Frequently asked questions

Yes, through HQ. It gives you internal only boards for SOPs, sales pipeline, asset library, team onboarding and personal lists, with items holding documents, files, comments and custom fields. There are two views, a stage based board where you name your own columns and a Files view, and you can group boards into folders. Fields come in ten types including a built in time tracker, up to ten per board. It is on every plan but the number of boards is capped: five on Studio, twenty on Agency, unlimited on Scale. Each board can be open to the team or restricted to named people. Guests never see HQ and there is no share link, so an external client cannot open an HQ item at all. Automations cannot drive HQ boards yet.

There is Discussions: a channel per brand and per project, plus workspace wide channels, direct messages, threads, and custom channels you create yourself. You can tag a specific brand, project or task inside a message so nobody has to paste links, and access follows brand and project permissions. A custom channel has three audience settings, private, team, or client visible, so it is more than a simple guest on or off. Brand and project channels are open to guests by default now. Most teams keep Slack at first and move over gradually rather than switching in one go.

Use pricing templates rather than typing amounts each time. Settings, Advanced, Pricing has four modes: flat, rules, profit share and hourly. Rules is the powerful one, it holds duration tiers or per second rates, version bonuses, revision surcharges, per sub role splits, and bonuses driven by how a published post actually performs on views or engagement. Hourly rates can be set per sub role, so a colourist and a rough cut editor bill differently. You can apply templates in batch and set what the client pays versus what the editor gets. Analytics, Financial summary then shows what each client owes you, what you owe each editor and the margin, counting only approved work. Payments are a proper ledger, so you record a deposit or a part payment against a line, backdate it, add the method and a note, and the balance keeps showing as owed.

Partly. Go to Settings, Advanced, Statuses. To do and In progress rename freely, up to 24 characters. Four more can only be swapped for one or two fixed presets: supervisor approval, in revisions, client approval and posted. Approved, admin approval and end client approval cannot be renamed at all, because permissions and notifications are built on them. Only in progress and posted can be switched off entirely. There are also six templates to pick from: basic, internal, internal with 2 approvers, agency, agency with 2 approvers, and agency plus end client. There are no stage groups and no per brand phase names, so the template is a single workspace wide setting. If you need your own phase names, use a select custom column instead.

Time tracking is a built in column, not a custom one. Click the plus at the end of the column headers and switch it on. The person working starts the timer when they begin and stops when they finish, or enters the time manually, and totals per task and per person appear in the Analytics time tracking charts, which every current plan includes. The system also tracks how long a task sits in each stage. It runs on trust, it does not monitor anyone screen, guests never see it, and it is not available on parent tasks, though time estimates are. Separately from this there are seven kinds of custom column you can add yourself: select, tags, date, date range, text, priority and link.

One project per month, for example Content July, with that month deliverables as tasks. Do not use one project for the whole year. For project based work make each shoot day a project and keep pre production, production and post as stage groups inside it rather than as separate projects. Subfolders let you group several deliverables inside a project.

Yes, in Analytics. You get tasks approved, approved on time versus delayed, average revision rounds per editor, who is overloaded, hours logged, cost per editor, bottlenecks and production momentum by month. Janet has context on all of it, so you can just ask how an editor did last month and what it cost. There is also a Workload view: set each person weekly capacity and working days, put estimated hours on a task and split them per assignee, and drag production or time off blocks onto a calendar, with conflict warnings, utilisation percentages and a calendar feed you can subscribe to in Google or Outlook. It needs Agency or Scale, only team members see it, supervisors and admins edit it, and an admin can switch it off entirely.

Use a parent task. Click New task, choose Parent, then click the small arrow on the card to expand it and use Add variant for each media or document item. From the client side the parent shows as a folder containing all the variants, so they review the video, the thumbnail and the caption together. You can also post straight from the parent, which publishes the variants together as a carousel. One rule to know: a deliverable has one posting plan, so it is either the parent carousel or individual posts per variant, never both.

Either click the plus icon on an existing task and upload, or drag the file straight from their computer into the supervisor approval column, which creates a task named after the file. By default editors can only push work as far as supervisor approval, they cannot send anything to a client, and they can also move approved work to posted. When it lands in supervisor approval the brand supervisors and admins are notified. Two workspace settings can lift that ceiling if a customer wants it: editors can reach client approval, and allowing an editor to skip supervisor approval on a task that has already been to brand approval once.

Yes. There are two kinds of task, media and document. A document task behaves like a Google Doc, so you write in it, several people can edit at once, people select text and comment on it, and it has its own versions and approvals. A task with nothing uploaded yet is just a media task waiting for a file, not a separate type. For admin work that never touches a client, use HQ instead.

You can. Variants start out inheriting whoever is on the parent, but each variant row has its own assignee control, so you can put a different editor on each one, for example the editor on the cut, the designer on the thumbnail and the social manager on the caption. What does not work on parent tasks is time tracking, which only runs on the individual media and document tasks, though time estimates do work on parents.

Name your export files close to the existing task names and drag them all in at once. They do not have to match exactly, Timeliner ignores case, treats underscores dots and dashes as spaces, and strips trailing version words, so Brand_Promo_v2.mp4 still finds the task called Brand Promo. On the drop you choose Match, then for each file say whether it is a new version, a new task, or skip it. It only matches ordinary media tasks, never parents or variants, and an editor only matches against tasks they are assigned to.

Yes. Tag every person on the task, then open pricing, choose manual, and set a separate amount for each one. You can also pay by salary rather than per task, or use hourly rates and templates by sub role such as rough cut editor or colourist. The brand financial summary then shows what the client owes, what each person is owed and the margin.

