has booked a project with you (contract signed and/or payment made). They’re an individual who has an established working relationship with you.

In comparison, a lead is an early-stage, potential client: someone interested in your products or services, but who has not yet booked.

For many businesses, client management is mission critical. When you establish and grow a relationship with a client, they’re more likely to become a returning customer and spread the positive word about your business (hello, testimonials!).

Whether you think about your business in terms of projects or clients, HoneyBook has the organizational tools to match your process.

Client projects are the “hubs” that house all of the participants, communication, files, and other details related to a specific job or event. You need to set up a client project first before you can send emails and files to your client. Once that’s done, you can keep track of everything related to the job within that hub.

Your pipeline is a centralized place to track your client projects by where they are in the booking process (their “stage”).

You can click into the Active tab of your pipeline to view all client projects that are currently in the works. Or, you can click into a different stage for a birds’ eye view of all of the client projects that currently live there.

The client workspace gives you an overview of a specific client's history with you. You can view all email communication, view client worth (all payments: completed, upcoming, and overdue), create and send files and emails for that contact, add new projects, and view other key details.

You might consider setting up a task to check the client worth listed in your client workspaces at a specific cadence.

For a personalized professional touch, HoneyBook supports integrations with all major email providers. Here’s what you can expect if you integrate your email with HoneyBook:

To integrate your email address, follow the steps here.

There are a number of different ways you can send emails in HoneyBook: through a client project’s activity feed; from the client workspace; at a pre-set trigger, through an automation; and more.

Learn more about communicating through HoneyBook here.

If a client comes to you with a question, it’s important to understand what they’re seeing and experiencing. In HoneyBook, you can preview your clients’ view of smart files and read up on what they’ll experience from first touch to project closure.

Whenever you draft up a smart file, you can always click Preview to get a peek into what your client will see once you share the file.

You can also send yourself a test of any file that you’re working on, to understand the full client experience from file receipt to completion. You’ll be able to click through each page to get the full feel, and even test out responding to questions, selecting services, and more—since it’s a test smart file, nothing will be saved or changed.

Learn more about your clients’ experience with smart here.

The client portal is the client-side view of a project, which houses all of the communication, files, and details in one easy-to-navigate place.

Sharing your client portal link is totally optional. Whenever you send files and emails to clients through HoneyBook, they'll always have loginless access to the client portal/project workspace.

If you do choose to set up and share your client portal link, here’s what your clients will experience once they click it.

Automations allow you to automate actions in your client projects, sending out emails, creating internal tasks, moving pipeline stages, and/or sending certain files at the cadence of your choice.

For example: If you have an email that you send at a certain point across all client relationships, and a questionnaire you always send 30 days before the project date, you can use an automation to automate those steps. Doing so will give you time back to focus on growing your client relationships in other valuable ways.

Smart files are your client-facing documents and experiences. They allow you to create everything from simple, one-page invoices, contracts, and questionnaires; all the way through to, for example, multi-step booking documents that let clients select a service, schedule a call, sign a contract, and make a payment in one fell swoop.

For example: If you have clients schedule a session, sign a contract, and pay across multiple platforms, you can combine all of these steps into a single smart file. Doing so will save you time and effort, keep key details organized in one place, and improve your clients’ experience.

The Scheduler tool is an extension of your already-powerful HoneyBook Calendar. You can create unique session types and set your availability, then share these sessions so clients can book time with you. Any meetings scheduled will appear in the corresponding client project and on your HoneyBook Calendar.

Learn more about scheduling in HoneyBook (and how you can use the Scheduler to book meetings 2x faster!) here.

HoneyBook offers a number of integrations with other platforms, such as QuickBooks, Meta, Zapier, and more. If you currently work in these other tools, you can connect them to HoneyBook to bring your essential apps into one centralized place.

Learn about the integrations available to you here.

Still have questions? Feel free to send us a message by clicking the Question Mark icon on any HoneyBook page. Our team is always happy to help!