Why agencies run on guesswork
Three questions come up constantly at a growing agency, and most teams answer all three from memory.
Can we take this on? The honest answer requires knowing who is booked on which days for the next fortnight. Without that view, the answer is a feeling, and the feeling is usually optimistic, which is how a team ends up at 130 percent for a month.
What do we charge for this? If your offers are not written down with prices and inclusions, every proposal is scoped from scratch, which is slow and inconsistent. Two clients buying the same thing pay different amounts for different deliverables, and nobody can explain why.
How do we do this? Process that only exists in one person's head is a bottleneck disguised as expertise. Every new hire relearns it by interrupting someone, and the answer drifts each time it is retold. We covered the compounding version of this in how to scale my agency without more chaos.
What Ops Hub is
Ops Hub is the planning and process layer of the workspace. It has three sections, and being clear about the boundary is useful: Ops Hub is not the daily to-do view. Live signals such as unpaid invoices, pending projects, upcoming deadlines, and a monthly profit goal sit on your dashboard home. Ops Hub is where you plan the next two weeks, write down what you sell, and record how you work.
- Resource Planner — who is on what, day by day.
- Service Catalog — your priced, repeatable offers, and inquiries against them.
- Agency Wiki — process documentation, shareable page by page.
What you can do in Ops Hub
| Capability | What it does |
|---|---|
| A capacity grid, day by day | The Resource Planner lays your people down the side and days across the top, with a Week, 2 Weeks, or Month window you can shift forward and back. Each row shows which projects that person is on, on which days, so overload and idle time are both visible at a glance. |
| Assign someone straight from the planner | Spotting that a designer is free is only useful if you can act on it. Pick a member, choose a project, and they are added to it without leaving the view. A project with no start date is anchored to the day you picked so it appears on the grid immediately. |
| Freelancers show up too | Anyone appearing on a project as a collaborator is surfaced in the planner even if they are not a workspace team member, marked as External. Capacity planning that ignores your contractors is not capacity planning. |
| Priced service packages, ready to reuse | The Service Catalog holds your offers as packages with a name, price, category, one-time or monthly billing, description, feature list, image, turnaround in days, and an optional popular flag. Scoping the same work from scratch every time stops being necessary. |
| A catalog inquiry inbox | A second tab collects inquiries that come in against your catalog, so interest in a specific package arrives as a record rather than as a message someone has to interpret. |
| The agency wiki, in the same place | How you run onboarding, what your revision policy is, which tools you use for what: the wiki lives here, with nested pages, comments, version history, and a per-page toggle to share a page with clients as read-only. |
The Resource Planner
The planner is a grid. People run down the left, days run across the top, and the window is Week (7 days), 2 Weeks (14 days, the default), or Month (28 days). It starts at the beginning of the current week, shifts forward or back by a full window at a time, and a Today button snaps you back and selects the current day.
Each person's row shows the projects overlapping each day, worked out from project start and end dates. Two filters narrow it: by role, built from the roles actually present in your team, and by project status, so you can plan against active work only rather than everything ever created. Archived and deleted projects are excluded. Each member carries a weekly capacity figure, defaulting to 40 hours.
The part that makes it operational rather than a report: you can assign from it. Pick a member, choose a project, and they are added to that project on the spot. If the project has no start date, Arpixa anchors it to the day you had selected so a bar appears immediately, rather than leaving the person still reading as idle. The confirmation names both the person and the project, so a mis-click is obvious.
Contractors are included. Anyone appearing as a collaborator on a project is surfaced in the planner even without a workspace account, marked External. For most agencies that is a large share of delivery capacity, and a planner that quietly omitted it would be worse than no planner. See Members for how team roles and project assignment work on the access side.
A capacity spreadsheet plus a pricing doc, or one hub
Resourcing usually lives in a spreadsheet that is out of date by Tuesday, pricing lives in an old proposal, and process lives in someone's head. Arpixa keeps all three beside the projects they describe.
Resourcing
Capacity
Process docs
Price lists
ArpixaAll of it, connectedThe Service Catalog
The catalog turns your recurring offers into records instead of habits. A service package carries a name, a price, a category, a billing type of One-Time or Monthly, a description, a feature list you build line by line, an image, a turnaround in days, and an optional popular flag for the one you want to steer people toward. Status marks whether it is active.
There are 21 preset categories to pick from — Design, Development, Marketing, Consulting, Branding, SEO, Social Media, Content Writing, Video Production, Photography, UI/UX, Web Design, App Development, Advertising, Analytics, E-Commerce, Email Marketing, Strategy, Public Relations, Maintenance & Support, and General — and you can add your own. Search and a category filter keep a large catalog usable.
