The Ruff Agency: one workspace instead of six tools

The problem

Agencies run on scattered infrastructure. Clients live in a spreadsheet, invoices in a separate system, payment tracking in someone head, and project handoffs in email. Growing the business means buying another tool, and teams work in silos because there is nowhere central to see who is doing what.

What we built

A workspace where contacts, contracts, invoices and tasks all sit together, and every member sees the same data gated by their role. Clients get their own portal on a workspace subdomain with independent credentials — the same records, a different view, read-only or collaborative depending on what they are given.

The hard part: two access patterns, one database

Team access had to be added to a schema whose policies assumed a single owner, across more than twenty tables, without a single existing read path breaking. The answer was two SECURITY DEFINER functions that resolve workspace membership once, referenced from permissive policies everywhere else. Postgres ORs permissive policies together, so the original owner-only check and the new member check coexist: adding a teammate can only ever grant access, never revoke it.

Getting paid

Invoices carry their own lifecycle from draft through sent to paid, with customisable templates, and settle through Stripe or Paystack depending on where the client is. Transactional email runs on Resend, and a WhatsApp bot pushes task updates to people who live in messaging rather than dashboards.

By the numbers

Database migrations shipped

88

Database migrations shipped

Tables under row-level security

20+

Tables under row-level security

Outcome

A client goes from invited to working inside their own portal without manual setup, pending approvals or a single email thread.