A piece of work passes through four documents: 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 the content lives, with your own numbering series, the VAT regime of each operation and whatever withholding applies.
From the brief to the invoice, in four documents
Almost no agency has an invoicing tool problem. It has a distance problem. The work sits in one place, what was agreed in another and what was charged in a third, and the conversation that begins with that was not in scope happens three months later with all three tabs open.
| 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 catalogue | A link or an email, and you see when it opens |
| Contract | What was agreed, line by line, with its status | Drafted here and signed elsewhere |
| Invoice | What you charge, with your series and your VAT | Its own link, and the payments row of their portal |
All of this belongs to agency workspaces, and that is worth saying before anything else. A creator, or a company running its own marketing, issues no documents addressed to a third party, so no screen for doing it is offered to them. What a workspace, a brand and a client actually are is in workspaces, brands and clients.
The brief is what settles half the arguments
A brief is a form built out of your questions and nobody else's. Fifteen field types is enough to ask for a short text, a date, a multiple choice, a number, a file or a link without forcing everything into one free text box. You send it as a link, the client fills it in without an account, and reminders go out by email for as long as it sits unanswered.
Then there is the other case, which is the common one in practice: the brief already arrived, as a PDF somebody wrote their own way. That one is uploaded as it is and kept as a document of that client, without converting it into a form and without asking anybody to type it again. Two shapes of the same row, because the alternative was losing half the real briefs for not fitting the format.
What a brief gives you later is not paperwork. It is a dated list of what was asked for, on the day the quote turns out to be short. Turning that into written scope is a separate conversation.
A quote goes out as a link, and you see when it is opened
The lines of a quote come from your service catalogue, so prices and descriptions are written once and reused. It is sent as a link or by email, the client opens it without signing up for anything, and the document records when it was first seen and when it was last seen. That is all the information anyone needs to tell last week's silence from a no.
A quote also states how what it proposes gets paid, and it can only state it one way at a time: once, split across a schedule of instalments, or renewed every interval. That is not a silly restriction. A document that can say monthly in three different ways on three different lines says it clearly on none of them, and the client reads a figure they cannot place. A mixed engagement, a setup fee and a retainer afterwards, belongs in the contract, which does keep the two cadences apart.
When the client says yes, you mark it accepted and the document changes status with its date. That is not an electronic signature and it should not be sold as one. There is no digital signature of any kind here: the link lets somebody read and download, and nothing else. What it gets you is a dated, numbered document with a record of having been read, and the actual signing happens with whatever you already use, outside. How the figure on that quote is arrived at is a different problem, covered in what to charge for social media management.
The contract writes the agreement line by line
A contract here is not an attached PDF. It is a row with line items, with amounts and with a status, from draft through to ended or cancelled. It can be created from a quote that has already been accepted, and then it inherits what was quoted instead of forcing a rewrite, which is where the discrepancies nobody remembers introducing come from.
Unlike a quote, a contract does mix cadences in one document: an implementation charged once and a retainer that repeats sit on separate lines, which is what long engagements actually look like. And the status answers the operational question, what is live right now, without opening folders.
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 keeps is the agreement, its amount and its state.
Your own numbering series, and corrections in their own
A numbering series is a row you write: the prefix it starts with, the digits the number is padded to, the suffix if you use one, and whether the counter restarts every January. You can keep several at once for the same document type and choose which one an invoice draws from, which is what you need when a large client asks for a series of its own, or when one part of the business is numbered apart.
One rule is not optional: corrective invoices are numbered in a series of their own. Spanish law requires it, and a correction 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 habit. The year in the number comes from the issue date and not from the day you type it, which is what stops a December invoice issued on 2 January from carrying the new year.
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Try it freeEight VAT regimes, and the IRPF withholding
VAT, the value added tax charged in Spain, is not a percentage you pick. It is a consequence of who the recipient is and where they are. An invoice carries one regime for the whole operation, and the regime decides the legend the document is legally required to print.
| Regime | When it applies |
|---|---|
| Domestic, with VAT | The ordinary case: a Spanish recipient, at whatever rate each line carries |
| Exempt | Each line at 0 % states why it is exempt |
| Reverse charge, domestic | The Spanish recipient self assesses and the invoice carries no VAT amount |
| Service to an EU company | Needs the recipient NIF-VAT, their EU VAT number, and they declare it at home |
| Export outside the EU | Goods only, leaving the Union |
| Canarias, IGIC | Self assessed by the recipient, and no amount is ever printed |
| Ceuta or Melilla, IPSI | Self assessed by the recipient, and no amount is ever printed |
| Service to a company outside the EU | Outside the territory the tax applies to: no VAT and no amount |
The client's country and their EU VAT number are what steer that choice, which is why they live on the client record rather than on each invoice. Beside them sits IRPF withholding, the Spanish income tax an invoice retains on account when the payer is required to hold it back. 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 client's fiscal record also decides which language their paperwork goes out in. The quote, the contract, the invoice and the email carrying them are written in the client's language, and the document's public page stays in that language even when whoever opens the link has a browser set to another. A download button in a language the surrounding document does not speak is the product talking over the agency.
What is already met of the invoicing record
Three things usually get said together and are worth separating. Royal Decree 1007/2023, of 5 December, requires an invoicing system to guarantee the integrity and traceability of every invoice issued, and that is three distinct requirements: a record per invoice, a chain of fingerprints linking each one to the previous, and the submission to the Spanish tax agency with a printed QR code.
What is built is the chain. Issuing an invoice computes its fingerprint over a frozen field order and links it to the fingerprint of the one before, so altering an invoice in the middle breaks the chain of everything after it. The QR printed on the document and the filing of the record with the tax agency are not built, and it is the only piece of the product badged as pending on its own product page. Saying it that way, rather than any other way, is the honest version: a tool that promises whole compliance and delivers a hash is no use to you on the day somebody asks.
What happens after an invoice is issued
An issued invoice does not end the job. Payments are recorded against it, partial ones included, so the outstanding balance is a lookup rather than a spreadsheet. The client finds their invoices and what has been paid so far in the payments row of their portal, without asking for anything by email. And if what you run is a monthly retainer, the subscription repeats itself and the payment setup goes out as a link for the client to put 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 made by whoever made it before. Where each piece of work comes from before a quote exists is handled by the CRM, and the module's own screens are on quotes, contracts and invoices.