1. The inquiry arrives
It comes by email, or through somebody who knows somebody, or from an agency with a specification attached. It is rarely complete and it is never in a form you can act on.
The first thing that happens to most inquiries is that they sit in an inbox, which is a terrible place for them. An inbox is sorted by time, and an inquiry needs to be sorted by whether anybody is waiting on you. Two weeks later somebody asks how the pipeline looks and you go searching.
What is worth doing immediately is small: get it out of the inbox and attached to a client, even if the client is new and the details are thin. Everything after this step is easier if the thing exists as a record rather than as a message.
2. Deciding whether to chase it
Most people qualify by feel, and mostly that works. The cases where it does not are expensive: the client who takes six weeks of conversation and never buys, the project priced below what it will cost you, the one that would have been fine except it starts the same week as something better.
Three questions cover almost all of it. Can they actually pay, is the timing real, and is the money worth the work. The third one needs a number, and the number is your rate, which is worth calculating properly at least once rather than carrying around as a feeling.
A pipeline with stages helps here in a way that is not obvious. Its value is not the pretty board, it is that moving something to a stage forces a decision you would otherwise defer, and deferring is what fills your pipeline with polite maybes.
3. The proposal, and the version problem
You send something: a quote, a profile, a rate, sometimes all three. This is the first real handoff, and it is where the version problem starts.
Six weeks later, somebody references "the document you sent". You have three that are nearly identical, saved with names like final and final-2, and the one they mean is whichever one was attached to an email you now have to find. If a second person is involved, they have a different copy.
The fix is not discipline about filenames. It is that the document lives on the client record instead of on your desktop, so there is one answer to what you sent and when.
4. Won. Now where does it live?
This is the handoff that costs the most, and the one most tool setups handle worst.
The deal is won, and now it needs to become a project. In a lot of setups that means creating it again somewhere else: a new record in a project tool, the client typed in a second time, the dates copied across, the agreed scope pasted out of an email into a task list. The proposal, the conversation history and the rate stay behind in the CRM, and by the time anybody wants them they are three tools away.
That is the seam between the two categories, and it is worth understanding properly, because whether you cross it every week is what decides if you need one tool or two.
5. Doing the work, recording the work
The work is the part you are good at. The recording is the part that decides whether you get paid for all of it.
What has to be captured while it is happening: the hours, in enough detail to defend later, and the things you spent money on for the client. Neither survives being reconstructed at the end of the month, and both are worth real money. Hours have their own page, and so do the expenses you keep forgetting to bill.
The other thing that happens here is scope creep, which does not look like scope creep. It looks like a small favor, then another one. Recording the hours does not stop it, but it does mean that at the end you know exactly what the favors cost, which is the only way to have the conversation next time.
6. The invoice, and everything it already needs to know
An invoice is a summary of everything above. It needs the client and their billing details, which came from step 1. The rate, which came from step 3. The hours, from step 5. The expenses, also from step 5. The reference number the client insists on, which arrived in an email in step 4.
If those live in five places, the invoice is an assembly job done once a month under time pressure, and the errors it produces are the quiet kind: a wrong rate, a missing day, an expense nobody remembered. Each one either costs you money or costs you a conversation with somebody who now trusts your paperwork slightly less.
If they live in one place, the invoice is mostly already written before you open it.
7. Paid, and what you learned
The money arrives, eventually, and everybody stops thinking about the project. This is the step that gets skipped, and it is the only one that improves the next job.
Two numbers are worth five minutes. What you invoiced, and what the work actually took. The gap between them is the real rate you earned, which is almost never the rate you quoted. Working that out is what stops you repeating a bad quote for three years because it felt busy and busy felt like good.
The other thing worth doing is the least technical thing on this page: write down what the client is like to work with, while you remember. In eighteen months, when they come back, that sentence is worth more than any of the data.
What one thread actually changes
None of these steps is hard. What makes the whole thing heavy is that each handoff is a small re-entry, and there are six of them, and they all happen when you are busy doing the work you were actually hired for.
Steerd is built as one thread through all seven. The inquiry becomes a client, the client becomes a project without being retyped, the hours attach to that project, and the invoice is built from what is already there. Every module of it is listed here, and the free tier covers five projects, which is enough to put a real job through it before deciding anything.