The CRM for a Glen Ellyn, IL business — the booking, the invoice, and the customer who never came back.

One place instead of four.

Right now your customer information is in a paper book by the register, a contact list on your phone, a card reader's payment history, and your own memory. None of those four know about each other. So the appointment lives in one, the money lives in another, the phone number lives in a third, and the fact that this person is three months overdue lives nowhere at all.

What we build is one record per customer. Every appointment sits with the invoice it produced, the text that confirmed it, the card that paid for it and the date they're due back — all under the same name. That's the entire idea. Everything below this is just what becomes possible once it's true.

It isn't a separate product you log into. The booking form on your website writes straight into it, the invoice you send comes out of it, and the review request after the job is fired by it. Same system, one login, one bill.

Booking that writes itself onto your Google Calendar.

The booking page runs off your own Google Calendar — the one already on your phone. Block Thursday afternoon for your kid's game and Thursday afternoon stops being bookable. There's no second calendar to keep in step, because there is no second calendar.

What it replaces is phone tag. A customer calls while your hands are full, you don't pick up, they leave a message, you call back at 6:40, they don't pick up, and somewhere in that gap they booked with whoever answered. That cycle costs you twice — once in the job you didn't get, and once in the twenty minutes of callbacks you made anyway.

The Tuesday after it's switched on, your phone rings less and your calendar fills more. Each booking arrives with a name, a number, the service and the time, already written down in handwriting anyone can read. The customer gets a confirmation without you typing one, and you find out about the 11pm booking when you look at your phone over coffee.

Invoices that go out the same day the work is done.

An invoice builds itself from the appointment that's already in the system — customer, date, service, price, all filled in. You check it, adjust anything that changed, and send. It goes by email or text with a link that takes a card.

This is the one that eats evenings. The work happens Monday through Saturday, the paperwork gets pushed to Sunday, and by Sunday you're reconstructing Tuesday from memory and a stack of hand-written tickets. Some of it never gets sent at all. The rest gets paid three weeks late, because nobody is chasing it and chasing it is nobody's idea of a good evening.

Afterward the invoice leaves before the truck is out of the lot. Everything unpaid sits on one screen with an age next to it, and reminders go out on their own schedule, politely, so you never have to be the person who nags a neighbor about $180.

The person who called once and never came back.

Every business has a pile of these. Somebody called in March, asked what it costs, said they'd think about it, and that was the last of it. You remember two of them. The system remembers all of them, because the call made a record whether or not it turned into an appointment.

Most of those people never said no. They said not right now, and then a Tuesday turned into October. Nothing about reaching them again has to be pushy — it's one message a few weeks later saying what you'd say in person: the quote still stands, there's room this month, and if the timing's wrong you'll leave them be.

What this replaces is nothing at all, which is the point. There is no system today for the customer who didn't buy. They evaporate, quietly, and the loss never shows up on any report because it never showed up anywhere. Turn this on and last spring's maybes start hearing from you again — and a fair number of them book.

The thank-you, the reminder and the follow-up, written once.

Three messages do most of the work. The reminder, the day before. The thank-you, an hour or two after they leave. The follow-up, at whatever interval matches your trade — six weeks for a haircut, six months for a check-up, every spring for the thing you do every spring.

You write each one once, in your own words, and after that they go out on their own with the name and time filled in. The reminder pays for itself fastest, because a no-show isn't a lost sale, it's a lost hour you can't resell to anybody, ever.

The thank-you is also where the Google review request lives. That matters because asking for reviews is the task that gets skipped first — you mean to ask, and then you're running a register with three people in line. Moving the ask into a message that sends itself is the difference between meaning to and done.

Getting paid online and at the counter, into the same ledger.

Payments connect to the same system, so a card run at the counter, a card run from an invoice link, and an order placed on your website all land on the same customer record. There's no second app and no end-of-day comparing of two histories that half agree with each other.

The change is small and constant. You stop opening one app to see what someone owes and a different one to see what they paid. When the deposit hits your bank on Thursday, you can trace it back to the jobs that made it without doing the tracing yourself.

And when a customer calls asking about a charge from last month, the answer is on their record with the appointment attached to it, in about four seconds, while they're still on the phone.

Where the receipts go.

Business expenses get logged in the CRM, right next to the income. Photograph the receipt for the parts, the fuel, the supplies, the ad you ran — it's attached, categorized and dated on the spot, from your phone, in the parking lot.

Today those receipts live in a truck console, a coat pocket and a drawer until March, when they become your problem on a weekend. The ones that faded or went through the wash were money you earned and then paid tax on for no reason.

That's the whole change, and it's bigger than it sounds. It's the difference between knowing what you made last month and estimating it.

Your accountant gets a clean P&L instead of a shoebox.

