Back office — how a job flows

Every job walks the same simple line: Book it → send them their portal → session details → agreement → marketing → roster → staff the shoot → equipment prep → shoot day → cull & production → deliver. It comes in two halves — Part One (steps 1–6) gets the client squared away (details, signature, roster) plus your marketing out; Part Two (steps 7–11) is running the shoot itself. Most of it is one click each, and Studio Magic sends the emails for you.

The one-page cheat sheet

Print this, tape it to your monitor. Each line names the exact screen.

#	Step	Where you go	What happens
1	Get the job in	Booking Magic → 📥 Intake queue / 🎯 Book / Rebook, or Organizations → New	A job gets created
2	They get their portal	Automatic when you approve	Org gets ONE "you're booked" email + their picture-day home
3	Session details	Job → Send session details (or they fill it in-portal)	You learn headcount, schedule, arrival
4	Agreement	Agreements board → send for e-sign	They sign; a copy auto-files
5	Marketing	Marketing Magic → make posters	Picture-day posters land in the org's portal
6	Roster	They upload / parents self-register / Roster Magic	You get the list of who's photographed
7	Staff the shoot	Shifts → the staffing sheet	Crew claim open seats, or you assign them
8	Equipment prep	Job → Equipment Prep (#/session-prep)	Each gear set gets an owner + a prep list, emailed & texted
9	Shoot day	Shoot-day home (#/shoot-day/home) + the job Brief	Crew see call time, details, scan subjects, log issues
10	Cull & production	Cull Magic + Backstage	Pick keepers, QC, prep for the lab
11	Deliver photos	Portal Magic → Photos & files; families buy in Captura	Org & families get their pictures

💡Steps 4, 5 and 6 come after you've got the job and portal going. Marketing does not wait on the roster — go make your posters as soon as the agreement's out. Steps 7–11 are the shoot itself, in order.

Get the job into the system

A job starts a few different ways depending on the client. Pick the one that matches your situation.

1a · A brand-new client you've never worked with

Three doors — any works:

They book themselves. Send them your booking link (clients see it as book.yourstudio.com). Their request drops into your Intake queue. Hands-off.
You send a prefilled booking link. From the org or the 🎯 Book / Rebook board, use Send booking link — it emails a link with their info already filled in.
You create it by hand. Fastest when you booked over the phone: Organizations → New organization, then on that org's page → ➕ New job → pick type + date → save.

1b · A client you've worked with before

Go to Booking Magic → 🎯 Book / Rebook. Each org gets a next-step button:

A returning org shows ▶ Send portal — one click grants their portal and emails "time to book your next season."
A brand-new org shows ▶ Send booking link.

You can do the same from the org's own page (Send portal / Send booking link + ➕ New job).

1c · Approving a request that came through the form

Public bookings land in Booking Magic → 📥 Intake queue. Open the request and:

Click Confirm → Create job — this creates the organization, contact, and job all at once.
Duplicate safety net: if it matches a job you already have, you'll see "⚠️ Already booked — approving this makes a duplicate" → click Update the existing job → to fold the new answers onto the existing job instead of making a second one.

🔔Reading the queue: Needs review = a client actually submitted something, waiting on you. Pending booking · awaiting their date = you sent a link and they haven't filled it in — just wait.

1d · Session types

Which form does each client get?

Every job has a session type, and each asks slightly different questions. Here's the big idea, then a table of every type.

📌Booking is two stages. Booking link (Stage 1) is short — just the dates and a rough headcount; that's what you send first. Session details (Stage 2) is the full pre-shoot form and comes later (step 3). So booking is quick; the heavy questions come once they're committed.

Pick the right type when you create a job

Session type	Use it for	Its form mainly asks
School Portraits (Fall / Spring)	K-12 picture day	Headcount, bell schedule, arrival, yearbook
School (multi-level)	A campus with several session types	"What kind of school?" then the right sessions
Preschool / Daycare	Daycares & preschools	Rooms, headcount, parent registration
School Sports	You dictate the day	Teams, athlete counts
Sports Leagues	League teams self-schedule	Team booking slots
Dance (Recital)	Parent-facing recital shoot	Dancers, costumes, schedule
Dance Company	Competition-team shoot	Teams, costume-per-team
Seniors	HS senior portraits	Headcount, look/attire
Staff Photo Day	Just staff / faculty headshots	Staff headcount, arrival — no roster/yearbook

They get their portal (this one's automatic)

When you approve a fresh booking (or click Send portal), Studio Magic does two things for you:

Gives the organization access to their portal (their picture-day home).
Emails their contact exactly one email — subject "You're booked! Here's your picture-day home." — with a one-click sign-in link.

✅You do not send a separate confirmation email. The portal invite is the confirmation — one email, never two and never zero, and re-approving won't re-spam them.

