Who it’s for
Commerce is built for service businesses, agencies, consultancies, and B2B SaaS companies that bill other companies — not for retailers or DTC stores. Typical fit:- Marketing agencies billing monthly retainers
- Consulting firms invoicing milestone-based projects
- Professional services billing time and deliverables
- B2B SaaS with custom enterprise contracts and invoicing
- Any business sending estimates, contracts, and invoices to clients regularly
What it is — and what it isn’t
Commerce is built for the workflow of selling services and managing client relationships, not for running a public storefront. The two patterns serve different audiences and need different tools.
If your customers manage their plan inside your own software, that’s a Stripe-in-code job. If you invoice them, or they pay or subscribe from a link you share, that’s Commerce.
What you can do
- Invoice clients — Draft, send, track, and reconcile invoices with line items, tax, and discounts. PDF download, payment link, automated reminders.
- Send estimates and quotes — Pre-sales proposals that prospects approve online. Convert accepted estimates to invoices with one click.
- Manage contracts and e-signatures — Templates with variable fields, multi-signer workflows, audit trail, and signed-PDF storage.
- Bill on a schedule — Subscriptions billed every so many days, weeks, months or years for retainers, memberships and plans, plus recurring invoices. Usage and time are logged and billed on invoices.
- Run a client portal — Public, branded link where clients view invoices, pay them, see contract status, and download statements.
- Process payments — Connect Hiveku Payments, your own Stripe account, or Authorize.Net. Clients pay by card; you record checks, wires, ACH, and cash yourself. See Payments.
- Take payments from a public link — Standalone payment pages anyone can pay through, including subscription pages that sign people up to a plan, with payer confirmation emails, CRM automations, and webhooks.
- Track receivables — Accounts aging by current, 1–30, 31–60, 61–90, and 90+ days past due. MRR, ARR, churn, and cash-collected reporting.
- Handle taxes — A default tax rate, per-state rates, and tax-exempt clients, applied automatically to invoices.
Why it’s bundled into Hiveku
Most service businesses cobble together separate tools — a billing tool, a quoting tool, a contract tool, a portal — and live with the integration tax. Each tool has its own client list, its own data model, its own login. The same client gets entered into four systems with four different spellings of their company name. Commerce shares one client list with your CRM, one company record, one source of truth. A contact you added in CRM is the same contact who pays an invoice — no syncing, no duplicates. When the AI assistant or a workflow needs to act on a client, it sees the full picture: their deals, their invoices, their contracts, their payment history.Where it lives
The Commerce UI is at/dashboard/commerce/ with sections for each capability:
/dashboard/commerce/— Overview dashboard/dashboard/commerce/products/— Catalog/dashboard/commerce/invoices/— Invoice list and editor, plus recurring invoices/dashboard/commerce/estimates/— Estimate list and editor/dashboard/commerce/contracts/— Contracts and templates/dashboard/commerce/subscriptions/— Recurring billing/dashboard/commerce/schedules/— Scheduled invoice generation/dashboard/commerce/payments/— Payments received, refunds, offline payments, and Hiveku Payments balances and payouts/dashboard/commerce/payment-pages/— Payment pages/dashboard/commerce/reports/— Revenue and AR analytics/dashboard/commerce/usage/— Usage and time tracking, billed on invoices/dashboard/commerce/settings/— Payment processor, branding, tax and invoice defaults, email, the client portal, and domains
/api/olympus/accounting/* routes, for automation and custom integrations. For contacts, see the CRM API reference.
Setup flow
1
Connect a payment processor
Under Commerce → Settings → Payment processor, set up Hiveku Payments, link your own Stripe account, or add Authorize.Net credentials — see Payments. Without a processor connected, you can still send invoices, but clients can’t pay them online.
2
Add tax settings
Set your default tax rate and label under Commerce → Settings → Defaults, add per-state rates under Tax by state, and mark tax-exempt clients on their CRM record so invoices calculate correctly from the first send.
3
Build your product and service catalog
Add the items you sell — services, retainers, plans, one-time products — to the Products catalog. Line items on invoices, estimates, and subscriptions pull from here.
4
Brand the client portal
Your logo comes from Settings → Branding. Set the portal’s colour and wording under Commerce → Settings → Client portal → Appearance, so the experience feels like an extension of your brand, not a generic billing page.
5
Send your first invoice or estimate
Pick a client, add line items, send. The client gets an email with a link to view and pay online; you watch the status update from sent to paid.
Where to start
Create and Send an Invoice
Build an invoice from your products, save or send it, and download the PDF.
Products & Services
Build the catalog that powers invoices, estimates, and subscriptions.
Invoices
Draft, send, track, and reconcile invoices with full status tracking.
Estimates
Pre-sales quotes that convert to invoices on acceptance.
Contracts & E-Signatures
Send MSAs, SOWs, and NDAs for legally binding electronic signature.
Subscriptions
Recurring billing for retainers, memberships and plans.
Payment Pages
Take a payment, or sign people up to a plan, from a link you share.
Client Portal
The branded public-facing surface clients use to pay and review documents.
Payments
Connect Hiveku Payments, your own Stripe, or Authorize.Net; refunds and saved cards.
Reports & Analytics
AR aging, MRR, ARR, churn, and cash-collected reporting.
How it fits with the rest of Hiveku
Commerce shares contacts and companies with your CRM — the same client record holds their deals, their invoices, and their contract history. Workflows can start from Commerce events — a client paying an invoice online or that payment failing, an estimate accepted or declined, a subscription created, renewed, past due or cancelled, a contract signed — and trigger emails, tasks, or follow-up sequences. Reports flow into the same dashboards as your sales and marketing data. A few common cross-module patterns:- Deal won → Estimate sent → Contract signed → Invoice billed. A single record chain from the CRM deal through to cash collected, all stitched together via cross-references.
- Subscription renewed → Email automation → Follow-up task. Trigger relationship-deepening actions off the renewal event without manual coordination.
- Invoice overdue → Automatic reminders → Accounts aging. Hiveku emails payment reminders on overdue invoices by itself (each invoice’s reminders are on by default), and the Accounts aging report shows what’s still owed — see Find and Chase Overdue Invoices.
- Contract executed → Project kickoff workflow. Auto-create tasks, calendar invites, and onboarding emails when a contract is fully signed.