Yes, this shipped at the end of July. Create a project, for example July, then create subfolders inside it such as Shoot 1, Shoot 2 and Shoot 3. It is aimed at agencies posting several times a day whose project list would otherwise get unmanageable. Two limits: subfolders are one level deep, you cannot nest a folder inside a folder, and you cannot share a subfolder on its own, permissions always come from the parent project. Share the project or the brand instead.

No. Editors only see how much they are owed and clients only see how much they owe you. The margin between the two is never visible to either side. There used to be a catch, that a price put on an individual task was visible to the main approver, and the advice was to put pricing at project level. You no longer have to do that, there is a hide client pricing setting in Settings that removes per task prices, project prices and the total owed card from every guest including the approver. Team roles are unaffected by it.

Select the brand or the project and choose Archive. Nothing is deleted. Two things to be clear about: archiving is admin only, a supervisor cannot do it, and it hides the brand or project for everyone including guests, not just for you. Any team member can then switch the filter in the bottom left between Active, Archived and All to see what has been archived, and you can unarchive at any time. Guests do not get that filter.

Not as a version, but you can make it a variant. Drag the stray task onto the one it belongs with and it becomes a variant of that parent, and you can undo it back to a standalone task later. It will refuse if the source is already a parent or a variant, if it is in a different project, or if the editor is not assigned to it. If you specifically need it stacked as a version of the same deliverable, the file has to be uploaded again into the original task. The simplest fix is telling editors to keep the same file name so the system matches it automatically.

It is a second, earlier deadline that only your editors see, while the real client deadline stays hidden from them. Set it a couple of days before actual delivery so you keep buffer. You switch two deadline mode on in Settings, and if you only want one deadline you can leave it on one.

Open the task, switch the media to the latest version, then overlay the comments from the previous version. Each old comment jumps to its timecode on the new cut so you can tick them off one by one. Unlike Frame.io or Dropbox Replay you pick exactly which version to compare against, not just the immediately previous one. There are three modes, overlay, split screen and both, set in Settings, Workspace, Comparison Viewer for the whole workspace, and it defaults to both. Overlay is faster than split for checking notes. Note that clients opening a public share link only ever get overlay, never split.

Yes. From a task you can export the timecoded comments three ways: an SRT file, a marker XML that drops onto a Premiere timeline, and a PDF report with the frame stills, which is the one most people forget and clients love. Resolve reads both the SRT and the XML. Be careful with Final Cut, the XML is the older Premiere format, not FCPXML, so Final Cut Pro X is not natively supported. There is no plugin and no live timeline sync yet. Plenty of editors skip the export entirely and keep Timeliner open on a second screen.

Yes. Anyone reviewing can record a voice memo on a comment, clients on a share link included. Transcription is a button rather than something automatic, so click Generate transcript when you want the text. It is one of the biggest differences from Frame.io, which does not have it, and it helps a lot with clients whose first language is not English. You can copy the transcript text, but the audio file itself cannot be downloaded.

A client can leave as many comments as they like, and a round is only counted when the task actually enters in revisions, which is when the editor is notified. Comments do not lock after that. Only the timecoded comment button on the player greys out, the discussion box stays live and the client can keep commenting, so it is not a hard freeze. Also worth knowing, the 30 minute auto revert can push a task into revisions on its own, which counts a round without the client pressing anything. Set a revision limit at workspace level, on the brand under Edit brand, Workflow, or per project. Analytics splits internal and client revisions.

No, and the known issue that used to be flagged here is fixed. Clients only see versions that were actually sent to them, so three internal rounds still show as version one on their side, and they are renumbered from V1 so the internal rounds are invisible even in the underlying data. If you want to remove version compare from clients entirely, turn off Task versions in Settings, Workspace, Client Portal, Client Visibility, and it takes the version pills away too. Split screen compare is never offered on a share link at all. Internal comments are separate: each comment is public or team, and it defaults to team, so guests never see one unless someone deliberately makes it public.

Use a document task. Create it with New task, Document, paste the script in, and move it to client approval like any other task. The client approves it in the same portal and you get notified. It works like a Google Doc, several people can write in it at once, and it keeps its own versions and approvals. Since 17 August there are doc and brief templates too, both built in starters and your own saved ones, so you are not pasting the same structure every time. The video is then a separate media task in the same project, so the script and the edit stay together.

Yes. Switch the status template in Settings, Statuses. Agency with 2 approvers gives you supervisor approval, then admin approval, then client approval, three separate sign offs, and a task cannot reach approved until every stage clears. There is also Internal with 2 approvers for work with no client, and Agency plus End Client where the client approves and then their own end client does. Admin approval can be scoped to only internal or only client brands, or overridden per brand. What does not exist is a quorum at the same stage. A brand can have several guest approvers, but any one of them clears the gate, so there is no two of these three must approve.

Yes. The web player goes up to 8x and plays in reverse. J and L shuttle backwards and forwards, stepping 1x, 2x, 4x, 8x, K pauses, the arrow keys seek two seconds and shift plus arrow steps a frame. Since 18 August every shortcut is customisable per person in Settings, Shortcuts, so anyone coming from another tool can remap them. You can also zoom into the comment timeline the way you would in an editing app, which makes a 25 minute video much easier to review. Video metadata sits behind the three dots menu. Note the mobile app is still capped at 2x.

