Clients are the backbone of aOS. Almost everything else — time entries, connected sales channels, profitability, demand planning — hangs off a client record, so it's worth getting these right early.
Adding a client
Go to Clients and add one. What you'll set:
Name and company name — the name is what you'll see everywhere in aOS; company name is the legal or invoicing name when it differs
Start date — when you began working together, which is what tenure and lifetime value are calculated from
Type — how you categorize this client
Tag clients to services
This is the step most worth not skipping. Tagging each client to the service they're on is what lets aOS split revenue by service line.
Without it, Agency Analytics still works, but the revenue-by-service breakdown has nothing to break down and stays empty. That's the single most common cause of "one chart is blank and the rest are fine."
Active and churned
Clients are active or churned. Marking someone churned keeps their entire history — time logged, revenue, connected channels — while removing them from current lists and calculations.
It's a status change, not a deletion. If they come back, switching them active restores them with their history intact.
Merging duplicates
Duplicates happen easily, especially when a client arrives from a connected data source under a slightly different name than the one you typed.
aOS has a merge tool for this. Merging keeps one record and folds the other's history into it, so time entries and revenue aren't stranded on an abandoned duplicate. The merged-away record stops appearing in your lists.
Merge rather than delete. Deleting would take the history with it.
Client health
Clients carry a health indicator that helps you spot which relationships need attention before they become churn.
Connected data belongs to a client
Sales channels and ad accounts — Faire, Klaviyo, Recharge, GA4, Google Ads — are connected against a specific client. That's how a client's dashboard shows their data and nobody else's.
Your own agency's accounting and Stripe are the exception. Those aren't attached to a client because they're your books, not theirs.
Who can see which clients
Team members either see all clients or only the ones they're assigned to, depending on their client scope. See Roles and permissions.
If a colleague can't find a client you can see, that's usually why.
Troubleshooting
A client I added isn't showing up
Check whether it's marked churned, or was merged into another record.
Revenue by service is empty
Clients need tagging to services. See above.
The same client appears twice
Use the merge tool rather than churning or deleting one, so the history stays together.
A colleague can't see a client
Their access is probably scoped to assigned clients only, and they aren't linked to that one.