Thought Bakery moved off spreadsheets in six weeks

Thought Bakery is a B2B marketing studio with more than 20 people working across different countries, plus freelancers around the world. Everything ran on Google Sheets.

What they asked for was a cost management solution. What made it difficult was the second half of the request: something easy to use that also had different layers of access.

Why the access layers were the hard part

A distributed studio working with freelancers has a visibility problem that a single-office company does not. Freelancers need to see their own work, their own deadlines and their own hours. They should not see what other freelancers are paid, what a project costs in total, or what margin the studio is making on it.

In a spreadsheet, the only real answer to that is separate files, which is how a studio ends up maintaining one sheet per relationship and reconciling them by hand. The numbers you need for cost management are exactly the numbers you cannot show everyone, so the data fragments along the same lines as the permissions.

Solving cost management therefore meant solving access first. If the system could not hold everyone's work and everyone's costs in one place while showing each person only their part, it would end up as another set of separate files.

How we built it

The project ran through five stages over about six weeks.

We started with an operations analysis run as workshops in Miro, mapping how work actually moved through the studio rather than how it was supposed to. Workflow design followed, using a hybrid data organization that kept project work and cost data connected while letting them be viewed separately.

Then the system itself, built on monday.com with automations handling the routine movements. Existing data was migrated across from the spreadsheets they had been running on. Training was delivered as Loom videos supported by live Q&A sessions, so people could return to the explanation later instead of relying on remembering a single session.

That last stage matters more with a distributed team. Training everyone at once is not possible across that many time zones, and freelancers join continuously rather than in intakes.

The result

The studio now runs project management, deadlines and cost tracking in one place, with permissions that let freelancers work in the same system as staff without seeing what they should not.

The outcome? Pure magic. Our whole team (including our freelancers from around the globe) is now working seamlessly on a platform that's got our back.

The build took a month and a half.