The whole commercial circuit is open on the agency plans that include it: the brief that captures what is being asked for, the quote that proposes a price, the contract that writes down what was agreed, and the invoice that collects it. All four are issued from the same place you run the content, with your own numbering series, the right VAT treatment per operation and any withholding that applies.
Four documents, one record underneath
Hardly any agency has a billing tool problem. What it has is a distance problem: the work sits in one place, the agreement in another and the money in a third, and the conversation that starts with "that was not in the quote" arrives three months later with all three tabs open and nobody keen to open them.
What lands today closes that distance from the boring end, which is the end that actually hurts. The four documents hang off the same client record that already holds the brands, the portal and the content calendar, so the amount on a line and the piece of work that justifies it are not in two different products.
| Document | What it is for | How the client gets it |
|---|---|---|
| Brief | What is being asked for, in your own fields | A link, or the PDF they already sent you |
| Quote | What you propose, with lines from your service catalogue | A link, and you see when it is opened |
| Contract | What was agreed, line by line, with a status | Drafted here and signed elsewhere |
| Invoice | What you charge, with your series and VAT treatment | Its own link, and the payments row in the portal |
All four belong to the agency plans that include them, and that is worth saying before anything else. An invoice needs a recipient with a legal name, a tax number and a registered address, and that record only exists where there are real clients. A creator or a business running its own marketing does not issue documents addressed to a third party.
The brief, in your fields or as their PDF
A brief here is a form made of your questions. There are fifteen field types, enough to ask for a short text, a date, a number, a choice between options, a file or a link without forcing everything into a free text box. It goes out as a link, the client fills it in without signing up for anything, and the reminders go out on their own while it stays unanswered.
Then there is the other case, which in practice is the common one: the brief already arrived, as a PDF somebody wrote their own way. That one is uploaded as it is and kept as a client document, without turning it into a form and without asking anybody to type it out again. Two shapes of the same row, because the alternative was losing half the real briefs for not fitting a format.
What a brief leaves you afterwards is not paperwork. It is a dated list of what was asked for, which is exactly what you need on the day the quote turns out to be short and somebody has to decide whether that was in scope. Turning it into written scope, with deliverables and limits, is a separate conversation.
The quote goes out as a link, and you mark the yes
The lines of a quote come from your service catalogue, with their category and their price, so they are written once and reused. The document goes out as a link, the client opens it with no account, and the link records when it was first viewed and when it was last viewed. That is all you need in order to know whether last week's silence is a no or an oversight.
This is where the wording has to be exact, because it is the sentence most often told wrong. The client does not accept anything, not through the link and not through the portal. The link allows reading and downloading, and nothing else. A quote is marked accepted by somebody inside your workspace with write access over quotes, and the status changes with its date. The client portal has no quotes screen, and there is no electronic signature in this product of any kind: what you get is a dated, numbered document with proof of reading, and signing happens wherever you already sign.
A quote also states how what it proposes gets paid, and it can only say that one way at a time: in a single payment, spread over a schedule of instalments, or renewed at an interval. That is not a silly limit. A document that says "monthly" in three different ways on three different lines says it clearly on none of them, and whoever receives it reads a figure they do not understand. How you arrive at that figure is an earlier problem, and it is covered in what to charge for social media management.
The contract is where two cadences can mix
A contract here is not an attached PDF: it is a row with line items, amounts and a status, from draft until it ends or is cancelled. It can be born from an accepted quote, in which case it inherits what was quoted instead of forcing a rewrite, which is precisely where the differences nobody remembers introducing get in.
Unlike a quote, a contract carries two cadences in the same document: a setup fee charged once and a retainer that repeats live on separate lines, which is what long engagements actually look like. And the status answers the operational question, what is alive right now, without opening a shared folder.
The same point again, because it is the most expensive mistake on this page: the contract is generated here and signed elsewhere. What the product stores is the agreement, its amounts and its state.
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Try it freeYour series, eight VAT treatments and the withholding
A numbering series is a row you write yourself: the prefix it starts with, how many digits the number is padded to, the suffix if you use one, and whether the counter restarts every January. You can run several at once for the same document type, which is what you need the day a large client asks for a series of its own. The year comes from the issue date and not from the day you type it, so a December invoice issued on 2 January does not come out with the new year in its number.
One rule cannot be switched off: corrective invoices are numbered in a series of their own. Spanish law requires it, and a corrective slipped into the ordinary series is a defect the inspector finds rather than the user, so it is a column on the document and not a team habit.
VAT, the value added tax, is not picked the way you pick a percentage: it follows from who the recipient is and where they are. An invoice carries one treatment per operation, out of eight, and the treatment decides the legend the document is obliged to print: from the ordinary domestic operation to the reverse charge, a service to a company in the European Union with its EU VAT number, an export, the Canary Islands, Ceuta and Melilla, or a service to a company outside the Union.
The client's country and EU VAT number live on the client record rather than on each invoice, and beside them sits the IRPF withholding, the Spanish income tax an invoice holds back on account when the payer is obliged to apply it. It is stored per client because it is a property of the pair: the same freelancer invoices a company with withholding and a private individual without it.
The hash chain, and what happens after you issue
Royal Decree 1007/2023, of 5 December, asks for three different things that tend to get named as if they were one: a record per issued invoice, a chain of hashes linking each record to the previous one, and the filing of that record with the Spanish tax agency with its QR code printed on the document.
What is done is the chaining. When an invoice is issued its hash is computed over a frozen field order and linked to the hash of the one before it, so altering an invoice in the middle breaks the chain of every invoice that came after it. The printed QR and the filing of the record are not there, and the notice that says so lives on the module page, which is the only place in the product where that warning appears.
Issuing is not the end of the work either. Payments are recorded against the invoice, partial ones included, so the outstanding balance is a query rather than a spreadsheet. The client finds their invoices and what they have paid in the payments row of their portal. And when what you run is a monthly retainer, the subscription repeats on its own and the payment setup goes out as a link for the client to leave in place once.
What none of these screens does is replace your accountant: they issue, number, chain and collect, and the quarterly filing is still filed by whoever filed it. The detail of each document is in agency quotes and invoices, the difference against a full business management suite is in the Holded comparison, and the screens are on the module page.