A dev shop sells work that is hard to see and easy to expand. The build is one thing; the business around it, winning it, scoping it, and billing it, is where good developers quietly lose money.
A build is a pipeline
Discovery, spec, sprint, ship. A project moves through stages, and a change request is not scope, it is a new quote. Seeing every build on one board, and treating change requests as their own line rather than absorbing them, is the difference between a profitable project and a favour.
Recurring hosting and support
The steady money in software is the plan, not the project: monthly hosting, monitoring, and support. Running those as recurring invoices means the reliable revenue actually shows up on schedule instead of being reconstructed each month. The BizSimple for software teams page has the detail.
IP and handover
Who owns the code, when, and what happens to credentials, these are the questions that turn friendly at the start and tense at the end. A clear agreement, IP transferring on payment, a defect warranty, credentials handed over, keeps the handover clean and the relationship intact.
Keep it light
You build software for a living; you do not want a heavy CRM to run alongside it. A lean core, contacts, projects, and invoices, with the extras added only when a real need appears, is exactly the philosophy BizSimple is built on by Impartial AI Tech, a software team that builds the same way it recommends.