Yes. Go to Settings, Workspace, Media and Workflow and change Download policy to manual toggle. After that the client can still click Approve but the file stays locked until you release it, and you get a downloadable column on each task, plus a bulk lock and unlock in the selection bar and a default setting for newly created tasks. One thing to know: it covers deliverables only, not the raw files in the project header. There is also a request and approve flow if you would rather let an individual guest ask for a file.

Yes. Open the deliverable and use the Transcript tab. It is not automatic, someone on the team clicks to generate it first, and it is included from Studio up. Once it exists you can search inside it, copy it, download it as TXT or SRT, or select a chunk of text and leave a comment anchored to that exact moment instead of describing where it is. There is no bulk export across a whole catalog.

Images, graphics, documents and audio all move through the same task and approval flow. Where they differ is reviewing. Images are the best case, you can draw on them and leave normal comments, just not timecoded ones. Audio and PDF can be commented on but not drawn on. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, text files, PSD and AI have no commenting at all, they are upload and download deliverables, so a PSD or an AI file cannot be marked up inside Timeliner. Drag and drop takes exactly 50 files at a time, anything past that is dropped with a warning, or drop a folder to load up to 100 into one task as variants. Some of our biggest customers are creative agencies doing mostly static work.

That is not a bug, it is the auto revert after comments setting in Settings, Workspace, Media and Workflow. It exists because clients often forget to press send to revisions, but the default is 30 minutes, so a client who comments, goes to lunch and comes back finds the item already moved. Set it to 24 hours, which is the longest option, rather than turning it off. It is a workspace setting with no per brand override. Do not confuse it with the per brand guest revert windows, which control how long a client has to undo a send to revisions or an approval, a different thing entirely.

Approval is not permanently locked. As an admin or supervisor you can move the task straight back to client approval from your side, with no confirmation dialog, and ask the client to add their comments and send it back to revisions. The pipeline is designed to push clients to decide once, and the approve screen tells them that is the final video, but you keep manual control. An editor cannot do this unless the workspace has editors can reach client approval switched on.

For a share link, nothing at all, they just open it and go. For a client you invite as a brand guest, an account is created behind the scenes with their name, email and optionally a phone for WhatsApp, but they never touch a password. Every time something moves into client approval they get a magic link by email, WhatsApp or Slack that signs them straight into their portal, and it works from a phone with nothing to download. If a security policy requires a real sign in, switch the brand to Secure mode, which is a normal setting rather than something we build for them. One thing to correct: there is no per client logo field, the logo on the portal and the emails is your agency logo.

Clients see tasks that have reached client approval, plus approved, posted, and anything they sent back to revisions. They never see to do, in progress, supervisor approval, who your editors are, what you pay them, or your internal comments. The portal is more than a folder layout: by default clients get folder view, list view and a calendar, and you can also switch on a kanban board and an analytics view, per workspace, per brand or per link. Downloads are allowed after approval by default and you can change that. An admin can also widen what clients see to include your internal columns, so check that setting if you are relying on those staying hidden.

Use a share link. Click the share icon on a single task, a folder, a project, or the brand to cover all of that client work, choose viewer, commenter or approver, and copy the link. An approver link lets them approve without ever logging in, it just asks for their name the first time. Expiry options are 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days or forever, and forever is the default, so set it deliberately if you do not want the link live indefinitely. There is no password on share links, security is the secret link plus the role and expiry you set. If a customer needs a real sign in, that is Secure mode on the brand instead.

Yes, with intake forms, in Settings, Advanced, Intake form. You build a form with your branding, a catalog of deliverables with example videos and optional prices, a brief field, a deadline and an upload area for raw files. Submissions arrive in Action items under Requests, and on approval they create the project with the brief and assets already attached. You choose whether requests are approved manually or created automatically. Two things added recently: you can ask for a brief per deliverable rather than one for the whole project, so each task carries its own, and there is an automation trigger for a client request coming in, though that one only routes to a brand, the full set of actions runs on approval.

Add them on the brand, not the workspace. Click the three dots next to the brand in the left sidebar, choose Manage members, and invite them by email under Brand guest with the role Approver. A brand guest is only notified when work reaches client approval and never sees your other clients.

Yes. A brand has one main approver plus as many extra guests as you want, each set as approver, commenter or viewer. They are all notified automatically when something needs review, so you do not have to forward links. If it is a one off reviewer, a commenter share link is quicker than creating a guest.

Open the project Raw files and assets card, click Share, set the link to anyone with the link and send it. They upload without being in your team and without using a seat, and your editors download from the same place. Only make it restricted if the person is already a team member.

Yes. Enable per task briefs by editing the form. Before that change the brief only reached the project brief and not the individual tasks, which blocked creators from raising edit requests with the details attached. It was built after customers asked and is live.

When you invite the guest, or afterwards in Settings, Team, Guests, where you can edit the number. The phone field is only used for WhatsApp. If you leave it empty they just get email notifications, and you can turn email off too if you want to handle it manually.

Yes. Brand and project channels are open to guests by default, so a client can chat with the agency straight away. On a new workspace the three dot menu offers Make members only, and Open channel to guests only shows up on a channel somebody already closed. If you do not want clients in there at all, there is a workspace wide switch in Settings, Discussion. Workspaces created before this became the default and never touched the setting stayed closed, so check which way yours is set if you are not sure.

The portal carries your agency logo, workspace name and colours, not the end client branding, and there is one identity for the whole workspace rather than one per brand. Notification emails going to the client are already white labelled to your agency. Per client white labelling and a custom domain are not available. What you can set per brand is the theme, which view the client lands on, whether work requests are on and which views they get. Removing the small Timeliner badge is possible but only on Scale and enterprise.

