Pipeline to invoice
Six stages,
and the record never restarts
Most pipelines stop at "won", which is a strange place to stop — like a recipe that ends when the oven is on. The interesting part is what happens between winning the work and being paid for it, and that is usually where the retyping starts.
Count the number of times a customer's name, address and telephone number are typed on that journey in a normal company. The honest answer is usually four: into the CRM, into the calendar, into the payment link, into the invoicing software. Each retype is a chance to introduce a typo, and each typo is a chance for an invoice to be rejected by someone whose job is rejecting invoices.
Here the number is one. The customer typed it.
Booking is not a separate universe
For anyone whose product involves turning up somewhere, the booking is the deal. Holding a slot, confirming it, reminding the customer the evening before — all of it hangs off the contact, so the reminder knows which conversation it belongs to and the seller can see that it went.
Which also means a cancellation is not a mystery. It appears on the thread, with a time, next to the message where the customer explained why. Whether that reason is true is between you and them.
Payment, on the seller's own account
Taking money is a service in the family rather than a plugin bolted on: the charge goes to the seller's own account, and the record of it lands back on the contact. The person who did the work can see that it was paid without asking the office, which removes an entire genre of internal e-mail.
- ✓Quoted2 400 zł, valid 14 days. Sent from the thread, so the customer replied to it on the thread.
- ✓BookedConfirmed by e-mail; reminder sent Friday evening. Dog noted.
- ✓Paid2 400 zł by card, on the seller's own account.
- ✓InvoicedRaised from the contact. Nobody typed an address.
Elapsed: 11 daysRetypes: 0
About the invoice, and about KSeF
Invoicing is its own service in the castomo family, and iKonekt hands it a record that already holds the customer, the agreed price and what was actually done. That is the entire trick: an invoice is not a creative act, it is a rendering of facts that already exist somewhere.
For Polish sellers that includes KSeF, the national e-invoicing system. The obligation date depends on the company, so this is configured per tenant rather than switched on for everyone at once — which is the polite way of saying that we are not going to make your accountant's calendar our design decision.
On the subject of accountants: every one we have spoken to has the same request, and it is not a feature. It is "please stop sending me spreadsheets with three versions of the same address in them". Consider this page a formal undertaking.
What the six stages are not
They are not a sales methodology, and iKonekt has no opinion about whether your deal is at 40% or 60%. Stages here describe what has physically happened to a record: a slot is either held or it is not, an invoice is either raised or it is not. Forecasting from facts is somebody's job. Inventing the facts is nobody's.
The record that starts as a chat message can end as a paid invoice.
Same record, same thread, same customer. No export, no import, no evening spent reconciling two systems that disagree.
“We'll raise the invoice on Monday.”
It was raised on Saturday, at 11:21.
The same record from the first chat message to the paid invoice. Nobody typed the address a fourth time, and the customer never noticed a seam — because there was not one.
What holds it all apart →