Retainers without retyping the invoice
Every agency on retainers has the same spreadsheet: client, fee, day of the month, paid or not. It works until the month someone is on holiday, and an invoice that should have gone out on the first goes out on the nineteenth.
A late invoice is rarely paid on time, and a forgotten one is rarely paid at all. The fix is not discipline; it is taking the retyping out of the month. This is how an agency moves from proposal to retainer without a spreadsheet in between.
1. The proposal lives on a pipeline
Each prospect is a deal on stages you name — brief, proposal, negotiation, won — with the next step and the person who owns it on the card. Several pipelines can sit side by side if new business and upsells to existing clients move differently. A deal that has not moved in three weeks is visible at a glance, which is most of what a pipeline is for.
2. The scope goes out as a quote
Write the scope as a quote, with its lines and its validity date, and send it from the client’s card. When the client agrees, mark the quote accepted: it becomes an invoice for the first month or the setup fee, and the quote itself stays on record, so the client who accepted QUO-0007 can still be shown QUO-0007 a year later.
Keep the quote. The conversation about what was included always happens, usually in month seven.
3. The monthly fee goes on a schedule
A recurring invoice holds the lines, the client, the currency and the day it is issued — monthly, quarterly or yearly. On that day the invoice is drafted with the same lines, and it waits for you to send it, with a payment link on monobank or LiqPay. Nobody retypes it, and nobody has to remember the date.
- The retainer: a schedule per client, drafted on its day.
- Extra work: a quote, or a line added to the month’s invoice before you send it.
- Overdue invoices: a reminder message you can switch on, sent only to the client who owes.
4. Requests stop living in five places
Client requests become tickets — opened by the client in their portal on setvos.com, or added by you from an email — each with an owner and a first-response deadline. The agency’s mailbox and Telegram go into one shared inbox, each conversation assigned to whoever runs the account. Deliverables become tasks linked to the client company, with due dates.
What it does not do yet
Extra hours are logged on the client’s deal, and the unbilled ones become one draft invoice beside the retainer’s monthly one. An invoice is not attached to the deal itself; both sit on the client’s record. And a contract is not signed in the app: the quote is accepted, and the signed contract is kept as a file on the client’s card.
None of that stops the thing that matters most in an agency’s month: every client invoiced on the right day, without anyone retyping it.