Lightweight Project Management System

The Challenge

A studio doing e-commerce product photography and videography ran every lead enquiry, project deliverable and team task offline or from memory. With five people and no digital system, work was tracked by whoever happened to remember it.

The constraint that shaped the whole project was budget: as a small early-stage team, they could not justify high-cost project management software. But their requirements were not simple — they needed real task tracking, live status, and client notifications.

What We Built

Rather than push them onto a platform they could not afford, we built the system on Google Sheets and kept operational cost close to zero.

A Fillout lead enquiry form feeds project data straight into Sheets. Each team member gets an individual task sheet that syncs automatically to an admin dashboard, so project status updates in real time without anyone reporting it. Make.com handles backend orchestration, with Google Apps Scripts and Cloudflare Workers taking the heavier processing to keep Make.com operation counts — and therefore cost — down.

Solutions Delivered

• Lead enquiry form integrated directly with Google Sheets
• Per-member task sheets syncing to a central admin dashboard
• Make.com backend automation for workflow orchestration
• Google Apps Scripts and Cloudflare Workers for heavier processing
• Centralised dashboard covering projects, deliverables and client data

The Results

60% time saving on previously manual tasks, materially better communication with every stakeholder, and full visibility into each stage of a project — achieved on infrastructure that costs almost nothing to run.

What's Next

A move to SmartSuite or Retool as the studio scales, AI-assisted prediction of delivery timelines, and a client portal for approving deliverables and handling payment.