A second tab holds inquiries raised against your catalog, so interest in a specific package arrives as a record you can work rather than a message someone has to interpret. Managing the catalog is permission-gated, so not everyone on the team can change your prices. The Free plan allows up to 5 services.
The practical payoff is proposal speed. Once an offer exists with a price, inclusions, and a turnaround, writing the proposal is assembly rather than invention, and two clients buying the same thing get the same thing.
The Agency Wiki
The wiki is where process stops being folklore. It is a full editor: a slash menu for inserting blocks, tables, task lists, images, code blocks, and callouts, with comments on a page, version history, live presence, and pages that nest into a tree so a process can have sub-pages instead of becoming one unreadable document. There is a template gallery, an AI assist menu for drafting, and export to Markdown, HTML, PDF, or ZIP.
Each page has a visible-to-clients toggle, which puts it into the read-only Knowledge Base clients see in their portal, and page views by clients are recorded. Separately, a page can be published on a public link or shared to specific email addresses as a Viewer or an Editor, which covers the partner or contractor who needs one document rather than a workspace seat. The full detail, along with client briefs and intake forms, is on Docs & Briefs.
How it connects to the rest of Arpixa
- The planner reads assignments and dates from Projects, and writes assignments back to them.
- Roles and project-level scoping come from Members, including who may manage the catalog.
- Catalog packages give Proposals a consistent starting price and inclusion list.
- The wiki is the same content covered on Docs & Briefs, and its client-facing pages appear in the client portal.
- For retrospective numbers — utilisation, client margin, invoice aging — use Analytics; Ops Hub is forward-looking.
Plan capacity instead of guessing at it
Start free in minutes, or log in to your Arpixa workspace. See pricing for plan details.
Arpixa has a real Free plan (not a trial), with Starter at $12/month, Pro at $29/month, and Advanced at $89/month. The Service Catalog is limited to 5 services on Free. Team seats, which affect how much there is to plan, are 2 on Free, 15 on Starter, and unlimited on Pro and Advanced. Annual billing lowers the effective monthly cost, and the pricing page is the source of truth for current plan limits.
How to use Ops Hub
- Open the Resource Planner and set the window to a fortnight so you can see the shape of the next two weeks.
- Filter by role or by project status to focus on the group you are planning for.
- Find anyone idle on a day that matters and assign them to a project from the same screen.
- Build your recurring offers into the Service Catalog with prices, features, and turnaround times.
- Check the catalog inquiries tab for interest in specific packages.
- Write the process the team keeps asking about into the wiki, and share the client-facing pages.
Related reading: how to manage team workload and how to run agency operations.
Frequently asked questions
What is Ops Hub in Arpixa?
Ops Hub is the internal operations section of your workspace, and it holds exactly three things: the Resource Planner for team capacity across a rolling window of days, the Service Catalog for your priced service packages and the inquiries they generate, and the Agency Wiki for process documentation. It is deliberately separate from your daily dashboard, which is where live signals such as unpaid invoices and pending projects surface.
How does the Resource Planner work?
It is a grid: team members down the side, days across the top, in a Week, 2 Weeks, or Month window that you can shift forward and back, with a Today button to snap back to the current week. Each person shows the projects they are on for each day, derived from project start and end dates. You can filter by role or by project status, and each member carries a weekly capacity figure that defaults to 40 hours.
Can I assign work from the planner itself?
Yes, and that is the point of it. Choosing a member and a project adds them to that project without leaving the view, so noticing spare capacity and using it are the same action. If the project has no start date, Arpixa anchors it to the day you selected so a bar renders on the grid straight away rather than the person still reading as idle.
Does the planner include freelancers who are not team members?
Yes. Anyone who appears as a collaborator on a project is included in the planner even if they do not have a workspace account, and they are marked as External. That matters because most agency capacity problems involve contractors, and a planner that only knew about full members would give you a misleading picture.
What is the Service Catalog for?
It holds your repeatable offers as priced packages, each with a name, price, category, one-time or monthly billing, description, feature list, image, turnaround in days, and an optional popular flag. There are 21 preset categories to start from and you can add your own. A second tab collects inquiries raised against the catalog. Managing the catalog is permission-gated, and the Free plan allows up to 5 services.
Where do I see what needs attention today?
On your dashboard home rather than in Ops Hub. Home carries the Action Center with items such as unpaid invoices and pending projects, upcoming deadlines for the next few days, a monthly profit goal, quick actions for creating a project, invoice, or client, and a client health panel. Ops Hub is for planning and process; Home is for the day.