Skydeck and Freshbooks blend cell phone records with CRM and billing.

When I was consulting full-time, I would have paid someone a ton of money for this new CRM software plug-in from Skydeck and Freshbooks.

Skydeck is a free service that can pull your cell phone records from your wireless provider's website. By building APIs into the service, developers at Skydeck have made it easy for the data to be sliced and diced in some interesting ways.

One of the first mashups for Skydeck is a tool that imports the records of calls made to or from clients into Freshbooks, one of my favorite hosted CRM and billing applications. If you bill your clients by the hour, you can seamlessly create invoices based on the exact amount of time spent on the phone with clients. You can even use Skydeck to measure the exact cost of speaking to your most frequent clients or customers.

Even without a connection to a third-party system, Skydeck offers some interesting CRM software features. You can sync your call records to your Windows or Mac address book, making it easy to stay organized regardless of whether you have a BlackBerry or an iPhone. You can even rank your contacts by the number of times you have called them, or vice versa. I can see folks using this as a small business CRM tool to measure the ROI of calling out to customers -- did those 300 minutes of calls result in a big sale?

This is a great, free small business CRM application, especially useful for consultants, coaches, and other time-billed professionals. Although the current offering is quite robust, Skydeck promises even more advanced functionality when they roll out their paid memberships over the coming months.