The back office for app and software studios.

What it does

Enquiry to proposal to agreement to invoice to cleared payment.

• Enquiries that arrive already filed

  Point your website's contact form at Studiobooks and each enquiry lands in the register with the name, email address and message intact, and an email to you saying it has arrived. Add the ones that come by phone yourself. Each carries its source, a status from new through to won or lost, and a next action with a date, so following up is somebody's job rather than everybody's. Either way, an enquiry becomes a proposal without anything being retyped.

  

• Proposals your clients answer online

  Write the proposal in the app, with your logo and colours on it, and send a link rather than an attachment. The register shows what is open, what it is worth and who has yet to reply. The client reads it in their browser and accepts or declines there, adding a note if they want to. You can see when it was first opened, and a revised version supersedes the old one rather than leaving two in circulation.

  

• What the client sees

  The proposal opens as a page under your name, with the short version up top, the scope, the price and the terms laid out below, and two buttons that stay in view: decline, or accept this proposal. No account is needed to read it or to answer it; the link is enough.

  

• Agreements that raise their own invoices

  A contract carries the monthly amount, the build fee if there is one, and the payment terms, and produces the order form your client signs. From then on the agreement, rather than somebody's memory, is what raises the invoices. The billing run reads your live contracts and raises the month's invoices as drafts for you to look over, numbered in sequence only when they are issued. It shows what it is about to do before it writes anything, and a period is billed once, so running it twice doesn't produce two invoices. Chargeable extras (a developer account renewal passed through at cost, say) wait on the same page and go on the next invoice. VAT is added if you are registered and left off if you are not.

  

• Invoices and credit notes, sent under your name

  Issue an invoice and it goes to the client by email from your studio, not from us, with your bank details in the footer. Record payments as they come in, in full or in part, and correct an issued invoice with a credit note rather than an edit, so the register always adds up to what was actually sent. The VAT summary at the top is taken from the same documents, so it never disagrees with them.

  

• Who owes what, and for how long

  Every issued invoice with a balance, grouped by how overdue it is, with the total against each client. Re-send the invoice, record a payment or open the document from the same row. The chasing is still yours to do; the screen just tells you where to start.

  

• One client book behind everything

  Every client with their contacts, the apps you run for them, what they pay each month and what they owe right now, taken from the same contracts and invoices the documents were printed from. A prospect becomes a client the day their proposal is accepted; nothing is entered twice.

  

• A portal for every client, in your colours

  Your clients sign in with the address you send documents to and see their proposals, invoices, the apps you have built for them and the documents you have shared, and nothing of anyone else's. It carries your logo, your colours and your contact details; Studiobooks appears only as a line in the footer. Share an agreement, a data-processing document or a getting-started guide and it is there when they need it, so "can you resend that?" stops being an email.

  

• Set up once, revise any time

  Company details, your logo and colours, VAT position, bank details for the invoice footer, the name your emails go out under, your team and your website's enquiry key all live in Settings, and the setup wizard walks the same fields if you would rather be led through them. Nothing here is shared with, or filled in from, any other company on Studiobooks.

  

Kept apart, kept private

Each studio sees its own records and nothing else.

Every company on Studiobooks is walled off from every other one, and a client sees only what their studio has chosen to share. These are the rules the app is built on, not settings to remember.

• Your clients see only what you've shared

  A client signs in with the address a document was sent to and sees the proposals, invoices, apps and documents shared with that address. Nothing is visible to them until you share it.

• One studio never sees another

  Records are tied to your company and to your staff's email addresses. Bank details and VAT numbers are held on the server and never sent to the browser.

• Analytics only if you say so

  No advertising and no push notifications. Google Analytics runs only if you accept it when asked, and you can change your mind at any time. Sign in with Apple or Google, or with an email address and password.

• Your data, your say

  Delete your account from Settings at any time. For what you hold about your own clients, KAE Ltd (the company behind EdwardsApps) is the processor and acts only on your instructions. The detail is in the privacy policy and terms.

Where it comes from

It started as our own back office.

Studiobooks began as the paperwork behind EdwardsApps: the proposal we send a new customer, the service agreement that follows it, and the invoice that goes out each month. Once it was running this business it was opened up so any studio could run theirs on it, with its own company, its own numbering and its own branding. Ask us for a custom build and the proposal you get back comes from Studiobooks, and so does the invoice.

It is made in Buckinghamshire by EdwardsApps, a trading name of KAE Ltd, and supported by the person who built it.