Yes, and we do it for free. Send us the brand images in a Google Drive or similar link with the matching brand names and we will add them to each brand in your workspace. It makes the workspace look considerably better.

Use the announcement banner in Settings, Workspace, General. It is a cross brand broadcast: you write it once and it shows across every brand and client portal and the internal app, including to people opening a share link without logging in. You choose the audience, everyone, team only or guests only, and you can set a start and end date. Two limits: it is admin only and needs Agency or Scale, and you cannot target one brand, so it is all or nothing.

Yes. Create a separate form and attach it to that specific client, so a client on a plan without a particular service simply never sees that catalog item. That is the supported way to handle different service tiers.

Yes. Open Intake form settings and use Copy form link. That link opens in a browser with no login, so you can send it to a client who is not on Timeliner yet. Check the form is attached to the right brand so submissions land in the correct place.

Go to Settings, Team, find the person and click Deactivate. Then re-invite them on the brand as a brand guest with the approver role. Admin role changes need approval from an admin. If the re-invite returns an error saying the user already has access, send the email address to support because that conflict has to be cleared on the backend.

The form needs a deliverables step, and the client has to actually pick a quantity on it. The count is the quantity stepper next to each deliverable, not a separate question. Without a deliverables step, or if the client leaves every quantity at zero, approving the request just creates a project holding the brief and the uploaded assets with no tasks. Edit the form to add the deliverables step and resubmit to test.

Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn, personal profiles and company pages alike, are live on officially approved integrations, and posts publish automatically. TikTok connects and schedules in the same calendar but still hands the post back to you to publish by hand while the TikTok Content Posting review is pending. X is not supported. On Instagram you can post feed, reels, stories and carousels. One limit worth knowing: Instagram collaborator invites are not built yet, so that field is greyed out and marked Coming soon rather than quietly swallowing a handle.

Open the scheduled post and click the AI button. For a video it works from the transcript rather than from the picture, plus that brand recent captions and its voice profile, which you set per client and per platform under Edit brand. For YouTube it also suggests the title and tags. On photo and carousel posts it does look at the images. Corrections are only remembered when you type them into the refine bar, so editing the text yourself teaches it nothing. You can always edit before saving.

By default a post only publishes once the task is approved. You can drag a task onto the calendar from any status, but if it is still in to do, supervisor approval or client approval it will not go out. When that happens the post is marked missed and it does not retry on its own, so move the task to approved and reschedule it. Two other things worth checking: an admin can switch the approval requirement off in Settings, and if the platform has no connected account the post is saved as manual rather than scheduled.

No. Social analytics only covers posts published through Timeliner, so an account with no Timeliner posts shows empty and there is no import of historical data. Per post you get views, likes, comments, shares, saves and engagement rate, and the whole section or any single card exports as PDF or CSV for the client. Reach is Instagram and Facebook only. Views means video views, falling back to impressions where the platform does not report them. TikTok and X return nothing, and numbers stop refreshing 90 days after a post goes out.

Yes. Once a video is in client approval the client sees the caption, the thumbnail options and the scheduled time next to the video. They can approve everything at once or go item by item and request changes. What they can edit versus only approve depends on the permissions you gave that guest. One limit to know: choosing which thumbnail actually gets published only works for guests reviewing inside the app, not for someone opening a public share link.

Open the brand, choose Edit brand, Connected accounts, and click Connect Instagram, which routes through Facebook. They need a Facebook business account with a page. In the Meta dialog choose Opt into current page, click Continue, select the Instagram account, continue and save. You can also generate a connect link and send it to the client so they authorise their own account.

Drag the task onto the date in the content calendar, select the platforms, and fill in the caption, title, tags, thumbnail and visibility. Timeliner uploads the file straight to YouTube, you never download it yourself. Made for kids is set to No, age restriction is left off, and the category is People and Blogs. If the visibility is not one of the standard options it falls back to private rather than public, so check it before you leave. Playlist assignment is not supported yet.

Yes, you write a separate caption per platform, and that also applies when a brand has two accounts on the same platform. Text only posts to Facebook and LinkedIn work properly now, so you can post to those without attaching media. Instagram, TikTok and YouTube still require a video or an image.

No, and no third party tool can. YouTube only accepts one thumbnail per video through its API, so no scheduler can run a real thumbnail test. You can attach up to three options so the client or designer picks one, but only the one you select is published. Title testing has the same limitation. Note that picking the thumbnail only works for a guest reviewing inside the app, not on a public share link.

Not if the app is officially approved by the platform, which is where the risk normally comes from with unauthorised third party tools. Our Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn integrations are all officially approved. Our founder runs his own 25,000 follower account through it. Accounts are connected per brand, so separate client accounts stay separate.

Yes, this shipped. How many depends on the plan: Studio is one account per platform per brand, Agency is two, Scale and enterprise are five. You add the second one from the same Connect button on the brand. The old workaround of creating two separate brands is only needed on Studio now. If you want combined stats across everything, open Analytics and select global view on the left.

Studio is 3TB, Agency 8TB and Scale 20TB, and each extra seat adds 250GB. Above that we quote a custom plan, and we already have customers on 25TB, 40TB and more. You cannot buy storage on its own in the app: the only thing you can add yourself is seats, and storage comes with them at 250GB each. If you need a lot more space without adding people, that is a custom plan, so contact us and we will quote it.

