We implement Holded for small businesses in Spain as an official Solution Partner. The calls we get from companies that set it up themselves are rarely about a missing feature. They are about an invoice series that restarted at 1, a product catalogue that doesn't match the web shop, or a bank feed nobody reconciles.
None of that is hard to avoid. It just has to happen in the right order. This is the order we use.
What should you decide before the first invoice?
Holded will let you send an invoice five minutes after you sign up. Don't. A few decisions are cheap to make on day one and expensive to change after you have issued fifty documents.
Your invoice series. Spanish invoicing rules say numbering within each series must be correlative, and corrective invoices (facturas rectificativas) must have their own series. Decide now whether you need separate series, for example per shop or per type of activity, and what number each one continues from. If you already invoiced this year in another program, the new series should continue the old one or clearly start a new one. It should never quietly restart.
Your tax setup. VAT rates, any special regime, IRPF withholding if you are a professional who invoices with retención. Agree these with your gestor before you configure them, not after.
Who your gestor is in the system. If your gestor will work directly in Holded, give them their own user from the start. If they will keep their own software, agree what they need from you and how often. That conversation decides half of your configuration.
Templates and payment terms. Your logo, your legal footer, your bank details, your standard payment terms. Boring, but every invoice carries them.
Verifactu. Holded states that its invoicing is adapted to Verifactu and that it sends the records to the Agencia Tributaria and generates the QR code automatically. In the accounts we set up, the status of each invoice (sent, pending or the error that stopped it) sits next to the document. That is the software side. Which date applies to you, and whether your business is in scope at all, is a separate question. Holded's own Verifactu page gives October 2028 as the date; that is the announced postponement, not yet the law. We wrote it up in a separate article.
In what order do you move your data across?
Holded imports most things from Excel templates, and its own help centre gives an order. We follow it, because Holded links records to each other and an import in the wrong order leaves loose ends:
- Chart of accounts
- Contacts, with the tax ID (NIF/CIF) filled in
- Products, with the SKU filled in
- Sales documents, invoices first
- Expenses, purchase invoices first
- Fixed assets
- Journal entries
- Employees
- CRM opportunities
- Projects
Two rules from the same help article save a lot of grief. Download the template from the import menu and don't rename, delete or move a column, or Holded can't read the file. Blank fields are fine. And imports take a few minutes, so check the result before you import the next file.
How much history should you bring?
This is the question nobody asks until the import is half done. You don't have to bring everything. For most small businesses we pick a cut-over date, usually the start of a quarter or a year, and bring:
- all active contacts and products
- open invoices, both what you are owed and what you owe
- opening balances, agreed with your gestor
Older invoices stay in the old system or as an archive export. Whatever you decide, decide it with your gestor, because they are the one who has to reconcile the year.
Clean before you import
Duplicated customers, three spellings of the same supplier, products without a SKU. Importing a mess into Holded gives you a faster mess. A day of cleaning in a spreadsheet is the best-spent day of the project.
How do you connect the web shop?
Holded has native connectors for the common shop platforms. Its integrations page describes them like this:
- Shopify: syncs products, orders and customers.
- WooCommerce: syncs product data, stock levels and warehouses.
- PrestaShop: connects one or more shops. Holded's help centre explains that this runs through a Holded plugin installed in PrestaShop and a Holded API key, that the plugin is not in PrestaShop's module directory so updates mean reinstalling it, and that new integrations start in draft mode.
- Wix and Amazon are listed as well.
Whatever the platform, the SKU is what ties a product in the shop to a product in Holded. If your shop and your import file don't share the same SKUs, the sync creates duplicates or misses stock. That's why products come before the shop connection, and why we check the SKU list line by line.
Test with real orders before you switch on. Place a few orders on the live shop with a discount, a shipping cost and a refund, and check what arrives in Holded: the customer, the tax, the series, the stock. It takes an hour and catches most of what goes wrong later.
When the system your sales run through isn't one of Holded's integrations, a booking system, a till, a custom platform, Holded has a REST API and webhooks. That's the part we build ourselves for clients, so nobody retypes an order.
How do payments and the bank fit in?
Two separate things people often mix up.
Getting paid. Holded lists Stripe (customers pay invoices from the customer portal), PayPal, Square, and GoCardless for recurring direct debits. Connect the one you already use. If you sell subscriptions or monthly retainers, direct debit saves you the chasing.
Knowing you got paid. That's bank reconciliation. Your bank movements come into Holded and get matched to the invoice they belong to. Holded lists Revolut Business as a direct connection. Set this up in the first week and reconcile weekly. A quarter of unreconciled movements is the single most common thing we find when we take over an account.
Where does the CRM come in?
Last, on purpose. The CRM is only useful once contacts and products are clean, because a deal is a contact plus what you sell them.
Start small. One sales pipeline with the stages you actually use, not the eight a template suggests. Import open opportunities into it if you have them. If leads come in through your website, connect the form so they arrive as contacts instead of as emails someone forwards. Holded lists Zapier for cases where there is no direct link.
What are the mistakes we fix most often?
- A restarted invoice series. Someone tested with a real series, deleted the test invoices and started again at 1. Use a test series, or better, don't test in production.
- Products without SKUs. Everything works until the shop is connected.
- The gestor finds out last. They receive an export in April and none of the accounts match theirs. Involve them on day one.
- Everything at once. Invoicing, inventory, CRM, projects and payroll in the same week. Nobody learns anything properly. Invoicing and the bank first, the rest when those are routine.
- No owner. Someone in the business has to own Holded: who gets access, which series to use, when to reconcile. Without one person, it drifts.
A realistic first month
- Series, taxes and templates agreed with your gestor
- Contacts and products cleaned and imported, with NIF and SKU
- Open invoices and opening balances in
- Bank connected and reconciled weekly
- Shop connected and tested with real orders
- Payment links on invoices
- One person who owns the setup
- CRM after all of the above
If you remember one thing
- Decide series, taxes and the gestor's role before the first invoice.
- Import in Holded's order, and clean the data first.
- The SKU is what connects your shop. Get it right before you switch on the sync.
If you would rather have someone else do this, it's what we do as a Holded Solution Partner: setup, migration, integrations and training, at a fixed price agreed before we start. Book the call and we'll tell you what your setup needs.
Sources
- Real Decreto 1619/2012, Reglamento de obligaciones de facturación, art. 6 (BOE)
- Holded help centre: recommended import order and template rules
- Holded help centre: import your contacts
- Holded help centre: PrestaShop, how to integrate with Holded (plugin, API key, draft mode)
- Holded help centre: PrestaShop synchronisation FAQ
- Holded: integrations
- Holded help centre: Stripe, what it is and how to integrate it with Holded
- Holded: Verifactu invoicing software
Builds websites and the systems behind them for small businesses in Spain and the Netherlands. Writes down the things clients ask twice.