When the org opens it, they see a Welcome page with an ordered checklist, "Your next steps":

① Fill your session details
② Confirm your brand (colors/logo)
③ Set up your picture-day schedule
④ Your roster

Below that is a calm "We're handling these — nothing needed from you" group (agreement, prep, marketing) so they know those are on your plate. Orgs with more than one session see a card per session.

Get the session details

The full pre-shoot form — headcount, bell schedule, arrival, yearbook. Two ways it gets filled in:

They fill it in their portal. Step ① on their Welcome checklist opens the full form. Nothing for you to do.
You send the link. Open the job and click Send session details — pick who it goes to (and CC anyone), and it emails a link to the same form (#/session-details).

🔔When they submit: you're notified three ways — a bell, an email that lists their actual answers, and a note on the org's Communication timeline. The job shows a "✓ Session details sent" marker and warns before you send it twice.

Send the agreement

The agreement is a friendly "here's what we'll do together" letter — not a deposit contract. Go to Agreements. The board sorts every org into four columns:

Ready to send — details are in, no agreement out yet.
Awaiting signature — you sent it, they haven't signed.
Signed — done, on file.
Waiting on details — no session details yet, so it's not ready.

One org: open its card → the editor opens (build it ✨ Full proposal or ✏️ From scratch) → send for e-signature. Several at once: Send to all missing opens a review step first — one row per org with a Preview, so you confirm the right agreement before anything sends.

📄Automatic: when they e-sign, a frozen copy of the signed agreement files itself into their Business documents (step 6). No PDF to save.

Make & share your marketing

What this is: the digital picture-day posters / announcement graphics you make so everyone knows picture day is coming — the images you post on social media and parent apps (ClassDojo, Remind, the school's Facebook). Keep it simple: a poster that says "Picture Day is coming!" in the school's colors.

⏱️Do this as soon as the agreement's out — it does NOT wait on the roster. The roster often comes late, and your posters shouldn't sit around waiting for it.

Current setup, honestly: Studio Magic can auto-make a poster the moment you confirm a job, but that's turned off by default right now (the auto-made ones weren't good enough). So today marketing is a quick make-it-yourself, then share step. (If you ever want the automatic version, it lives under Marketing Magic → Approvals with an "Auto-marketing is off" activate button — but you don't need it.)

How to make and share a set

Go to Marketing Magic (#/marketing-magic).
Work left to right — Brand kit → Make → Approve → Set ready. Pick the school, pick a design, and it renders the poster in their colors.
When you finish, it drops the set into that org's portal (their Marketing Materials folder) and emails the org that new marketing images are ready. Finishing the set is delivering it.

Quicker way to share one graphic: Card Studio lets you upload your own finished poster (a Canva design), drop the right QR on it, and send it into the org's portal Marketing Materials folder — same place.

Get the roster

The roster is the list of who's being photographed. Three ways in (any one works):

The org uploads it in their portal. Step ④ on their Welcome checklist — drop a spreadsheet, or add/confirm people in the roster tab.
Parents self-register. For daycare, sports, dance and staff days, families register their own child via a public link (#/register), often a QR code you hand out. Watch who's come in on the Registration review screen (#/register-review) — "N registered · N still to come" by name, so you can chase the stragglers.
You import it — Roster Magic. Go to Roster Magic (#/roster-magic, also #/import) and walk Drop → Map → Preview → Commit. It flags anything odd for you to fix — it never silently guesses.

🔔Automatic: a roster drop or a parent registration notifies you three ways (bell + email + timeline).

💡Why marketing came first: the roster can lag — a school might not send names until the week before. That's fine. Your agreement's signed and your posters are already out; the roster just needs to be in before you plan the shoot day.

That's the setup done. Everything above got the client squared away. Everything below is your side — actually shooting and delivering the job.

Part Two — Running the shoot

Staff the shoot (crew & shifts)

Every job needs people on it. Go to Shifts. The default view is the staffing sheet (there's a ▦ Sheet · ⊞ Grid · ☰ List toggle — Sheet is the one that looks like your old Google spreadsheet):

One row per session. Across each row are the seats — Lead · Camera 1–4 · Group · Assistant 1–3. An empty seat shows a dash; an open seat you still need to fill shows as a dashed amber OPEN.

Two ways a seat gets filled:

Crew claim their own shifts. Your photographers open Shifts on their phone — they land on the same Sheet you see — spot the open seats, and tap one to claim it. They self-select, you don't have to assign anybody. (Crew see the whole schedule and can claim an open seat, but never see anyone's pay.)
You assign someone. Click an open seat → the shift window opens → pick a person and add & assign them. You can also confirm, edit, or cancel a shift from that same window.

