What's new in Mortar

Mortar is now an MCP connector, which means you can plug it into Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor — anything that speaks MCP — and ask real questions about your actual studio: "What's still unapproved in the Henderson project?" "Which orders won't land before the October install?" The answers come from your live Mortar data, not from the AI's imagination.

The safety story matters more than the demo. You connect it per studio, with real OAuth — the same grant-and-revoke flow as connecting any serious app, managed in Settings. It's read-only by default, and every write lands in Mortar's approval queue and waits for a human. You see exactly what it wants to do first.

Set it up in Settings → Connected apps — two minutes, revocable any time.

Mortar now carries a complete billing layer, shaped around the way design studios bill rather than the way generic invoicing tools assume.

• Payments that match reality. Record a bank transfer, cheque, or cash payment against an invoice, in full or in part, and edit or void a mispunched entry. Recording an offline payment carries no Mortar transaction fee. Online payments only ever charge what's still owed, so a client who has paid a deposit can't be double-charged.
• Invoices you can work with. Edit a draft's lines, dates, and notes without voiding it. Every invoice has a detail page with its payment history and activity trail. Resend a lost invoice, choose recipients and cc with a personal note and a live preview, and search the list in plain language ("unpaid invoices over $5,000 from last month").
• Get paid without chasing. Automatic reminders before and after the due date, written warm, always stating the current amount owed. Turn them on studio-wide or pause them per invoice.
• Card or bank transfer in the portal. Clients pay through your connected Stripe account by card or by bank transfer (US ACH and AU BECS). In the common case the payment link doesn't expire.
• Deposit up front, balance on delivery. Create a deposit invoice as a percentage or fixed amount; once paid, apply it to the balance invoice and Mortar adds the credit line with accurate tax handling.
• Bill straight from procurement. Every item shows its billing status; select a room's approved items or everything received and generate an invoice in two clicks, with protection against billing the same item twice.
• Client statements. A per-client account view (invoiced, paid, outstanding, deposits held) with a branded PDF statement for any date range. It's a studio tool you generate and share, not a client login.

Four additions that make a board read as designed rather than assembled:

• Grounding shadows. Product images get a realistic shadow the moment they land on the canvas: a soft drop shadow, a thrown shadow, or a "sitting on the floor" puddle. Adjust preset, blur, opacity, and light angle per element.
• Real palette extraction. The swatches on a board (including AI-generated ones) are now sampled from the actual photos on that board, not a preset rotation.
• Swatch from image. Click any product photo with the eyedropper and pull an exact colour into a new swatch element.
• Make hero. One click resizes and places the selected piece as the board's anchor, with everything else demoted to supporting cast.
• Textured backgrounds. Warm paper, Linen, Soft plaster, and Dark charcoal join the flat colours.

Nothing here is gated. If your studio has boards, it has all of this.

Boards are the first thing a client sees and the last thing a project tool usually does well. Mortar's boards are built on the project's own data:

• A freeform canvas with drag, resize, layering, and snap guides.
• A live budget bar on the board. Every item is a real product from the project, so the room's total moves as the board changes.
• Approve from the board. Share a board to the client portal and clients tap an item to approve or decline it. Decisions land on the item, dated, in one place.
• Tearsheet PDF export. A designer version with the product list and prices, and a client version without them.
• Draft a board from a sentence. Ask the assistant for "a concept board for the living room" and it produces a real, editable draft board. The assistant only ever works on drafts; nothing it makes reaches a client until you share it.

The project overview now shows you what's approved and what's still in flight without opening every room.

• Each room card carries an approval status (In progress, In review, Approved) set from a one-click menu on the card.
• The project stat strip shows a "rooms approved" ring beside budget consumed, plus a project delivery date you edit inline.
• Room cards show a photo carousel (room photos first, then item photos) and an items-approved count separate from the room's own status.
• Filter the room grid by approval status, and delete a room from its card menu without opening it.

The Room Details screen got a full rework, built for rooms with a lot in them:

• Budget at a glance. Budget consumed, items approved, and items in review as progress rings, with a $/% toggle.
• Allocation by item. A colour-coded bar shows how the room's spend splits across items, with a total that updates as you filter.
• Search and views. Search items by name or vendor, switch between a detailed list and a visual grid, and scan large rooms by category tab.
• Faster navigation. Prev/next arrows jump between rooms without going back to the project overview.
• Per-item quick actions. One menu per item for status changes (including moving an item back to proposed), choosing from alternatives, requesting a supplier quote, and removing the item.
• Portal visibility. An Include toggle on each row controls whether the item shows in the client portal.

Paste-a-link product capture now reads a few more of the ways retailer websites structure their product data: product photos come through from pages that previously returned none, an additional common price format is read correctly, and pages that group several colour or size variants under one listing are captured instead of skipped.

Switching to Mortar no longer means re-typing a schedule. Open Data Import from the sidebar, upload a .csv, check the column guesses (name, price, quantity, currency, product URL, vendor, category, room), pick the project, and import. A Room column sorts items into rooms and creates any that don't exist yet.

Honest limits: CSV only, up to 500 rows per import, creates new items rather than updating existing ones, no photos, and prices in USD, EUR, GBP, AUD, or NZD. Rows Mortar can't read are listed with a reason; the rest of the file still imports. Included for every studio — there's one plan.

Clicking AI Assistant now opens a panel docked to the bottom-right of the screen. The rest of Mortar stays visible and usable behind it, so you can check a room's budget while asking the assistant to update an item. Minimise it to a small pill and keep working, or close it from the panel header. Switch projects while it's open and it follows you, starting a fresh conversation for the project you're now in. The assistant can also set a room's approval status and a project's delivery date.