Docs & Briefs: Client Briefs, Intake Forms, and an Agency Wiki

Why the brief is where projects go wrong

Almost every painful agency project can be traced back to the start. Not to a bad decision, but to an absence: nobody wrote down what success looked like, so two months later the client's expectation and the team's plan turn out to be different documents.

The usual intake makes this likely. A kickoff call, some notes in someone's app, a couple of emails with attachments, and a scope paragraph in the proposal. None of it is structured, so nothing is comparable, and the details that would have mattered — who the audience is, which competitors they benchmark against, what deliverables they are actually expecting — are never asked consistently.

Then it gets worse: the brief is treated as a one-off. It is read once at kickoff and never referenced again, so by the time a scope disagreement arrives, the original intent has faded from everyone's memory. We covered how to write one properly in how to write a project brief.

What Docs & Briefs is

Docs & Briefs is the knowledge and intake layer of your workspace. Three distinct things sit under it:

• Client briefs — structured project briefs the client writes in their portal and publishes to you.
• Forms — custom intake forms, questionnaires, and feedback forms you build and publish on a public link.
• The agency wiki — internal process documentation that can be shared with clients page by page.

Contracts, NDAs, and the paperwork that needs signatures live next door in E-Sign Docs, and briefs arrive in the same document list, which is why the two are neighbours in the workspace.

What you can do here

How client briefs work

The client starts in the Brief Builder in their portal. They can begin from one of five prefilled templates — Website Design, Brand Identity, Marketing Campaign, Mobile App Development, or Content Strategy — each of which comes with a suggested budget range and timeline, or start from scratch.

The structure is the same every time: title, description, a category from nine options such as Web Design, Branding, Marketing, App Development, Content, Video, Social Media, or Consulting, a budget range, a timeline, repeatable goal lines, target audience, key competitors, expected deliverables, and file attachments. Because the shape is fixed, two briefs from two different clients can actually be compared.

Publishing sends it to a connected agency. On your side it appears as a Brief document with the status Received, and you get an in-app notification plus an email naming the client, the brief title, the budget range, and the timeline. Stat cards count Active, New, In Progress, and Archived, and the default view hides archived and withdrawn briefs so the list stays a working queue.

Triage is three actions. Mark as Viewed records who looked and when, so the client's brief is visibly acknowledged. Mark In Progress signals it is being scoped. Archive retires it once the work has moved into a project. And because the client still owns the original, an update on their side refreshes your copy rather than creating a duplicate. If they withdraw it, yours is marked Withdrawn.

More on gathering requirements before you commit: how to collect client requirements before a project.

The agency wiki and what clients can see

The wiki is a proper editor, not a text box. You get a slash menu for inserting blocks, tables, task lists, resizable images, highlights, code blocks, and callouts, plus comments on a page, version history, and live presence so two people editing the same page can see each other. Pages nest into a tree, so a process can have sub-pages instead of becoming one enormous document. There is a template gallery to start from, an AI assist menu for drafting, and database blocks for structured tables inside a page.

Sharing is where it becomes client-facing. Each page has an eye toggle — visible to clients, or hidden from clients — and the page tree shows at a glance which pages are shared. Clients see a read-only Knowledge Base in their portal containing only the visible pages, with search across them. Page views by clients are recorded, so you know whether the onboarding guide is actually being read.

Independently of that, any page can be published on a public link, or shared to a list of specific email addresses with either Viewer or Editor access, which covers the contractor or partner who needs one document and not a workspace seat. Export covers Markdown, HTML, PDF, and ZIP, and import brings content in as pages that start hidden from clients.

How it connects to the rest of Arpixa

• A published brief becomes a document on the client's record in your CRM, next to their contracts and proposals.
• Briefs sit in the same Projects hub as delivery, so the brief that started a job is beside the project running it.
• E-Sign Docs handles the same document list when a signature is required.
• The Brief Builder and Knowledge Base are sections of the branded client portal.
• Brief attachments and form uploads count against your workspace storage.
• The wiki lives in Ops Hub alongside the Resource Planner and Service Catalog.

Arpixa has a real Free plan (not a trial), with Starter at $12/month, Pro at $29/month, and Advanced at $89/month. Briefs, forms, and the wiki have no separate item caps, though attachments and uploads count against workspace storage, which is 500 MB on Free, 50 GB on Starter, 250 GB on Pro, and 1 TB on Advanced. The pricing page is the source of truth for current plan limits.

How to use Docs & Briefs

1. Invite the client to their portal so they can reach the Brief Builder.
2. Ask them to start from a brief template and publish it to your workspace when ready.
3. Open the brief in Docs & Briefs, read it, and Mark as Viewed so the team knows it is picked up.
4. Move it to In Progress while you scope, then Archive it once the work is underway.
5. For anything the brief does not cover, publish an intake form and send the public link.
6. Write the process and reference material into the agency wiki, sharing individual pages with clients where it helps.

Related reading: client intake software and how to onboard a new client smoothly.

Frequently asked questions