Do you need a CRM if your invoicing or accounting tool already holds your clients?

Not while almost everyone you deal with is already a client. Your invoicing tool’s client list holds what a small business needs on a customer: contact details, every quote and invoice, what they owe, and notes. You need a CRM when you’re chasing people who haven’t bought yet: enquiries that don’t belong in your books, quotes that need a call on a set day, or two or three people working the same leads. Check your plan before you buy one, because QuickBooks Plus, at $140 a month, already tracks leads. If you do add a CRM, start free: Zoho CRM’s and Freshsales’s free plans each fit 3 users.

What does your invoicing tool already keep on a client?

More than owners tend to think. Every tool in this guide keeps the money side of a customer in one place, and most keep notes too:

• QuickBooks Online customer profiles take simple notes, which also appear on invoices, and date-stamped notes that stay on the profile.
• Xero contacts hold several people, addresses, and a notes field for anything specific to that contact.
• FreshBooks client profiles hold secondary contacts and internal notes only you and your team see, beside the client’s invoices, estimates, and payments.
• Wave customer profiles show the customer’s details with their invoice and payment history.
• Zoho Books keeps customers with their contact people, quotes, and invoices, and connects to Zoho’s own CRMs (more on that below).
• Square’s customer directory comes with every Square plan, and Square’s help center describes notes on a customer profile that can carry a dated reminder (it doesn’t say which plans include reminders).

So the question isn’t whether your invoicing tool knows your clients. It does. The question is whether you’re chasing people it doesn’t know yet.

When is the client list enough?

Keep it if all four of these are true. They’re true for a lot of businesses whose new work comes from people who already know them.

• The people you follow up are clients. Repeat work, renewals, referrals who become clients on the first call. You rarely chase someone who hasn’t bought before.
• Your open quotes fit on one screen. You send them as estimates or quotes from the invoicing tool, and a glance down that list tells you which are waiting.
• The follow-ups that matter are about money. Overdue invoices, deposits, renewals. Those are what an invoicing tool is built around: the invoice, its due date, and whether it’s paid.
• One person owns the follow-up. Nobody needs to see who called whom last week.

Whether your books need more than an invoicing tool is a separate decision, and accounting software or just an invoicing tool? answers it.

What are the signs you need a CRM beside it?

Check these against what actually happened last month.

• You’re putting prospects in your books to remember them. Enquiries become “customers” with no invoice, your customer list fills with people who never bought, and on a plan priced by clients they count. FreshBooks counts active and archived clients toward its limit on every plan, so on Lite each prospect uses up one of its 5 clients. Which plan cap you’ll hit first covers every tool’s limits.
• A quote went cold because nothing reminded anyone. The estimate sat in the list, nothing told you it was time to call, and you found out it was lost when the client bought elsewhere.
• Enquiries live in your inbox, not in any tool. Half your leads are emails you’ve starred and the other half are on your phone. The invoicing tool only meets them once they’re paying.
• Two or three of you work the same enquiries. Someone calls a lead your partner spoke to yesterday, or nobody does because each thought the other would.

One sign is a nudge. Two in the same month is the line, and the cold quote is the one that costs you money, because it’s revenue you’d already priced. If you’re not sure the problem is the tool rather than the time, CRM or spreadsheet? has a thirty-day test, and a lead sheet that may be all you need.

What does your invoicing plan already have?

Check this before you pay for anything new, because two of the tools in this guide do part of a CRM’s job.

• QuickBooks Plus and Advanced include lead management in the Customer Hub. Leads sit on their own tab, apart from customers, and each deal is an opportunity with a stage in a pipeline you set up, plus a hot, warm, or cold status. When you mark a deal won, the lead becomes a customer, so there’s nothing to retype. Simple Start and Essentials don’t include it. If you’re already on Plus, use this before you look at a CRM.
• Square’s customer directory is included in every Square plan, Square Free among them. Square’s help center describes adding a note with an optional dated reminder to a customer profile, and the reminder arrives by email and in the Square POS app. That article doesn’t say which plans include reminders, so check that yours does before you count on it. For a seller whose follow-ups are “call them back Thursday”, that may be enough.

What not to do: move QuickBooks from Essentials ($85 a month) to Plus ($140 a month) just to get lead tracking. Essentials already covers 3 users, and a free CRM plan tracks leads at no cost. Plus is worth it when you need what else it adds, like more users, inventory, or project profitability; QuickBooks Online pricing sets out each plan.

What does adding a CRM cost, and how do the two connect?

Nothing, to start. Zoho CRM’s and Freshsales’s free plans each fit 3 users, and Zoho CRM’s free edition lists follow-up reminders; the other free plans in this guide fit fewer people, and when a free CRM plan is enough shows what ends each one. What you’re deciding is how a client gets from one tool to the other.

