Contract and invoice automation

Contract and invoice automation is the chain of admin that runs after a deal closes, handled for you off your CRM. When a deal is marked closed, it generates the contract from the deal record, sends it for signature, raises the invoice once the contract is signed, sends that to the client, and follows up on a schedule until it is paid, updating the CRM and accounting system at each step. Standard deals move through on their own. Anything non-standard, custom terms or a partial payment, stops for a person to approve. It removes the copy-paste and the chasing, not the person who owns the client relationship.

They sit at opposite ends of the money flow. Invoice reconciliation is about invoices coming in: it matches the bills your suppliers send to their purchase orders and payments and posts the clean ones. This is about the paperwork going out after you win a deal: generating and sending the contract and the invoice, chasing signature and payment, and keeping the CRM and accounting system in sync. One handles what you owe and receive from vendors, the other handles getting your own clients under contract and billed. Many firms end up wanting both, but they solve different problems.

Your accounting tool can send a scheduled invoice once someone sets it up inside the tool, which works well for flat recurring charges. This starts a step earlier and reaches wider. It triggers off the deal in your CRM, generates the contract first, waits for signature, then bills the right amount for that specific deal, and follows the chase across email and Slack, updating the CRM as it goes. It reads from and writes to the accounting tool rather than living only inside it, so the contract, the CRM, and the books all stay tied to the same deal instead of being three separate manual jobs.

Not for anything non-standard. Clean, standard deals, the template contract and the expected invoice amount, can send on their own once the rules are set and tested. Anything unusual, a negotiated clause, a discount that is not in the CRM, a partial or split payment, is held and routed to a person to approve with the reason attached. This is deliberate: a wrong invoice or a bad contract sent automatically is worse than a manual miss, because it goes out fast under your name and has to be walked back with a client. So the system errs toward flagging, and a human owns every exception and the final send on anything it is not sure about.

On the CRM side, Attio. For contracts and signature, tools like DocuSign and PandaDoc. On the billing and accounting side, QuickBooks, Xero, Stripe, and Bill.com. Signed documents can be filed to Google Drive or Dropbox, and approvals and payment reminders can run through Slack or email so the right person sees them fast. Most tools with an API can be added. The audit maps your exact stack and confirms where your deals, contracts, and invoices actually live before anything is built.

Usually two to three weeks. The first days go to mapping your close-to-paid steps: what a standard deal looks like, which cases count as non-standard, your contract templates, and how the CRM and accounting system should stay in sync. Then it runs against your real deals for a week or so, with a person approving each contract and invoice, so the rules get tuned to your business before anything sends on its own. You see it working quickly, and that review window is what makes it safe to let standard cases go automatically.

Two parts. Tooling runs as a monthly cost for the document generation, signature, and processing, usually a range that scales with how many deals you push through. Implementation is a fixed scope, quoted once the audit maps your systems and your standard-versus-exception rules, so you are pricing a defined build rather than an open-ended retainer. The audit itself is where the scope and price get set against every other opportunity in your business, so you are not guessing at the effort up front.