WorkNavo — Multi-Tenant Client Operations Platform
A MERN-stack platform for freelancers and agencies to track time, manage roles across client workspaces, and bill without rebuilding the same data twice.
The Client
WorkNavo targets solo freelancers and small service teams who juggle multiple clients and need one place for time tracking, project assignments, and billing — without the overhead of enterprise project-management tools built for much larger teams.
The Brief
Freelancers and small agencies managing several client relationships at once typically stitch together a timer app, a spreadsheet, and an invoicing tool. Nothing enforces who can see what across clients, and reporting means rebuilding the same numbers by hand every time.
What Shipped
Built a multi-tenant platform where a user can belong to several organizations and switch between them, with role-based access (Admin, Project Manager, Finance, Member, Viewer) controlling exactly what each person can see — including hiding financial data from roles that shouldn't have it. One live timer per member, project-scoped visibility, and one-click PDF reports, invoices, and CSV exports close the loop from tracked time to paid invoice.
How it was built
npm workspaces split the codebase into client, server, and shared packages so validation schemas and types are written once and shared across the stack. Every domain document is scoped by organizationId, with membership modeled as its own collection so a user's role is per-organization, not global — authorization is enforced in Express middleware before any route handler runs, not scattered across individual endpoints.
The hard part wasn't blocking access, it was partial visibility — a Project Manager should see a project's timeline and team but not what a client is billed. That's handled with role-aware API serializers that never send restricted fields to the client, rather than a frontend conditional hiding a div.
Results & reach
A working multi-tenant SaaS demonstrating production patterns for role-based access, org switching, and financial data scoping — the same architecture problems real client-ops and PM tools have to solve at scale.