The rule that keeps one list: each person has one home at a time. The CRM owns them while they’re an enquiry: the first contact, the calls, the date you’ll follow up. The invoicing tool owns them from the first quote or invoice you send from it: billing details, what they owe, and payment history. That’s the day they move across, once. If you quote from the invoicing tool, that’s when you send the quote. The invoicing tool then holds their details and the quote, and the CRM keeps only the deal’s stage and the date to chase it; their name and email can sit in both. If you quote by email or from the CRM, it’s the day they say yes. From then on you change their details only in the invoicing tool.

That move is either typed or synced:

• Zoho Books and Zoho CRM sync both ways, on every Zoho Books plan, and Zoho CRM’s free edition can be connected; on the free edition only contacts, accounts, and vendors sync, not products. If you’re on Zoho Books, that pairing costs nothing.
• Bigin (by Zoho) is Zoho’s lighter CRM, a separate product from Zoho CRM. Its free edition is for 1 user, and the connections start on a paid plan: Bigin Express (by Zoho), at $9 a month per user, lists both a Zoho Books and Zoho Invoice integration and a QuickBooks integration. Bigin’s help center says each one syncs your customers and products and lets you create invoices and estimates from Bigin; the QuickBooks one works with QuickBooks Online only. Zoho CRM and Bigin pricing covers both products.
• QuickBooks Free and Wave’s Starter plan don’t connect to other apps. QuickBooks’ comparison lists app integrations on every paid plan and none on Free, and Wave lists third-party integrations on Pro only. On those free plans, a won client is typed in by hand.
• Any other pair: look for your invoicing tool on the CRM’s integrations page, and check which plan it needs, before you pay for that plan. Zoho CRM, for example, lists its QuickBooks integration on its Enterprise edition, not on the free edition.

Our view is that typing a new client in once is fine while they come a few a week: it’s a short job, and it’s the moment you’d check their billing details anyway. A sync earns its cost when you’re retyping every day, or when the same quote has to exist in both tools.

Say you run a three-person corporate gifting company: you and an account manager quote, and an office coordinator takes enquiries and sends invoices. About sixty companies order from you every year, and you’re on QuickBooks Essentials, at $85 a month, which includes 3 users, so all three of you work in it. Each autumn about forty new companies enquire about holiday gifts. Last October you added them to QuickBooks as customers so you’d remember them; half never ordered, and two estimates went cold because nobody called back.

That was two signs in one month, so this year it’s time. Moving QuickBooks to Plus, at $140 a month, would give you its lead pipeline, but your suppliers ship the gifts direct, so you don’t need its inventory tracking or anything else Plus adds. Instead, put the enquiries in a free CRM that fits all three of you, Zoho CRM’s or Freshsales’s, with a follow-up date on each. A company goes into QuickBooks once, when you send it an estimate, and the CRM keeps the date to call about it. If the season brings so many quotes that typing companies in starts to hurt, Bigin Express (by Zoho), whose QuickBooks integration creates estimates and invoices from Bigin, is $27 a month for three. If you started on Zoho CRM’s free edition, moving to Bigin is a move between two Zoho products, not an upgrade, so make that call before the busy season, not during it.

What not to pay for yet

• A bigger invoicing plan for lead tracking alone. If the only reason to upgrade is leads, a free CRM plan does it.
• A CRM plan for its integration before you’ve counted the retyping. Count how many clients you’d move across in a month. A few a week is a short job.
• A paid CRM for one person whose follow-ups are about payment. That’s your invoicing tool’s job, and it already does it.
• Automation and sequences. If you’re starting a CRM because quotes went cold, a reminder on the right day fixes it. Full CRM or lead tracker? explains when more pays.
• A suite just to get the connection. Moving your customers and invoices to one vendor so the lists sync is a bigger change than the retyping it saves while new clients arrive a few a week. One tool or three? weighs a suite against separate tools.

Our view

If your new work comes from people who already know you, your invoicing tool’s client list is your CRM, and we’d keep it that way. The month enquiries start slipping, add a CRM for the leads only, start it free, and keep the books in the invoicing tool, with each tool having a clear responsibility. If you’re on QuickBooks Plus or Advanced, or on Square, try what your plan already has first. What this gives up: with a separate CRM and no sync, each new client is typed in twice, and the history of the sale stays in the CRM while the history of the money stays in the invoicing tool. For a team of one to three, we think that’s a fair trade for a free tool and clean books.

Your next step

This week, open your invoicing tool’s customer list and count the names that have never had an invoice. Then count the quotes from the last month that nobody followed up. If both counts are zero or close to it, and no enquiry went unanswered in your inbox or on your phone, you don’t need a CRM yet: keep the client list and look again next quarter. If you’re on QuickBooks Plus or Advanced, open the Customer Hub’s Leads tab and add new enquiries there as leads, not customers. Otherwise, start a free CRM for the enquiries, sized to everyone who’ll work them. If that’s 3 users or fewer, start Zoho CRM’s free plan (it syncs with Zoho Books if that’s your invoicing tool) or start Freshsales’s (its sign-up starts a trial; switch the plan to Free under Admin Settings, Account Settings, Plans and Billing). Add your open enquiries to it the same evening, and from then on add a person to the invoicing tool on the day you send them a quote from it or they say yes, whichever comes first.