Yes, and for large raw volumes we recommend it. Paste the Drive, Dropbox or server link into the project brief or the Links header card so everyone reaches it from inside Timeliner, and keep deliverables and the assets editors actually need in Timeliner storage. Teams migrating in usually move only their deliverables and link their existing raid or server per project, which makes migration much faster. Most people end up downgrading their Drive plan rather than cancelling it.

There is no per file limit, so multi gigabyte files straight off the camera are fine. The only cap is the storage on your plan. Drag and drop handles about 100 items at a time and uploads three files concurrently in a queue, and you can start another batch immediately. One exception: images are currently capped at 5MB, which is being raised to 10MB.

Our benchmarking shows the same speeds. Watch out that the Frame progress indicator can report a much higher rate than it is actually achieving, so compare the finish time rather than the number on screen. What we do not have yet is a mounted drive or a watched folder that syncs an export automatically, that is on the roadmap.

Every project has a Raw files and assets header card that works like a Google Drive folder, so create folders there and drag in the raw footage, B roll and briefs. The brand has a matching header for brand guidelines, links and the B roll library, so a new editor finds everything without being onboarded each time. You can also click Share on that card to send a videographer or the client an upload link.

There is no automatic library that collects approved deliverables per brand. Today you archive the project to keep it out of the active list, use HQ to store finished work, or send the client a share link to the finished project. Automatic move to a library is a feature request, not something that exists.

Deleted files go to the trash and are fully removed after 30 days, the same as Google Drive. There is also a storage management centre where you can see what is taking up space and clean up.

Not currently. The block downloads setting applies to deliverables, not to the raw files and assets in the project header. Your options right now are to leave raw files visible and downloadable, or hide them from guests entirely using card permissions.

No. Streaming quality only affects playback in the browser. Every file keeps its original format, so a ProRes upload downloads as the exact same ProRes file. In practice most people cannot tell the difference on the 1080p stream anyway. Studio is capped at 1080p streaming, Agency and Scale get 4K, and Scale also streams raw. If an older 4K upload is only playing at 1080p there is a Generate 4K button in the player quality menu that builds it on demand.

By default an editor only sees the tasks they are tagged on, across every brand. To change it go to Settings, Workspace, team permissions and enable editors to see all tasks, or set it per person under Team, edit role and access. Remember that adding an editor to a brand is separate from tagging them on a task, both are needed before they see anything.

Three team roles and three guest roles. Admins see everything and control billing. Supervisors have the same day to day powers but only on the brands and projects they are given. Editors only see what they are tagged on and never see other editors internal communication. On the guest side, approver, commenter and viewer are separate roles, not one guest role, and on agency workspaces a guest can also sit on an end client tier underneath your client. Editors can be given a free form sub role such as colorist or rough cut editor, which automations can target and which now also drives per sub role pricing splits and hourly rates.

Yes. Access resolves most specific first, project, then brand, then workspace, so someone can be a supervisor at workspace level and deliberately just an editor inside one brand. The workspace role is only the fallback when nothing more specific is set. In practice you still mostly control which brands and projects each person is added to, and a supervisor only sees the brands you give them. Check that new brands are not set to auto assign to everyone in settings. Watch out when granting access: writing a plain editor grant on a brand will quietly downgrade a supervisor or admin everywhere inside it.

They can now, but it is off by default. Turn on editors can create projects in Settings, Workspace, team permissions and they can open their own projects and folders. Leave it off and only supervisors and admins can. If someone needs more than that, promoting them to supervisor costs nothing in capability, a supervisor can do everything an editor can. You can also block editors from creating tasks in the same place.

Click the three dots on the header card and choose Card permissions. From there you set per role who can view and who can edit, so you can hide an internal card from guests, or from editors, or let guests edit the brief. Admins always see everything regardless of what you set.

No. All admins have identical full access and there is no way to scope one differently. Admins also always see every header card regardless of card permissions, so treat admin as a management only role. If you need someone with limited rights, make them a supervisor, since supervisor access is configurable.

No. The invitation email sends as soon as you invite someone. You can still create tasks and assign them to people who have not accepted yet, but if you want to finish setup quietly, tell your team not to accept the invite until you are ready.

An admin controls billing, can delete the workspace and is added to everything automatically. A supervisor has the same day to day powers but only sees the brands and projects they are given. If you only made someone an admin so they would not have to be added to every new brand, make them a supervisor instead and turn on the setting that adds supervisors to new brands automatically.

The original owner email cannot be changed or removed. The workaround is to add a second admin or owner on the email you want to use going forward. It is worth choosing the right entity name and email at signup for this reason.

Deactivating is the only option, and it does remove them from the workspace. The difference is that the record is kept so you can bring them back later if you need to. There is no hard delete.

Yes. In Settings, Advanced workflows there is an agency plus end client workflow. Your client is the agency, and inside them sit their own end clients, so work is approved by the agency first and only then moved to the end client for approval. The end client sees the middle agency branding and never sees you.

Notifications reach the in-app bell, which always fires, plus email, WhatsApp, Slack direct message and Slack channel. They are set per person, not per brand, so you never repeat it for every client. Set the workspace default first in Settings, Notifications, because turning a whole channel off there overrides everyone. Members and guests now have separate defaults, switched with the pill at the top. Then edit a person under Team, edit member, Notifications tab, Notification overrides, Customize. There is a batch apply, the Override everyone now button, but today it only pushes the automation settings like quiet hours and batching, not the per trigger grid. Each person can also have their own notification language, though WhatsApp always arrives in English or Hebrew.

