CRM with invoicing: what agencies should check
What a CRM with invoicing built in should do for an agency: quote from the deal, invoice from the quote, bill retainers and hours, and see who owes you.
Spodus team
Published 4 min read
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Key takeaways
- A CRM with invoicing keeps the deal, the quote and the invoice on one client record.
- The test is the handover. An accepted quote should become an invoice without retyping.
- Retainers and billable hours are where most CRMs with invoicing stop short.
- It is not accounting software. Keep your accounting tool for the books and tax.
A CRM with invoicing is a CRM that also writes your quotes and invoices, on the same client records as your deals. For an agency, it means the pitch you won becomes the quote, the accepted quote becomes the invoice, and the account lead can see what the client owes without asking finance.
Most CRMs say they have invoicing. Some mean a full billing module. Some mean an integration with a separate invoicing tool. This guide lists what to check before you choose.
Why agencies want invoicing in the CRM
An agency sells, delivers and bills the same clients, usually with the same people. When the CRM and the invoicing tool are separate, three things go wrong:
- The client is typed twice. The company, the contact, the address and the tax number live in two places and drift apart.
- The quote is retyped. Someone copies the lines from the accepted proposal into the invoicing tool, and sometimes copies them wrong.
- Nobody knows who owes what. The account lead sees the deal as won. Finance sees the invoice as overdue. Neither sees both.
Putting invoicing in the CRM fixes all three, if the CRM does it properly.
What a CRM with invoicing should do
Check each of these on a trial with your own data, not on the vendor's demo.
- Quote from the deal. Create the quote on the deal, with the client already filled in.
- Line items and a price list. Save your services and rates once and pick them into quotes.
- The client accepts online. The client opens the quote from an email and accepts or declines it, without a phone call.
- Quote to invoice in one step. An accepted quote becomes an invoice with the same client, lines, terms and currency.
- Deposits and stages. Bill part of a project on acceptance and the rest on a date or a milestone.
- Retainers. Bill a monthly or quarterly fee on schedule, with the hours it includes and a rate for hours over.
- Billable hours. Logged time turns into invoice lines, so hourly work is billed without a spreadsheet.
- Payments. Record a payment, split it across open invoices, and see the balance update on the client.
- Who owes you. A view of open and overdue invoices by client, with how late each one is.
- Export. Invoices export in a format your accounting software imports.
Points 5, 6 and 7 separate a CRM with real invoicing from one with an invoice template. Many tools pass the first four and stop.
What a CRM with invoicing will not do
Be clear about the line, because vendors blur it.
- Bookkeeping. Bank feeds, reconciliation and a ledger belong to accounting software.
- Tax filing. The CRM can apply tax rates to lines. The return comes from your accountant's tools.
- Payroll. Paying your own team is a separate job.
If a CRM claims all of this, ask to see each one working.
Questions to ask on a demo
- Can I make a quote from a deal and send it without leaving the deal?
- What happens when the client accepts? What is created, and what do I still do by hand?
- How do retainers work, and what happens to unused hours?
- Can I bill the hours my team logged this month in one step?
- Can clients see their invoices without a login I pay for?
- What does the export look like for my accountant?
How Spodus does it
Spodus is a CRM with invoicing for agencies and service businesses. Quotes are created on the deal or the client and sent by email; the client accepts or declines from the link. Accepting can move the deal to won, open the project with the quote as its budget, draft the deposit invoice and start the retainer contract, all on the same client record. Retainers bill their fee each period, with hours over the allowance. Billable hours and expenses become invoice lines in one step. Payments are recorded by hand and can be split across a client's open invoices.
Clients sign in to the client portal to see their invoices and quotes, and they never take a seat. There is no bank feed and no double-entry ledger, and clients cannot pay an invoice online, so keep your accounting tool. Invoices and credit notes export as a CSV in Xero's import format.
See Spodus for agencies, or read how agency billing software handles retainers and hours.
Questions, answered
- What is a CRM with invoicing?
- A CRM with invoicing is a customer database and sales pipeline that also creates quotes and invoices on the same client records. The deal, the quote, the invoice and the payment sit together, so nobody copies a client's details from one tool into another, and anyone on the team can see what a client owes.
- Can a CRM with invoicing replace accounting software?
- Usually not. Invoicing is sending bills and recording what was paid. Accounting is the books: bank feeds, reconciliation, double-entry bookkeeping and tax returns. Most CRMs with invoicing, Spodus included, do the first and export to an accounting tool for the second. Check whether the CRM exports invoices in a format your accountant's software imports.
- Is it better to buy a CRM and a separate invoicing tool?
- It can be, if your sales process and your billing are run by different people who rarely need the other's data. For an agency, the same account lead usually wins the client, scopes the work and asks whether the invoice was paid. Then two tools mean typing the client twice and checking two places, and one system saves that time.
