Onpolar runs a consultancy from enquiry to invoice in one system

The studio

Onpolar is an Estonian product development studio: senior engineers building AI-native SaaS for clients, from MVP to production. The work is project-shaped — scoped, quoted, delivered, billed — and like most studios of its size, the commercial half of it used to live across a set of documents, a spreadsheet and somebody's memory.

Proposals start life as leads

Consulting work arrives as conversations — a form on onpolar.com, a referral, an intro call. Each one goes into the pipeline as a lead with its source recorded, and moves through the stages a studio actually has: enquiry, scoping, proposal sent, won or lost. The notes on the record hold what was discussed and what was promised, so a proposal written two weeks later starts from the record, not from memory.

Clients are records, not folders

A won proposal converts to a customer record, and everything after that attaches to it: the quotes that scoped the work, the invoices that billed it, the notes that explain it. When a client comes back a year later, the whole relationship is one screen — what was built, what was billed, what was said.

Invoicing that matches how studios bill

Project work bills monthly. Each invoice goes out from the client's record with line-level VAT and the studio's details on the PDF, and lands in the income view next to the expenses the month actually cost — software, subcontractors, hardware. The gap between billed and spent is visible without exporting anything into a spreadsheet.

The hardware is in the register

Workstations, test devices, the machines the studio develops on — each sits in the fixed-asset register with its purchase date and value. It's the unglamorous part of running a company, which is exactly why it belongs in the same system as everything else instead of in a document nobody updates.

Why this loop matters

A consultancy's whole commercial life is a loop: enquiry → proposal → client → invoice → repeat. Onpolar runs that loop daily with the studio's own books beside it — so the question every studio owner eventually asks, which clients are actually worth the calendar space, gets answered from the records rather than from instinct.