CRM and business management

If your process is like everyone else's, set up an off-the-shelf CRM

Not everyone who asks for a custom CRM needs one. If you sell through a recognisable pipeline (contact, quote, follow-up, close), there are tools on the market that have done that for years and someone else maintains them. What usually fails is rarely the tool: it was signed up for, left on its factory settings and nobody looked at it again. That's where we come in: we set up the pipelines with your real stages, the fields you actually use, users with their permissions and the training so the team really uses it. We earn less than building you one from scratch. We don't mind: it's what makes sense.

The CRM we use to run Xora

We have our own management CRM: customers, quotes, invoicing, expenses, tasks and time tracking in one place. It isn't a demo a salesperson shows you. It's the system we run Xora on internally: our customers, quotes and tasks are in it, so when something gets in the way we suffer it before you do. It fits if you want to cover sales and admin in one go without ending up with four subscriptions that then need connecting to each other. It's designed for the cloud, can be deployed on your own server, and you add the modules you need: quotes, digital signatures, projects. You don't have to switch them all on from day one.

When is a custom build worth it?

When your sales process is unlike anyone else's and you've spent years bending a tool to pretend otherwise. Signs that's your case: your sale goes through stages no CRM caters for, there's a parallel spreadsheet only one person knows how to use, or the piece of data everything depends on (the case file, the route, the shift, the plot of land) doesn't fit in any field of the software. That's when building pays off, because the hidden cost is the whole team adapting every day to a tool that wasn't right. We write the code, so the CRM looks like your company and not the other way round. If what doesn't fit is another part of how you operate (the job sheet, the route, the warehouse), that's custom applications.

If the CRM issues invoices, it has to comply with anti-fraud rules

The boring part, and it's worth looking at before rather than after. In Spain, software that issues invoices is subject to anti-fraud rules: invoicing records must be complete, traceable and tamper-proof. A spreadsheet doesn't meet that, and neither does a home-made build done without taking it into account. On top of that comes mandatory business-to-business e-invoicing, whose framework has already been published in the Spanish Official State Gazette (BOE). We take this as given in any CRM that invoices: if we build it, it's built to comply, and if we set up an off-the-shelf one, we check the vendor complies before recommending it.

If the CRM knows when you deliver, the invoice goes out that day

The CRM issues the invoice on the day the work is delivered, not at the end of the month, and chases payment as soon as it's overdue. And in Spain people pay late: the average payment period was 80.5 days in 2025, well above the maximum set by the late payment law. No software makes a customer pay. What it does is get the invoice out sooner and make sure the reminder doesn't depend on someone remembering. If you also want the invoices you receive to be read and filed automatically, that's document automation; and getting CRM data into your accounts or your ERP is systems integration.

Source: CEPYME (Spanish Confederation of SMEs), Late Payment Observatory, second half of 2025

When we'll tell you not to set anything up

We'll tell you more often than you'd expect. If you work alone, with few customers and keep them in your head, a CRM will make work for you without giving anything back. If the real problem is that nobody follows up, software doesn't fix it: it makes it visible, which isn't the same thing. And if you already pay for one and don't use it, configuring that one nearly always works out better than switching. Tell us about your case and we'll tell you whether we can do it, how we'd approach it and what it would cost. If it isn't for us, we'll tell you that too.