Seven triggers: status change, stage change, posting time set or moved, a date column being set, a new version uploaded, an intake request approved, and an intake form submitted. Thirteen actions, and one rule can do up to twenty of them. Rules can be global across all clients or set per brand, and you can ask Janet to build one in plain language. Dates work backwards from a publish date, so twelve days before posting set the deadline is a normal rule and it recalculates if the date moves. Two limits to know: 25 rules per scope, 50 on Scale and enterprise, and that ceiling is not something support can raise. It is also an Agency feature and stays off until an admin turns the master switch on in Settings.

Yes, and you no longer need a workaround for it. The automation center now does date anchored rules, so you set something like twelve days before the posting date, set the deadline, and it fills itself in every time you enter a publish date. Explain the logic once when you build the rule and it applies to every episode after that. If the logic is unusual you can still ask Janet to build the rule for you in plain language, or drive it from your own Claude over MCP.

Use the automation center. Create a rule with the trigger When status changes to approved and choose the Notify action. You pick one of four sets of recipients: assignees, supervisors and admins together, admins only, or specific members up to twenty. There is no supervisors only option, it is always bundled with admins. Status change rules can run immediately or on a delay, anything from a day up to a year, and a delayed one re-checks the task is still in that status before it fires.

Yes. First set the sub roles by going to Settings, Team and clicking the sub role column to give each person a label, for example rough cut editor or colourist. Once sub roles are set they become available as targets in the automation center.

Not for ordinary internal comments. By default you are notified when a task moves to revisions and when someone tags you directly. Two exceptions worth knowing: every comment a guest leaves does notify the assigned editors, the project supervisors and the admins, and that one is on by default, though it can be switched off in the notification grid. There is also an opt-in comment added notification if someone actually wants to hear about every internal comment. If you need a specific person to see a message, tag them in the comment.

On Agency, Scale and Enterprise you get an API key, webhooks and an MCP connector under Settings, Advanced, Developers. Studio does not include them. Paste the MCP URL into Claude or ChatGPT as a custom connector and you can ask which editor is free right now or what is due today, and have it create brands, projects and tasks, assign people, set pricing, write captions and schedule posts. It can also pull a file straight in from any public link up to 100MB, so only files sitting on your own computer still need the browser. For most cases it replaces paying for Zapier.

There are no native plugins for those tools. Everything of that kind runs through the API, MCP or webhooks, and we help you set it up on an onboarding call. That covers things like creating a Timeliner project when an invoice is issued in QuickBooks or Zoho, syncing an Airtable status, or copying approved deliverables back to Google Drive if your policy requires a backup there.

You need to be an admin. Click your profile picture at the bottom left, go to Settings, Notifications and open the Members section. Enter your Slack workspace URL, click Connect to Slack and click Allow on the Slack page that opens. Then pick the default channel where notifications go. It works on every current plan. You may also need to add the Timeliner app to the specific channel first, through View channel details, Integrations, Add an app.

In Timeliner go to Settings, Advanced, Developers and copy the MCP server URL. In Claude open Settings, Connectors, click the plus button, choose Add custom connector, name it Timeliner, paste the URL, leave advanced settings empty and click Add. It is admin only unless an admin turns on the allow supervisors option in that same screen. A supervisor who has been allowed in gets the MCP connector only, API keys and webhooks stay with admins.

Start with the Notification log, the icon at the top right, and open the WhatsApp tab to see whether the message was actually sent. It shows what went out but never why something failed, so work through the causes yourself. The usual one is the phone number not being in proper international format, so go to Settings, Team, scroll right to the phone column, click the three dots and Edit, and fix it. Then untag and retag the person on a task to fire a fresh notification. If nobody in the workspace is getting WhatsApp at all, that is on our side rather than yours, so tell us straight away and we will get it back on. Editors and up can see the log, resending needs supervisor.

No. There is no way to embed a Timeliner video on your own website. Share links cannot be placed in an iframe, and every video URL is tied to a login or a share token and expires, so it will not work as an embed source. The only thing you can embed elsewhere is the intake form. It does work the other way round, you can paste a YouTube, Vimeo or Loom link into a Timeliner doc. If someone needs video on their site, they still need Vimeo or YouTube for that part.

A channel post writes the person name as plain text, it is not a real Slack mention. If you want one specific person pinged, Timeliner matches people to their Slack account by email, so set their notifications to Slack direct message instead of a channel and they get a real DM. The integration is one way, so replying in Slack does not reach Timeliner. Comment inside Timeliner and tag the person there.

Yes, per brand and per project. In the Slack settings click Add override, pick a brand or a project, choose the channel it should go to and save. There is no limit on how many overrides you add. Correcting what we used to say here: each notification goes to exactly one channel, the most specific one that matches. A project override beats a brand override, and a brand override beats the workspace default. One status change cannot post into two channels.

14 days with full access and no feature limits, so you can add your whole team and upload terabytes. A card is required at signup and the first charge happens on day 15. You can change plan during the trial without being charged, so it is worth starting on Agency to see the posting calendar and the API even if you downgrade later.

Studio is 89 dollars a month with 5 seats, 3TB and 1080p streaming. Agency is 199 dollars a month with 10 seats, 8TB, 4K streaming, social posting and the content calendar, automations, analytics, payment tracking, intake forms and API plus MCP access. Scale is 499 dollars a month with 20 seats, 20TB, 4K and raw streaming and a dedicated success manager. Annual billing is 15 percent off, which is 75, 169 and 419 a month. The thing to lead with on Studio: it connects one brand to social and does not include the content calendar, so any agency running posting for more than one client needs Agency. Agency connects 10 brands, Scale is unlimited.

