Ask an agency or a consultancy where a given client’s files are and the honest answer is usually a list: some in a shared drive, the latest version in an account manager’s personal Google Drive, the signed brief in a WhatsApp thread, the logo pack in an email from March. Everyone can find their own piece. Nobody can find all of it, and the firm owns less of it than it thinks. This post is about putting client files somewhere the firm owns, sharing them with the client without creating accounts for anyone, and being able to stop sharing when the work ends.
Why client files end up in personal drives
Nobody decides to keep client work in a personal drive. It happens because the personal drive is the path of least resistance: it is already open, it needs no permission from anyone, and sharing from it is one click. A client sends a file over WhatsApp because that is where the conversation was. An account manager uploads the deck to their own Drive because the shared folder asked for a licence they did not have. Each choice is sensible on the day. Over a year, the firm’s record of a client becomes a set of private collections stitched together by chat history.
Per-seat storage pricing makes this worse. When every added person costs money, firms keep the paid seats for a few people, and everyone else works around the edges. Google Workspace lists Business Starter at $7 per user per month and Business Standard at $14, on an annual commitment, with storage pooled per person (prices read on 4 October 2026). For a 25-person firm, Standard is $350 a month, so somebody will suggest that the interns and contractors do not need a seat. They then keep files wherever they can.
What it costs when someone leaves
The bill arrives at offboarding. Google’s own administrator guidance on deleting a user is direct about it: when a user leaves, deleting their account removes their access to all services and data, an admin can transfer company data to another user, and any data that is not transferred is deleted, with some data retained for 20 days during which the user can be restored. The transfer tool has its own small print: items in the leaver’s trash are not transferred, and if the user is deleted, untransferred trash goes with them. The firm has a window, and it has to know what to look for before the window closes.
That is the cost in the good case, where the files were in a company-managed account at all. Files in a genuinely personal account, or in a chat app on a personal phone, are not the firm’s to transfer. The client asks for the source files of last year’s campaign and the only person who had them has gone. Google Drive’s sharing help also notes that when you share a link to a file, your name and email are visible as the owner. Every link a leaver ever sent a client carried their name, not the firm’s.
A folder structure per client that the firm owns
The fix is less about software than about where the root sits. Client files belong in storage the organisation controls, where the folder exists before the first person touches it and survives the last person leaving. A structure that works for most agencies and professional services firms:
- One top-level folder per client. Named after the client, not the account manager. This is the folder you share with the client and the one you stop sharing when the engagement ends.
- One subfolder per engagement or retainer period. A client with three projects has three places to look, and the share for a finished project can be turned off without touching the live one.
- Inbound and outbound. Inside each engagement, keep what the client sent separate from what the firm produced. It settles most “which version did you send us” questions without a search.
- Final versions in one place. A
Deliveredfolder per engagement is the only thing the client ever needs to open.
In Orbiz Filespace the whole tree lives under your organisation’s own storage space, served through signed URLs, never mixed with another customer’s files. Folders are shared with named members with one of two permissions: View only, which opens and downloads what is inside, or Can edit, which also uploads, renames and adds subfolders. A share on the client folder covers everything in it, so a new account manager gets the full history with one share and loses it with one removal. If you run engagements in Trackline, a project can be linked to its Filespace folder, and every member of the project is given edit access to that folder and kept in step as people join and leave.
How to share a folder with a client
Sharing with named members is the default and it only reaches people in your organisation. For a client, who is outside it, Filespace offers a public link on a folder. Open the folder’s share dialog and the first row reads Restricted: only people you share it with can open it. Press Make public and it switches to Anyone with the link. The link itself is shown in the same row, with a copy button, and it is a plain address of the form /s/ followed by a token on your organisation’s own Filespace subdomain. Paste it into the email or the client channel, and that is the whole procedure.
What the client sees is deliberately simple. The page says Shared by and your organisation’s name, then the folder’s name, its subfolders, and each file with its size and last-updated date and a Download button. They can open subfolders, breadcrumb back up, and download individual files. They never sign in, never create an account, and never see who inside the firm uploaded what. If the link was turned off, or was never made public, they see a You need access page with a button to continue with an Orbiz account, which is there for your own members who followed the link while signed out.
