Searching for a basic CRM for small creative business

Hi there!

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I am beginning work with a small interior textiles company that sells yards of fabric to interior designers and then produces that fabric to order in their mill. Right now the order details and status are logged in email conversations with the client and/or factory. In order to check status, payment confirmation, changes made, or anything else that needs to be tracked – they go through their emails until they find the info. The emails can get as many as 90 messages back and forth so it's a lot to sort through.

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They want to use a program to store and track all of this information, that's it. Right now they are using HubSpot to do this, but it seems to be overkill as we don't need the sales-team aspect of the app.

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I am looking for a free (if not free, then cheap) organizational tool that we can use to track order status and conversations with clients and/or production. Kind of like a list of orders we could click on and then see all the details for – contacts, invoice, entire history sequence of actions – all with the ability to link to product pages or emails or attach documents for reference. Maybe one that syncs with G-Suite so you can link/attach from Drive. Would love for it to be simple to use. Doesn't need to be automated but if there is a solution out there that has some automation to it, I'm open to exploring that and learning how to set it up.

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Also if there is a simple way to use HubSpot for this I'm all ears. The program has seemed kind of confusing and not exactly aimed at what our needs are.

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Thanks so much for your help! New to this so I'm open to any resources for researching this in other ways.