No. Seats are only your own team: admins, supervisors and editors. Clients and guests are unlimited on every plan, so you can have hundreds of them at no extra cost, each set as approver, commenter or viewer. This is one of the main cost differences against Frame.io, where a client who needs to upload has to be given a paid seat.

Yes, we do this regularly. Extensions of 20, 21 and 30 days have all been given, and larger evaluations get more. Just ask us on WhatsApp or by email. The advice that actually works is to take one client and one project and run the whole flow end to end rather than clicking around.

Yes, we do it often. Tell us the seats and the storage you actually need and we price it, whether that is a small team on a lot of storage or a large team on very little. One limit to know: a plan inherits a whole feature set, Studio, Agency or Scale, so we cannot mix single features, we move price with seats and storage.

There is no invoice generation, no contract signing and no payment processing, and both invoicing and contracts are still on the roadmap. What you do get is a proper record of money that moved outside Timeliner. Track what a client owes you and what each editor is owed, then record a payment against any line: a quarter, half, three quarters, the balance, or any amount you type, with the real date, the method and a note. A line shows as unpaid, part paid or settled, and if a client overpays it is held as credit. You can export receivables and payables as CSV. Most agencies still attach the invoice PDF to the project header so it sits with the job.

Each seat above your plan base is 10 dollars a month, or 8.50 on annual, and adds 250GB of storage. Studio goes from 5 up to 10 seats, Agency from 10 up to 20, Scale from 20 up to 40, and past that you move plan or we quote you. So 15 people on Agency is 199 plus 50 dollars and lands you around 9 to 10TB. On Agency an extra seat also raises the connected brand cap by one, so 10 included brands becomes 20 at the maximum 20 seats.

Yes. You only pay for the seats active at the same time, so you can hold 50 member accounts and pay for 10, activating and deactivating people as projects come and go. Deactivate the person you are swapping out before you activate the next one. Deactivating does not delete anyone, so their past work and tags stay in the workspace.

If we change pricing for new customers it does not affect existing subscriptions, so what you sign up on is what you keep paying. On an annual enterprise contract a renewal increase can be written into the agreement, capped at 15 percent over the prior term and separate from any seats or storage you add. This comes up because Shade tripled a customer price year over year and Vimeo charged on renewal without warning.

No. The smallest plan is Studio and it starts at 5 seats for 89 dollars a month, so there is nothing cheaper for one person. Be clear about that early rather than letting a solo operator think there is a single seat price. If the budget is the blocker, the annual price brings it to 75 a month, and a custom plan is worth asking Noam about.

Both are done by you in the app, from the billing area at the bottom left. Card changes and cancellation are manual, so if the card you used at signup is not the one you want charged, update it before the trial converts. There is no automatic switch of payment method.

No. Cancelling before the trial end date stops the subscription from starting, but you keep full access until the original expiry date. Nothing is cut off the moment you cancel.

Yes, we do a white glove migration. It is included with the Scale annual subscription and with Enterprise. On every other plan it is a one time service fee of 450 to 950 dollars depending on what needs moving, and the Agency annual plan gets 50 percent off that fee. Because the price depends on scope, the fastest route is a short call, we look at what you have and quote it on the spot. How it works: there is no Frame.io connector. We work from your exports and a folder of your files, so you download your assets first and we take it from there. Files are copied into Timeliner storage and count against your quota, we cannot link to your existing raw storage. What does come across is brands, projects and subfolders, tasks with deadlines and custom column values, review comments with their original timecodes and authors, and client and team accounts created silently with all notifications held until you sign off. A typical migration takes 3 to 7 business days to fully implement, though a large or unusual archive can take longer.

Click your profile picture at the bottom left and choose Get help. That gives you live support, report a bug, book another onboarding call for team members who missed the first one, and the community. Janet, the in app assistant, sits in the floating dock at the bottom corner of the workspace, bottom right in English and bottom left in Hebrew or Arabic. She does more than answer questions, she can create tasks and projects, set deadlines, assign people, build automation rules, schedule posts and record payments, and she asks you to confirm before each one. She is on every plan for admins, supervisors and editors, guests never see her, and she replies in each person own language. Support runs on live chat and WhatsApp during working hours with a response time of about two hours.

Most teams take one to two weeks, and motivated ones do it in a day. The approach that works is one client and one project run end to end, brief to final client approval, before you onboard everyone, so your leads are confident before the wider team touches it. Onboarding calls are free and included, you can bring your lead editor as a guest, and there is a full tutorial course inside the app.

There is now an iOS app for clients and reviewers. They sign in with a password, magic link, Google or Apple, then get their task list, the video player with downloads, the full commenting tools including voice notes and drawing, and the brief, transcript and post tabs. Three things to know: it goes out through TestFlight rather than the App Store, so ask us for an invite. There is no Android app. And it has no push notifications yet. Team members still use the web app, a team account signing in is handed off to the browser. The web app adapts to any device, so a client can also just review from their phone browser through the same magic link.

Yes, and you can do it yourself in the app. There are two importers, both taking CSV or Excel with a downloadable template and a column matcher. One imports brands and projects, up to 50 brands and 20 projects each, and it sends a real client invite if you include a client email. The other imports tasks into a project, up to 250, with title, type, parent for variants, status, client price, editor pay and deadlines. Publish date, record date, assignees and custom field values still need us to run a script for you, so ask if you need them. One trap worth knowing: the deadline columns are day offsets counted from the project start, not real dates, so putting a date like 2026-09-14 in there produces nonsense.