✅You mostly don't build this by hand. When you confirm a job, Studio Magic already opens the right number of crew seats, worked out from the headcount (more kids → more camera stations → more seats). And if the roster comes in bigger than expected, the app quietly opens more open seats to match — it only ever adds, never touches a seat someone already claimed. Your whole job is to make sure every OPEN seat gets a name before the shoot.

The # Stations column shows how many camera setups the day needs (this same number drives the equipment prep list in the next step); the Time column shows the crew's call/arrival time — earlier than the shoot start, because the app works it back from how long setup takes.

Equipment prep (who grabs the gear)

Once the shifts are claimed, someone has to pull the gear from the prep room and get it ready. Studio Magic turns that into four prep sets, and for each one you "tag" the person who owns it — in the app that's picking an Owner — and they get a checklist by email and text. This is the "who grabs what, and is it ready?" step.

The four prep sets

🔌 Electronics — the powered gear: cameras, batteries, SD cards, lights.
🧰 Equipment — the passive support: backdrops, stands, tripods, cases, props.
✅ QC — the quality-check steps before the batch goes out.
✂️ Cull — the keeper-assembly steps after culling.

What's actually in the prep room (and on the list)

Here's the thing that saves you the most work: the Electronics and Equipment lists ARE your Equipment registry. They're built live from the gear you keep in Equipment (#/equipment) plus your station kits — you don't hand-author them. The two lists just sort your gear into the powered stuff you charge or format (Electronics) and the passive support you just pack (Equipment). Lenses stay on the cameras, so they never show up as a separate grab line. Add a new camera or retire a broken stand in Equipment, and these lists follow on their own.

They also scale to the size of the day. Each item carries a "per-station" amount, so the list multiplies by the day's station count (the same # Stations number from the staffing sheet): 4 stations → "charge 4 batteries, pack 4 SD cards," 2 stations → 2 of each. You never hand-count.

QC and Cull are the same short checklist every time — the control-point steps before the batch goes out and the keeper-assembly steps after culling. You write those two once; they don't change job to job.

How you set it up on a job

From the job's Crew & setup area (or the Equipment Prep header), open Equipment Prep for that job (#/session-prep/<jobId>). You get one card per set.
On each set's card, pick the Owner ("— pick a person —") — usually the Lead. This is the "tag who's on equipment" step. The card also shows an editable Stations number (prefilled from the job — that's what scales the quantities), a running "N items · N to grab · N/N packed" count, the 📍 where it's stored line so the owner knows where to grab it, and a preview of the actual list.
Click Send list. The owner gets the prep list by email and by text — e.g. "MXM: you're on Equipment for Franklin Elem Oct 14. Prep list ready — charge 4 batteries…" (with a "Reply STOP to opt out" line). Change something afterward and the button becomes Resend list.

📋What the owner does: opens the list, grabs & preps each item, and checks it off as they go. You can hit Mark ready so on shoot morning it's obvious at a glance the gear is packed.

Set-up-once vs. every-job. The prep sets — their labels, where each is stored, and the QC/Cull steps — are authored once under Equipment Prep template setup (#/session-prep). There, Electronics and Equipment show a read-only preview of your live gear (edit the gear in Equipment, not here), while QC and Cull are simple tables you type into. After that, every job is just "pick an owner → Send list."

Shoot day

On the day, your crew live in Shoot-day home (#/shoot-day/home) — a phone-friendly page built for photographers, not the admin dashboard.

What crew see

Today's sessions on a timeline, with the call/arrival time and one-tap call / route to the location.
A Session details drop-down (backdrop, expected count, badge/check-in, parking, notes) so they don't dig through the app.
A 📋 Job brief link to the full read-only day-of brief (#/brief/<id>).
Clock in / Clock out and confirm shift right on their card.

Capturing what happens on the day

A pre-shoot Heads-up box — "anything to watch for today?"
A Log issue button for anything that comes up mid-shoot.
A short post-shoot pulse (a few quick questions + an "anything else?") that each route to the right place for you to see.
A Notes reader — the one place to read everything the crew logged for that shoot, newest first.

📸Marking who got photographed — the QR / access-code flow. Every subject has an access code (and you can make QR cards in Card Studio). Scanning the subject's code before their photo records that they were photographed. The payoff: anyone never scanned is exactly your makeup-day list — no reconstructing it by hand.

Cull & production (finish the photos)

After the shoot, the pictures go through your production pipeline. High level, there are two homes:

Cull Magic (#/cull-magic/<job id>) — where you go through the shoot and pick the keepers. Built for photographers: images stay grouped the way you need them (by subject / pose) and it never silently re-sorts your work. You assemble a keeper package to hand to editing, and the round-trip back from the editor is tracked so nothing gets lost. (It also has a Pose Library and Training for consistent poses across the crew.)