Money in and money out both sync to QuickBooks — or to whatever you already keep your books in, if it isn't QuickBooks. Invoices, payments and expenses arrive already categorized, so the books are current instead of being rebuilt from scratch once a quarter.

Not having this costs you twice. Once in the hours you or your bookkeeper spend re-typing numbers that were already typed. And once in the decisions you can't make, because you don't really know what March looked like until the middle of May, by which point March is a story rather than something you can act on.

We set the sync up, and we'll map the categories with your accountant if you want them in the room for it. You keep your accountant. Nothing here asks you to change who does your taxes or how they like things filed.

The first of the month, in one page.

On the first, a report arrives. Not a dashboard you have to remember to open — a report that lands, whether or not you were thinking about it.

It turns 'business felt slow last month' into a list of names you can actually do something about on a Tuesday morning.

• What came in — revenue by service, so you can see which work is carrying the month and which is just keeping you busy
• What went out — expenses by category, including the ones that quietly grew
• Who's due back — customers past their normal interval, by name, with their number
• New customers versus returning ones
• Anything still unpaid, with how old it is

Every call answered, at 9:40 on a Tuesday night.

This one is a bolt-on: 24/7 automated phone answering, $100 a month on top of either plan. It picks up the calls you'd otherwise watch ring out — during a job, after close, Sunday morning, the week you're in Florida.

Every call is answered and recorded. Every message is transcribed and filed against the caller's record in the CRM, so it isn't a voicemail you have to stand in a parking lot with one bar to hear. It's text, in the system, with the number attached, ready to answer with a thumb between jobs.

Before the line goes live, we configure the recording disclosures for the state the line is operating in, so callers hear the notice they're supposed to hear. That's handled during setup and it's on us, not left as homework for you.

What it replaces is the missed call, which is quietly the most expensive thing that happens in a week. Most callers don't leave a message. They just call the next listing, and you never learn that they called at all.

Replies to your Google reviews, without you writing them.

The second bolt-on is automated Google review replies, $130 a month. Every review gets answered — the good ones thanked by name and for the specific thing they mentioned, the middling ones answered like a person rather than a form letter.

A page of reviews with no replies underneath them reads as a business that stopped paying attention, and the next customer scrolling through can tell. Answering all of them is a job that never feels urgent on any given day, which is how six months of them pile up unanswered.

You stay in control of the hard ones. Anything that reads like a real complaint comes to you before anything gets posted, because that reply should be yours.

What it costs, said plainly.

The CRM is part of Growth: $500 a month, plus a one-time $500 setup. That covers everything on this page and the website in front of it.

Foundation, at $250 a month plus $250 setup, does not include the CRM. We'd rather you read that here than find it out on a call. Foundation is the getting-found half — the website on your own domain, the Google Business Profile, email at your own address, and the SEO. It's the right plan for plenty of people. It just won't take a booking or fix invoicing.

Prepay the year and Growth is $5,100 for the twelve months, which works out to $425 a month, with setup billed separately. The two bolt-ons are $100 a month for the phone answering and $130 a month for the review replies, and either can be added to either plan. Anything custom is priced to the job, in writing, before a keystroke.

It's a twelve-month partnership, billed on the same date each month. Why twelve: a website needs roughly three months before it starts earning its keep, and we'd rather build the thing that works than the thing that's cheap to cancel. We're putting a year into you as well. If you want out early, tell us in writing: you pay the current month plus one more, and the domain, the Google profile and the customer list leave with you.

• Everything in Foundation — website, Google Business Profile, Google Workspace email at your domain, SEO, one update a month
• A booking site synced to your Google Calendar
• The CRM — booking, invoicing, payments, expenses, cold-lead follow-up
• Automated texts and emails — the thank-you, the reminder, the follow-up
• Automated review requests after the job
• Monthly reports, and the sync to QuickBooks or your accounting software

It's your ledger, and it leaves with you.

The customer list inside that CRM is yours. So is the domain, and so is the Google Business Profile. All three are registered in your name from the first week, not ours.

If we ever part ways, you take all three, exported in a format something else can read, without a retention call and without a waiting period. We say this out loud because the industry has a reputation and it earned it — plenty of systems are built so that leaving costs you your customers. This one isn't.

Drive it before you decide anything.

There's a working version of this CRM behind the link below, loaded with data. Not screenshots and not a video — the actual thing. Put an appointment on the calendar, build an invoice, open a customer record, read the reports, poke at the parts you're suspicious of.

Six complete demo businesses live behind the same door too — a barbershop, a taqueria, an auto shop, a nail salon, a chiropractor and a lawn crew. Book a haircut in the barbershop demo and a real confirmation email shows up in your inbox roughly ten seconds later. That's the same booking engine that would be running your Thursday.

Nothing to install and no form standing in front of it. Project Knox is new, and we'd rather you judge us on something you can drive than on testimonials we haven't earned yet.