Yes.
You need a simple CRM — but it's a job tracker, not a sales CRM.
What's really going on
Fifty jobs a year, two workflows, one of you. The DM is fine. The risk is what happens after someone says yes: draping site visits, stationery proofs, deposits, final headcounts, delivery windows. That lives in your head and your inbox right now. One missed reply or wrong measurement on a draping job costs you a weekend and a referral.
What to do instead
- Google Sheets (free) — one tab per workflow: Stationery and Draping. Columns: client, event date, stage (inquiry / quote / deposit / proofing or site-visit / delivered), deposit paid?, balance due, next action, next action date. Sort by event date. This is your CRM.
- WhatsApp Business app (free) — move booked clients off Instagram DM the moment they say yes. Use labels: "Awaiting deposit", "Proofing", "This month". Stops the DM scroll-and-lose.
- Habit — every Monday morning, 20 minutes, open the sheet and update "next action" for every live row. Nothing else. That weekly pass is the system.
First action today: open a Sheet, list every live job from memory and your inbox, mark which ones owe you a reply. You'll find two you forgot.
What you're being oversold
HoneyBook gets pitched hard to event creatives — it's US-only and built for a team that needs proposal-contract-payment in one flow; at 50 jobs a year as a solo with Xero already humming, you'd pay monthly for features you won't open. HubSpot Free sounds tempting and isn't wrong, but it's built for shared inbound pipelines with 3-10 people — for one person it's a museum. Doing nothing costs you slipped deposits and the occasional double-booked Saturday — small in dollars per miss, large in referrals and your weekends.
When to revisit this
When you hire a second pair of hands, or when you cross ~80 jobs a year and the Monday review takes more than an hour.
The part worth getting right
The real fork is whether stationery and draping are one business or two. If most clients book both together, you want one row per client with both services on it — and your sheet, your quote template, your deposit flow all stay single. If they're mostly separate clients with separate seasons, you want two parallel systems that never touch, because mixing them will hide the draping site-visit deadlines behind stationery proofing chatter. Pick wrong now and in six months you're rebuilding the sheet mid-wedding-season.