Backstage — your production control room. Its rail leads with "What needs you now": the Queue, Mentions, Session issues (everything crew flagged on shoot day), and a launch into Cull Magic. A calmer group holds Yearbook readiness, the Makeup board (who still needs a makeup day), and Production health (jobs sitting too long).

💡You don't need every control on day one. Just know: after the shoot, Cull Magic is where keepers get picked and Backstage is where you watch the job through QC and out to the lab.

⚠️Honest heads-up on Cull Magic: the deep image cull — flipping through the full-resolution frames — is still maturing. The heavy pixel work happens on your own machine, and the in-app image wall depends on getting the photos out of Captura, so today Cull Magic is more about organizing keepers and the editor round-trip than replacing your desktop culling tool. Lean on it for the keeper package + tracking; don't expect it to be your only daily culling app yet.

Deliver the photos

After the shoot, the finished pictures reach two audiences:

Families buy their photos in Captura

Captura is the store where parents order prints and downloads. Studio Magic is your hub — it's never a parent storefront and parents never log into it. You hand families their gallery links (or a QR / access-code sheet) and they shop in Captura.

The organization sees its files in the portal

In Portal Magic, an org's files live under 📸 Your photos & files. A file only shows for them once it's marked delivered — a draft stays hidden. When something reaches delivered, the org gets a "something new is ready in your portal" email automatically.

Handing links to families

Under the portal's 🤝 Share with families tab: an access-code list (CSV), QR cards and proof sheets, a printable photo-gallery sheet (hand it out so everyone can find their gallery), and copyable "find my photos" + makeup sign-up links.

⚠️Staff galleries — a change is coming (confirm before relying on it): today the printable staff photo gallery sheet only shows up on a dedicated Staff Photo Day. A change in the works will make that staff-gallery sheet available on any school picture day that also shoots staff — so you can hand the staff their own gallery even when they were photographed alongside the students. Pending — check with the team before you count on it for a non-staff-day shoot.

That's the full line — from "I have a client" to families holding their photos.

What's automatic vs. what you click

Moment	You click	Studio Magic does automatically
Approve a booking	Confirm → Create job	Creates org+contact+job; grants portal; sends ONE "you're booked" email
Org opens portal	—	Shows the "Your next steps" checklist
Session details submitted	(they submit)	Notifies you 3 ways, email lists the answers; marks the job
Agreement signed	(they sign)	Files a signed copy into Business documents
Marketing set finished	Generate & save	Drops posters into the Marketing Materials folder + emails the org
Roster dropped / parent registers	—	Notifies you 3 ways
Confirm a job	Confirm it	Opens the right number of crew seats on the staffing sheet
Send an equipment prep list	Send list	Emails and texts the prep list to the set's owner
Crew claim / clock in	(they tap)	Fills the seat / logs their hours
File marked delivered	Mark it delivered	Emails the org "something new is ready"

Notes for Mande

Gaps / confusing bits (flag only — not fixed here)

Audited against the live app 2026-07-14. Every screen/route/button in this guide checked out — no phantom screens. These are the open questions + coming changes.

Staff gallery on any school day — PENDING (biggest one to confirm). A separate lane is making the staff photo gallery sheet available on any school picture day that also shoots staff, not just a dedicated Staff Photo Day. §11 now flags it as "pending." When that lands, tell me and I'll turn the caveat into a plain "every school picture day can hand out a staff gallery" line.
Marketing folder has two names in the app. The campaign flow calls the bucket "Marketing media"; Card Studio & booking call the same bucket "Marketing Materials." This guide uses Marketing Materials throughout. Small future fix: pick one label.
marketing-magic/README.md still says auto-marketing is "(default ON)." Stale — the live function is OFF by default (mig 683; verified the marketing-generate-on-confirm gate reads === true). Worth a one-line README fix so it doesn't mislead a future builder.
Cull Magic depth. §10 now says plainly that the deep full-resolution cull is local-first / still maturing and not yet a full desktop-cull replacement. If that's more finished than described (or you want it sold harder), tell me and I'll adjust the tone.
Order check. This runs session details → agreement → marketing → roster → shoot, marketing explicitly not waiting on the roster. If in real life you often run agreement + marketing before details are fully in (or roster + agreement in parallel), tell us and we'll reword the "wait for X" lines.
"Send session details" recipient. Worth a line for Lauren about who the details link goes to when the portal contact isn't the right person (e.g. a sports link to the athletic director vs. the front office). Kept general — add specifics if you want.
Shifts status chips (tiny). The admin Shifts page now shows only Open · Confirmed · All as visible filters (Needs confirm / Completed / Backed out are hidden). This guide doesn't lean on those chips, so no change — noted only for the record.