I’ve been working with the accounting profession for nearly six years, and it’s the one profession I never expected would send me all over the world. I first joined the team at Ignition after falling in love with their platform and was even more excited by the opportunity ahead to impact the industry.
The concept for me was simple: Ignition was built to help accountants and bookkeepers streamline and improve a relationship with their clients so that they can spend more time adding value and having important conversations that help small business owners to make better decisions and everything that can flow on from that.
Engagement letter creation and building proposals is one of the least enjoyable things imaginable in your firm, but it’s also a catalyst that allows you to win new clients, improve your fees and create first impressions. Getting paid for the work is the second most important piece, once the customer has agreed and officially become a client.
Why Ignition?
Ignition is both a proposal system and a payment gateway. It’s effectively two (or three) applications in one. It allows you to price up your client work, create your engagement letter, and, in turn, automatically bill your client for all the services listed on multiple variables – whether that’s fixed fee or ad hoc arrangements.
The end result is a perfect client onboarding process. It’s a solution that ensures 100 percent that you’ve collected your client payment information, so you’re confident that you will get paid for the work that you’ve priced and agreed upon. Not only will you have better profitability, but your efficiency and client experience will also be incredible.
Ignition benefits
Here’s how Ignition will help you:
- Price your clients fees for service.
- Automatically create your engagement letter.
- Automatically collect and process your clients payments through direct debit (ACH) or credit card.
- Seamlessly create branded proposals quickly.
- Forecast all of your revenue and created trackable KPI’s in your firm.
How it works
Ignition is your all-in-one client onboarding solution, helping you get paid and removing all the admin, both before and after they become a customer.
The integration into QuickBooks® means you’ll never need to raise or touch an invoice again. It’s completely automated based on the billing and payment schedule setup in your proposal and payment plan.
And, because your payment system is connected to the original contract, whenever the agreement is updated in Ignition, it automatically updates your payment schedule and the invoice schedule back in QuickBooks. This, alone, will help you save countless hours, with no more double handling or trying to maintain multiple databases.
What sets Ignition apart
It’s been an interesting journey working for Ignition, as it’s one of the only apps I’ve ever known to not have any real competitors.
I can’t find another system on the planet that can create all of your pricing, proposals and engagement letters, and has a built-in complex billing engine that automatically collects and processes all your payments in one go.
It doesn’t exist and, as a result, it meant that we’ve created a new category for accountants to bring into their technology stack. It’s exciting to be a product at this stage of our journey, really challenging the norm when it comes to a process that is very much built around word documents and excel spreadsheets.
We learned from our customers that essentially, this was a problem they didn’t know they needed solving. They were content with manually creating word docs and trying to work off hourly fees and pricing.
We run review sessions with our users all the time so that we can understand what’s working in their process, which allows us to identify potential product enhancements and improvements that we can put in place for everyone’s benefit.
The Ignition and QuickBooks integration
Working with Intuit® on this journey has been a fantastic experience. Personally having worked with Intuit for nearly three years in Australia before my time at Ignition, and now another two years on this side, they’ve been a fantastic partner that truly believes in our mission.
We’ve been integrated to QuickBooks for a number of years, we’ve supported their QuickBooks Connect and roadshow series all over the world, and we plan to continue doing this for years to come.
Their ProAdvisor® and small business community has a great bunch of people that are all so invested in technology and the future of how business is run, it’s completely a no-brainer. We were also born in an accounting firm in Sydney, so we stay incredibly close to our roots so that we know that we’re still able to solve and provide for our target audience.
Our vision for the future
We’re excited by the future of QuickBooks Online Accountant, as we can see some really cool integration opportunities available in their platform that will allow our users to price their services better and more accurately, as well as trigger workflows and tasks automatically based on accepted proposals.
We believe that having debtors or bad payers in your firm is absolutely a choice, whether that’s conscious or not. The only reason you can have bad paying customers is because you gave them the option to not pay you in the first place.
As soon as you give a client an invoice, it’s up to them to make an action. If that action has no deadline that they are tied to, you’ve already given them too many options.
By removing this option, you’re only giving them one option. This is a proactive approach where you’ve collected the client billing information before you’ve even started working with them. You begin every relationship with the important information taken care of, giving you more time to focus on actually building a relationship that matters.
Our mission is to help improve the relationship between the accounting profession and their small business clients. We strive to price more effectively, eliminate your debtors, win more clients and drive real efficiency. We are tool built for the accounting community, and it’s something we are incredibly passionate about.
