Everything a studio runs on. One plugin.
Booking, galleries, contracts, invoices, email, and automation: each one below, with screenshots. Video walkthroughs are on YouTube.
Open one screen. Know your whole studio.
Every client is a record with a portal login, linked sessions, payments, signed documents, questionnaire answers, and full email history. Leads stay lightweight until they convert. One step, no retyping.
The dashboard turns it all into a triage list: unanswered emails, unsigned contracts, unpaid retainers, incomplete questionnaires, sessions in the next three days. Each one has a one-click jump to the fix.
Define an offering once. It books itself properly forever.
A session type bundles price, deposit, duration, location, delivery-window promise, contract requirement, its own questionnaire, and print rules. Offering classes cover year-round, seasonal, and limited-time work.
Each type gets a public booking link. One submission creates the client, the session, the retainer request, and the confirmation email. The usual back-and-forth becomes a link.
The only studio calendar that knows when the light is good.
Month, day, and list views of sessions and blocked time, with weekly availability feeding the booking form so links can't double-book you.
And the photographer detail no generic CRM ships: the golden hour window, computed and marked on every single day. Export your calendar, subscribe from your phone, print the week.
Your real inbox, sorted by what your business needs next.
Mankai connects your actual mailbox over IMAP and SMTP. Not a proxy address that forks threads. Conversations link to clients and sessions, and a pipeline sorts them: new inquiry, waiting on you, waiting on the client, follow up.
Quick-response templates, compose with session context, and unread counts that roll up to the dashboard. Follow-ups stop depending on memory.
Galleries your clients will love. And can't steal.
Standard delivery or soft-proof mode: publish watermarked previews, let clients pick favorites under a selection limit, edit the picks, deliver finals. Clients can favorite, leave per-photo notes, download singles or ZIPs, and order prints.
Per gallery: cover image, drag to reorder, expiry date, password, public token link, watermarking with position, opacity, and tiling, download protection, even DevTools detection. Storage is your hosting plan, not a metered tier.
From "what would it cost?" to a booked session in one approval.
Line-item proposals with validity windows and a full lifecycle: draft, sent, approved, changes requested, declined, archived. Clients respond inside the portal.
Approval converts the quote into a session or project automatically. The proposal, contract, booking, and invoice are one object changing state, not four tools and three copy-pastes.
Deposits, balances, reminders. Without the extra percent.
Invoices for sessions, projects, milestones, print orders, and general billing. Retainers, installment plans, remaining-balance tracking, and reminder stamps right on the row.
Clients pay by card through Stripe or PayPal at standard processor rates. Mankai adds 0%. Cash, check, Venmo? Record them manually. Coupons, gift cards, expenses, CSV exports, and bookkeeping reports are all built in.
Send the contract. Watch it sign itself into the archive.
Reusable templates render with live session data: names, dates, amounts. Clients sign with a typed-name signature in the portal, and the record stores signer name, email, IP address, and timestamp as an audit trail.
Document emails and signing reminders fire automatically, and unsigned contracts surface on the dashboard until they're handled.
Ask every client the right questions, automatically.
A drag-and-drop builder with 20 field types, including uploads and system fields that embed an appointment picker, a contract step, or a payment step right inside a form. Multi-step flows, conditional logic, live preview.
Questionnaires attach per session type, the contact form creates leads and inbox threads, and answers land on the job record that already holds the contract and the invoice.
Thirty-eight emails you'll never have to write again.
38 built-in templates cover the whole lifecycle: booking confirmed, session reminders, questionnaire nudges, gallery delivery, receipts, overdue follow-ups, print tracking, even branded WordPress password emails. Each one is toggleable and editable with live preview, device toggles, 60+ merge tags, and test send.
Workflows layer on top: 24 event triggers plus 3 scheduled ones, 11 action types, run history. System workflows ship enabled. Custom ones are yours.
The moment your client logs in, it's still your studio.
Clients get a branded portal on your domain: a greeting dashboard, session checklists with countdown chips, galleries, deliverables, print orders with tracking, invoices with Pay Now, document signing, and quote approvals.
You preview the exact client view with one click, and the branding is yours to configure: logos, colors, type, menu labels.
Same system, different nouns.
Flip one setting and sessions become projects: milestone billing, deliverables with categories like final files, source packages, live URLs, and credentials, plus file exchange, intake forms, a leads pipeline, and client to-dos with reminders.
Designers, developers, videographers, and studios get a genuinely native workflow. Same license, same quotes, invoices, documents, inbox, and automation underneath.
Built on the boring, bulletproof thing you already own.
Your database.
Clients, sessions, payments, galleries, and documents are WordPress data. Query it, back it up, export CSVs, take it with you.
Exit-friendly by design.
GPL-licensed code on your server. Stop renewing and the plugin keeps working. Deleting data on uninstall is off by default.
Standard updates.
License key plus the native WordPress updater. Weekly releases, a public changelog, a system-health screen, and an activity log.
Installs on your phone.
The staff CRM is a progressive web app. Add it to your home screen and run the studio without an app store between you and your data.
Honest requirements: a WordPress site on decent hosting ($5 to $15/mo), PHP 8.0+, and email credentials for inbox sync. If that sounds like work, Pro Setup exists.
Want to see it move?
Watch the walkthroughs on YouTube, or put Mankai on your own site this afternoon.