How long does it take to set up a branded document portal?
One of the first questions studios ask is how long they'll be without a usable system. The honest answer is about two weeks from the moment you hand over your brand assets — and here's what actually happens in that window.
The short answer
Most studios are generating real, client-ready documents within two weeks of providing their brand assets — logo, fonts, colour palette, and a few examples of work you're proud of. In many cases you'll generate your first document on the day your portal goes live.
What happens during setup
Setup isn't a black box. It breaks into three clear stages, and none of them require anything to be installed on your machines:
- Template design — we take your brand guidelines and design a suite of document templates (fee proposals, schedules of finishes, design intent statements, and so on), built to your fonts, colours and spacing.
- Portal build — your templates are loaded into a branded portal that your whole team logs into through the browser.
- Handover — we walk you through it, you generate a test document or two, and the keys are yours.
What we need from you to start the clock
The two-week window starts when we have what we need to design accurately. The studios that go live fastest are simply the ones who have these to hand:
- Your logo in vector format
- Brand fonts, or the licences and links to them
- Your colour palette or brand guidelines
- A few examples of documents you currently send — even rough ones — so we can match your tone and structure
If your brand guidelines are scattered across old files and inboxes, gathering them is usually the longest part of the whole process — not the design itself. It's worth pulling them together before you start.
Adding more templates later
You're not locked to the templates you launch with. New document types can be designed and added to your portal at any time, quoted per template based on complexity. Most studios start with the documents they send most often and expand as they see where the system saves them the most time.
Why it's faster than doing it in-house
Building this yourself means briefing a designer, running several rounds of revisions, then finding some way to reuse the layout without it breaking when the next person opens the file. That cycle tends to stretch into months and rarely produces something the whole team can use safely. A dedicated setup compresses it because the templates, the portal and the handover are one coordinated process rather than three separate projects.