A few facts about the link worth knowing before you send one. It is switched off by default, and a folder you have not made public is private even if someone guesses the address. The public link is per folder, not per file; a file’s Copy link in the file menu is for teammates who already have access. The link carries no password and no expiry date. If you need a link that expires, that is what Grabr’s share links do, and we would rather say so than let you assume it.
How to stop sharing, and keeping the record
Stopping is the same row, pressed the other way: Turn off returns the folder to Restricted and the client’s link lands on the You need access page. The token is kept, so teammates who had the folder shared with them in their own right still get in through the same link. For a named member, the share dialog lists everyone the folder is currently shared with, their permission, and a remove button beside each; removing access takes effect on the folder and everything inside it. If a share still names someone who has since left, the list shows them as Former member rather than hiding the row, so you can see it and remove it.
Deleted files go to a trash you can restore from, by file or by folder, and storage is only freed when an item is permanently deleted. That is the right default for client work: a mis-click during a tidy-up is an undo rather than a support ticket. Starred files and the recent list help an account manager get back to the deliverables they are working on without changing anything for the rest of the firm.
Quotas per member instead of licences per seat
The reason the firm’s drive stays the firm’s drive is that nobody is priced out of it. Orbiz is one flat price per organisation with unlimited members (the bands are on the pricing page), so a contractor or an intern is a member like anyone else, and storage is a quota an admin sets rather than a seat you buy. The admin’s Storage & Access page lists every member with their quota, usage and allowed file types. A member can be left unlimited or given a cap in megabytes, gigabytes or terabytes; an admin can also restrict a member to images, documents, videos, audio or archives, set the organisation’s overall storage limit and the largest single file it accepts, and see who is close to their quota.
That changes the offboarding story. There is nothing to transfer, because the client folder was never owned by the person. Removing someone from the organisation removes their access to every tool at once, including Filespace, and their shares are listed on the folders they were part of. The firm keeps the files, the structure and the share history. We count the licences this saves, alongside the rest of the stack, in the hidden cost of eight SaaS subscriptions.
What Filespace does not do
- No client accounts or client portal. A client opens a public folder link and downloads. They do not sign in, upload through the link, or comment. If your clients need to send you files regularly, a member of your team uploads on their behalf, or you use the channel you already have for inbound work.
- No online editing or co-editing. Files are stored, previewed and downloaded. A document is edited in whatever application made it and uploaded again.
- No e-signature. A signed contract is a file in the client folder, signed elsewhere.
- No password or expiry on a Filespace link. Access is on or off, per folder. For a link that expires or needs a password, use a Grabr share link for recordings; for anything else, turn the folder off when you are done.
- No download log per link. You can see who the folder is shared with and switch the public link on and off; you cannot see who downloaded what through it.
If a client relationship needs real-time co-authoring, Filespace is the wrong tool and a document suite is the right one; the folder structure above still applies, and the point about who owns the root still stands. For client logins rather than client files, the ad accounts and CMS passwords, the answer is a vault, not a folder: see how to share team passwords safely and Orbiz Vault.
A checklist for the first client folder
- Create the client’s top-level folder in the organisation’s space and share it with the account team, View only for most, Can edit for whoever uploads deliverables.
- Move every file you can find for that client into it: from personal drives, chat threads, email. Keep the inbound and outbound split as you go.
- Make the
Deliveredfolder public and send the client that one link, from the firm, in place of the per-person links they have been collecting. - Set a quota for each member of the team and leave nobody without access because of a seat count.
- Write the offboarding step down: remove the leaver from the organisation, check the trash, and confirm the client folder’s share list.
This is the pattern we see marketing and creative agencies adopt first, because they have the most clients and the most file traffic, and professional services firms adopt most carefully, because a client file at a law or accounting firm has a longer life than any employee. For the agency version in detail, see Filespace for agencies.
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