Keeping clients, invoices and payments together

An agency's relationship with a school or client runs through conversations, bookings and invoices. When those sit in separate places, history gets lost and it takes longer to answer a simple question about what was agreed or billed.

Why it matters

Clients judge an agency on small things: whether you remember what was agreed, whether the invoice matches the booking, and whether anyone in the team can pick up a conversation where it left off. All of that depends on information being in one place.

When client records, emails, calls and invoices live in different tools, the answer to "what did we agree with this school?" depends on who you ask. People leave, move teams or go on holiday, and the history goes with them. A single record means the client relationship belongs to the agency, not to one person's inbox.

What to look for

• Client contacts and interactions in one place. Every contact, and a record of what has been said and done with them.
• Communications in the same record. Emails and calls should be part of the client's history, not something you have to go and find.
• Invoicing alongside bookings, so an invoice can be traced back to the work behind it.
• A connection to your finance system, so your finance team is not re-keying invoices.
• Control over who can see what. Different roles need different access, for example consultants seeing their own clients.
• A record of changes, so you can see who changed what and when.

Questions to ask in a demo

1. If a consultant leaves, what does the client history look like for the next person?
2. Can I see emails and calls against the client record?
3. How does an invoice relate to the booking and hours behind it?
4. Which finance and email systems does it connect to?
5. How do I control what each person can see?
6. Can I see a record of changes to a client?

Common pitfalls

• Relationships that live in people's heads. If the record is incomplete, the agency only knows what individual consultants remember.
• Finance as a separate world. If invoicing is not connected to bookings, errors and disputes take longer to untangle.
• Too much access, or too little. Everyone seeing everything is a risk. Nobody seeing enough slows people down.

How Edun CRM helps

Edun CRM keeps client details, communications and invoicing together, and connects to finance and communication systems such as Xero and Microsoft Outlook. Your team can see the full picture for a client in one place.

If you want to connect Edun to your own tools, the Edun API is available on request.

Frequently asked questions