How IPBases is organised

The records everything hangs on

IPBases is built around a few kinds of record. Almost every screen either shows one of them or adds something to one.

• Trademarks, plus patents and industrial designs if your firm uses them. Each has its own status, dates, classes, files, actions, invoices and history.
• Clients, the owners of the marks.
• Associates, the foreign firms that send you work and the agents you instruct abroad.
• Invoices, payments, services and expenses, the money side of each mark.
• Actions and tasks, the work that has to happen and by when.

Because they are linked, one change travels. Setting a client to be billed through an associate, for example, changes who receives that client’s notices, reminders and invoices.

Roles: who can do what

Every user has one of five built-in roles:

• Owner: can do everything, always.
• Administrator: can do everything by default; this can be narrowed.
• Manager: works on clients, associates, trademarks, cases and tasks, creates and edits invoices, offers and payments, and sees reports. No system settings and no deleting invoices or payments.
• Staff: day-to-day work on clients and trademarks, tasks and mail, can create invoices, and sees reports.
• Read-only: can look at everything they are allowed to see, and change nothing.

On top of the role you can add permission groups or set individual Allow and Never rules for a person. See Users and permissions.

Finding your way around

• Sidebar: icons for every section. Hover to see its name; the gold icon marks where you are. Trademarks, clients and associates sit right under Home.
• Top bar: search across clients, trademarks and invoices, the Actions counter, the mail icon and the notifications bell.
• Quick create: the round + button at the bottom right of every page, or press N anywhere.
• System Setup: all settings in one six-step guide: Branding, People & Security, Email & Automation, Billing, Lists & Fields, and System. You only see the steps you have permission for.

How a filing moves through the system

A new trademark follows the same four steps every time:

1. Basic info: the mark, client, country, classes and numbers.
2. Invoices: bill the work, or link an invoice that already covers it.
3. Action required: record what has to happen next and the deadlines.
4. Client updated: send the client or associate the notice for this stage.

As the mark moves on (acceptance, publication, registration, renewal) you come back to the same steps. IPBases keeps every change, file and message on the mark’s timeline.

A record of everything

Every create, update and delete is written to the audit log with who did it, when and what changed. Emails and WhatsApp updates are kept in the mail log and on the record they belong to. Nothing important lives only in someone’s inbox.

How it connects

This part of IPBases takes information from the parts on the left and changes what appears in the parts on the right. When you change one of them, check the other.