Project brief template: the numbers a brief has to carry.

A project brief is the short document, agreed before the work starts, that settles what a project has to achieve, who it's for, what gets made, what it costs and when it lands. The one below is complete rather than empty, filled in for a $24,600 loyalty program launch, and you can copy it, download it as a Word file or take the PDF. It differs from the versions Asana, Canva and Smartsheet publish in one section, and that section is the rate card.

That difference is the whole argument of this page. A brief written for an internal team can stop at a budget number, because nobody in the room is going to invoice anybody else when the plan grows in week eight. A brief written by an agency for a client is a different animal entirely, since the moment it's approved it becomes the thing both sides remember agreeing to, and the first request that arrives after that moment either has a price attached or turns into a negotiation.

Where does a project brief stop being useful?

At the first request nobody thought to price, which on agency work tends to arrive somewhere around week eight. Up to that point the document has been doing its easy job, telling everybody why the project exists and what it has to achieve, and most briefs do that part well. Then somebody asks for a tenth app screen, and the brief either has a sentence covering it or the two of you open a negotiation with the work already half built.

So the sections worth real attention while you write are the ones that get reread rather than the ones that read well. Why the project is happening and what would count as it having worked, who the work is aimed at, what physically gets made and how many of each thing, what the client is paying, when it lands, who is allowed to say yes on the client side, and what everybody is quietly assuming. Anything that doesn't fall into one of those buckets is context, and context belongs in the background section where it can be skimmed.

The useful way to test a draft is to imagine that phone call happening. Somebody wants an extra thing, or the assumption about who supplies the photography turns out to be wrong, and you need to answer in one message rather than three. Whichever sentence you reach for during that call earns its place in the brief. The rest is decoration, and a brief made mostly of decoration is the reason so many of them are written once and never opened again.

What goes into a project brief?

Thirteen headings cover an agency project comfortably: the parties and the named approver, background, objectives with a measure against each one, audience, what gets made, what's excluded, the assumptions, the schedule, the fee, the rates for anything added later, who decides what, how a change travels, and two signatures. The published templates don't agree on this, and it's worth seeing how far apart they sit rather than averaging them. Asana names four key elements and says so plainly. Canva describes eight components without ever counting them. Smartsheet gives eight core sections and then eight more it treats as optional extras.

They disagree because they're written for different readers, and all three are aimed at an internal project manager lining up an internal team. That shows in what they include and in what they leave out. Every one of the three has a budget section in its list, and not one of them prints a figure anywhere on the page, so a reader who wants to know what a filled-in budget section looks like finishes the article exactly where they started. The assumptions question goes the same way. Canva raises risks, nobody explains that an assumption is a priced conditional rather than an entry in a risk log, and that distinction is the difference between a brief that absorbs a surprise and one that funds it.

What does a project brief example look like?

Here's a complete sample, filled in for an eleven week engagement at $24,600. Hollowmere Garden Centers runs three stores and is launching a membership program, and the brief below is the document both sides sign before anybody opens a design file. Swap the client, the counts and the rates for your own and the structure carries over without edits.

Two details in there do most of the work. Clause 5.7 says that anything absent from the list is priced under section 10, which turns a description of the work into a boundary around it, and 6.6 then offers the excluded items back at a price instead of refusing them. That pairing is the same move that makes a priced exclusion harder to argue with than a bare one, and it's why the exclusions section reads as helpful rather than defensive.

How should the budget section be written?

With a total and a rate card, never a total on its own. The total answers what the client is paying today, and it's the rate card that answers what they'll be paying in week eight, which is the question the brief is actually going to be opened for. Section 9 splits Hollowmere's $24,600 across six items so a stop halfway through has an arithmetic answer, and section 10 then prices the five things most likely to grow, plus an hourly figure for everything nobody thought of.

Choosing what belongs on the rate card takes about ten minutes and it's the most valuable ten minutes in the document. Look at the deliverables with a count against them, because a count is an invitation to ask for one more of the same thing, and price each count. Nine app screens becomes $980 a screen, six print pieces becomes $540 a piece, and five emails becomes $610 each. Then price the two things clients ask for that aren't on any list, which are another revision round at $520 and another concept route at $2,900, and finish with $135 an hour for the unlisted. That's the whole method, and it's the same reasoning behind writing a count against every deliverable in the first place.

Is a project brief binding?

On its own, usually not, and that's the honest answer rather than a convenient one. A brief that's been approved by a named person is strong evidence of what both sides agreed, and it carries real weight once a contract points at it, which takes a single clause naming the brief by reference and version. Without that clause you have a well-organized record of a conversation, which settles most disagreements on its own and settles none of the ones that get expensive.

The practical arrangement for agency work is to let the contract carry the standing terms, payment, liability, ownership and termination, while the brief carries this project, and to make each one refer to the other. Asana's guide mentions in passing that a creative brief can function as a statement of work for outside agencies, and that's true for small engagements, though it skips the part where the two documents then need an order of precedence between them. Decide which document wins when they disagree, write that decision down once, and reuse it.

What happens when the client changes the brief mid-project?

The brief gets a new version number, the change gets a price from section 10, and nobody starts work until the named approver has said yes in writing. Canva's page comes closest to this of the three, with a line telling you to establish how changes will be assessed and approved, and it stops there. Establishing it is the easy part. What the brief has to do is make the answer automatic on the afternoon it matters.

Hollowmere's change arrived in week eight, from a new face. A retail director had joined, liked the program, and wanted a physical member card as well as the app, plus a fourth store format for the seasonal pop-up the company had just signed a lease on. Two more print pieces for the pop-up format at $540 each is $1,080. A card-linking screen in the app at $980. One more revision round on the identity so the card artwork matches, at $520. The card artwork itself was on no list at all, so it went in at three hours of the $135 rate, which is $405. The change totaled $2,985 and took the engagement to $27,585.

It also moved the schedule, and that's the part a rate card alone doesn't cover. The six original print pieces go to press in one batch with the two new ones, so all eight waited five working days for the extra artwork. Section 8.8 had already said that dates move with feedback, and clause 12.1 requires the schedule effect to be written into the change alongside the money, so the delay arrived as a line in an approval rather than as an apology in week ten. Nobody enjoys reading that line, and everybody prefers it to the alternative, which is discovering the new date after the pop-up has been advertised.

The mechanics of that approval are what Docket does, and the reason it's worth automating is that the moment a change is requested belongs to nobody by default. The request arrives in a meeting or a passing message, somebody says they'll look at it, and the work starts before the price does. Writing the change up, pricing it from rates that already exist and getting a recorded yes takes about four minutes when there's a route for it and about four days when there isn't.

The brief is the last place a rate costs you nothing to write

Before the brief is signed, $980 a screen is just a number in a document nobody is upset about. After somebody has asked for a tenth screen, the same $980 is a bill, and it arrives in a conversation where the client has already pictured the screen existing. The figure hasn't changed and the cost of saying it has, which is the entire reason section 10 is written in week zero rather than negotiated in week eight.

So when you adapt the template above, the section worth spending real time on isn't the background or the objectives, however much better they read. It's the ten lines of section 10, and they take longer than they look because each one is a decision you've been making by feel on every project. Once they're written, the brief becomes the document your team quotes from instead of guessing from, and each new engagement starts by copying them across alongside the project scope and the kickoff conversation that makes the whole arrangement feel normal to the client.

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