Written for owners of small Canadian accounting, bookkeeping, and tax practices who want one board for client work instead of a pile of files.
Quotes are the agreement, not a side document
A quote is the first time the firm puts a number next to a promise. In a small practice that number is often typed into an email and then retyped later, which is how the promise and the bill slowly diverge. FirmBoard treats the quote as a record: a number, a client, an amount, and a path toward an invoice. The person who sends it and the person who later bills it are looking at the same object. Quotation terms, written once, can travel with the document so the validity period and the scope language are not improvised for each client.
The quote belongs to the client journey rather than to a sales pipeline. There are no stages designed for a call centre. There is a document a Canadian practice can stand behind, tied to a service the firm actually sells. When the client says yes, the next step is an invoice that inherits the commercial facts. When the client says not yet, the quote remains findable. The office does not depend on the sent folder of one mailbox. That is the entire standard: a quote you can still open after the person who sent it has left for the day.
Allowances on each plan count quotes for the same reason they count invoices and receipts. A small firm should buy a predictable month, not an unlimited meter with a surprise. The basic plan includes a modest number of quotes. The premium plan, marked as the popular choice for a growing book, includes more. The pro plan includes more again. If your month regularly exceeds those counts, the honest move is a larger plan or an enterprise conversation, not a workaround in a spreadsheet beside the system.
Invoices continue the quote instead of restarting it
An invoice that is typed from memory is a second negotiation conducted in private. FirmBoard would rather the invoice be the public continuation of the quote. The client name, the amount, and the service stay stable. The invoice adds what a bill needs: a due date and a payment status. Pending and paid are visible in the list because the list is how a small team manages cash without a collections department. You should be able to scan, not investigate.
Status is operational, not decorative. Pending means the journey is open on the money side. Paid means a receipt should exist or should be recorded next. The public tour shows both states with sample amounts so the colour and the meaning are obvious. Your live invoices will carry your numbering and your clients. The meaning of the states does not change. A practice that can trust the status can stop maintaining a shadow list of who owes what.
Document terms for invoices are the practical sentences clients actually read: where to send an e-transfer, how long you expect to wait, what reference to use. Keeping those sentences in settings, attached to the invoice type, means a new bill does not ship with an old account number copied from a Word file. It is a small control with a direct effect on how often you answer the same payment question. The billing module is successful when those questions decline because the document already answered them.
Receipts finish the journey
A payment receipt is the last fact in the story the quote started. FirmBoard records the date, the client, the receipt number, the method, and the amount. Bank accounts you have defined are available so method is not a free-text shrug. View, edit, and delete exist because real offices correct real mistakes. The preview uses obvious sample receipts. The live screen uses the payments your firm actually took, inside the monthly allowance of the plan.
Statements are the same facts gathered for a client and a date range. A client who asks what they paid between January and March should receive a statement, not a forwarded chain of emails. Generating that statement from the receipts you already recorded is the point of having recorded them in the journey rather than in a bank export alone. The bank export still matters for your own accounting. The statement matters for the client relationship. FirmBoard is aimed at the relationship side: the receipt the client can recognise, sitting next to the invoice they were asked to pay.
Nothing in this path requires the firm to abandon the accounting tools it already trusts for its own books. The quotes, invoices, and receipts are the client-facing and practice-facing trail of services delivered. They are how a small accountant shows that the engagement was agreed, billed, and collected. They are also how the team proves it to themselves on a busy afternoon. If a number cannot be found, the journey is broken, regardless of how polished the return or the bookkeeping file may be.
Pricing, preview, and the live product
The plans on the homepage are the commercial version of this discipline. Basic is twenty-five dollars a month for up to fifty clients, with ten invoices, ten quotes, and ten payment receipts in the month. Premium is one hundred and twenty dollars a month for up to one hundred and twenty clients, with thirty of each document, and it is the plan most growing firms should compare first. Pro extends the same idea to a larger book and a higher document count. Enterprise is not a self-serve checkout. It is a contact, because custom limits deserve a conversation about how the firm actually works.
The buttons in the website tour do not create live documents. They show the structure and then say, plainly, that a working demo is a contact away. That warning exists so nobody mistakes a sample board for the depth of the application. The live product is more advanced than the preview: your catalog, your terms, your bank accounts, your statuses, your filters, and your real client journey. The preview is basic information about which features exist. It is not a claim that the software ends at the sample row.
If you want to see quotes become invoices and invoices become receipts inside a working file, ask for a live demo. Bring one messy engagement if you like. The right demonstration is not another screenshot. It is the path from the client workspace through the service card and into the billing documents, using the application your staff would actually open on a Monday. That is the standard this module is written to meet, and it is the standard the rest of FirmBoard is built around.
The billing habits that keep a small firm credible
Credibility with a client is mostly consistency. The number on the quote matches the number on the invoice. The payment instructions on the invoice match the bank account that receives the money. The receipt uses the client name the client expects to see. None of these are advanced accounting ideas. They are operational habits, and they fail when each document is born in a different file. FirmBoard keeps the habits in one path so a busy week does not invent a new template. Quotation terms, invoice terms, and payment terms are written where the document type lives, then they travel. The person sending the quote does not have to remember the sentence about how long the quote remains open.
Credibility inside the firm is the same consistency pointed the other way. A staff member should not need the partner to interpret a paid invoice. The status says paid. The receipt sits with the amount and the method. If a correction is required, edit is an ordinary action, not a crisis. If a document was created in error, delete is available and the list returns to the truth. The sample rows on the website use obviously fictional names and round amounts so you can see those actions without looking at anyone real file. Your own billing screen will feel stricter, because the rows will be yours and the monthly counts on your plan will be real. That strictness is the product working.
A practice that bills from the journey also gets a cleaner conversation about price. When a client asks why a fee moved, you can show the quote that was accepted and the invoice that followed it, instead of reconstructing a verbal discount from memory. When a client asks for a receipt months later, you can find the payment without opening a banking app and guessing which deposit belonged to which return. These are the questions that make a small firm look either organised or improvised. FirmBoard is built so the organised answer is the default, and so the path from quote to invoice to receipt stays short enough that people will actually use it on a Friday afternoon. A firm that can answer those questions from the billing screen does not need a side spreadsheet to stay credible with the client or with its own staff.