No. Build it in parallel, keep the old tools running, and switch teams over once a full project has been through end to end. For a larger team that is the only approach that works, and it is also the point at which teams decide whether the migration is worth the effort.

You can turn an internal brand into a client brand, but not the other way round, so pick the right type when you create it. Internal is for your own channels or paid ads where there is no client approval step, client is for anything with an external approver. If you got it wrong, delete the brand and recreate it, or ask support since there was a hotfix for exactly this case in August.

Yes, eleven languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Dutch, French, Hindi, Russian, Chinese, Hebrew and Arabic. Hebrew and Arabic run right to left. When you invite a member or add a guest you set their system language and their notification language separately, so an editor in India and a client in Germany each get the interface and the alerts in their own language. One caveat to mention up front: WhatsApp messages only go out in English or Hebrew whatever the notification language is set to. If any wording reads badly, tell us and we will fix it.

Folder view was actually fixed back in May, it pages 50 at a time and only renders what is on screen, so it holds up at volume now. List view is still the strongest for teams reviewing hundreds of videos and it has had the most tuning through August. The one to steer people away from on very large boards is kanban, which is the only view that still renders every card in a column. Folder view also does not give you a global view across everything, which is the other reason to move people to list.

We are in the process, working with an external audit firm called Scytale, with policies and staff security training being completed now. We are not certified yet. We can send a letter confirming we are at an advanced stage of the process, which most companies accept for vendor review. If your lawyer or IT lead wants to talk it through, contact us and we will put you in touch with the team directly.

Yes. Anyone can turn on two factor authentication themselves in Settings, Security, using any authenticator app, and they get backup codes when they set it up. That part is free on every plan. Forcing it on the whole workspace so nobody can skip it is an Agency and above setting. An admin can reset it for someone who loses their phone, and there is a remember this browser option so people are not challenged every time. Guests can set it up for themselves but cannot be forced to. Password resets work as long as the person has access to their own email.

Big production updates go out roughly once a month, with smaller fixes shipping continuously in between. There has been one outage on record, on 18 August, which locked people out for about 45 minutes, and changes were made so it does not recur. Updates are announced in your shared channel before and after they go out, and there is a Whats New feed in the app, the icon in the top bar, which every team member can open. Guests do not see it.

Files and video streaming run on Cloudflare R2 behind the Cloudflare CDN, and video transcoding runs on AWS in the US East region. The app itself is hosted on Vercel, and the database and login sit on Supabase, which is managed Postgres. The AI assistant runs on Claude, by Anthropic. If their IT team has specific security requirements, send them over and we will put you directly in touch with our CTO.

No watermarking of any kind, per viewer or otherwise. What you can do instead is lock downloads, and there are three layers: a workspace policy set to always allow, only after approval or manual per task, a per deliverable unlock switch, and a request and approve flow for an individual guest. That covers most of what people actually want watermarks for.

SSO is not built. It is an enterprise contract item that we scope and deliver on request after the trial, with our CTO working directly with your IT contact, including Microsoft Entra setups. Be clear that it is not part of Scale and not something waiting behind a toggle. Sign in today is email and password, Google, or a magic link.

Recently shipped: two factor authentication, the iOS review app, workload planning, Facebook posting, more than one account per platform per brand, sub folders, date anchored automations, a payment ledger, and editors creating their own projects as an opt-in setting. LinkedIn company pages and TikTok are both connectable, though TikTok still hands the finished post back to you to publish rather than publishing on schedule. Still ahead of us: X, a mounted drive, NLE plugins and live timeline sync, invoicing and contracts, per viewer watermarks, and an automatic asset library. We do not publish dates for anything on that list, and nothing is committed until it ships. If something you need is missing, send it to us and it goes to the product team.

Project switching is fast now. Rows used to wait behind a queue of header requests that ran one after another, so on a large workspace you sat in front of an empty body for seconds. That queue was removed in August 2026 and switching measures at under a tenth of a second where it used to take 3 to 4. The calendar had a separate problem, it loaded every task in the workspace before drawing, and that was fixed too. If you are still waiting several seconds to switch project, tell us and include the rough size of your workspace so we can reproduce it.

Janet will not send you to Notion, Monday, ClickUp, Asana, Trello, Airtable, Frame.io or a spreadsheet as the way to get something done. Where Timeliner does not do something she says so honestly and offers the closest thing inside Timeliner. One thing that is deliberate rather than a fault: she can still name another tool when you ask her to compare it with Timeliner, or when she is helping you move off one. If she gives a genuinely wrong answer, send us the exact question you asked and we will correct it.

This was traced and fixed in August 2026. What people were seeing was group headers with the right counts above an empty body for a few seconds, then every row appearing at once, because the rows were queued behind a stack of header requests. That queue is gone. If you still see a flash on one specific screen we want the details: which screen, which account, and a screen recording.

Found and fixed in August 2026. A client replying to a comment could be told Parent comment not found about a comment plainly on the screen. The code could not tell no such comment apart from a real database error, and there was a 30 second window during a deploy where the app was live ahead of its database change. That narrow window is why it was so hard to reproduce. Both the misleading message and the underlying case are fixed. If you ever see it again, send us a screen recording and the exact link the client opened.

Not any more. A cancelled or locked workspace no longer publishes queued posts, they are held and marked missed. Past due and grace period accounts do keep publishing, on purpose, so a late invoice never takes a client campaign down mid flight. One thing to plan for: while a workspace is locked nobody can get in to unschedule anything, so if you resubscribe those posts are sitting as missed and need rescheduling by hand rather than going out on their own.