Accounting with Confidence Podcast

45: Ignition to the Rescue: How a Proposal App Improved My Firm

• Beth Whitworth • Season 2 • Episode 45

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In this episode, I share my journey of integrating the proposal and payment acceptance platform, Ignition, into my CPA firm. I discuss the numerous challenges I faced with the old system, which involved using Microsoft Word, Excel, Adobe, QuickBooks, and various other platforms to manage proposals, agreements, and billing. The cumbersome and disjointed process often led to procrastination and inefficiencies. However, after adopting Ignition in 2021, I was able to streamline these operations, making billing and renewals much more efficient and professional. Ignition enabled me to create templates, automate payments, and manage renewals with ease, ultimately saving significant time and allowing my firm to grow faster. If you're struggling with similar issues in your accounting practice, implementing a system like Ignition could be a game-changer.

Ignition: https://get.practiceignition.com/bethwhitworth5357

 I am Beth Whitworth race car driving quilt making CPA firm owning wife, mom, and boss. I'm here to help you build a business you love by sharing all of the good, the bad, the ugly, and the excellent sides of working in this industry. It's not always easy, but after many years, I can finally say it's worth it.

Let me guide you on your journey to accounting with confidence.

Hi, and welcome to another episode of Accounting with Confidence. I am Beth Whitworth and I'm here today to talk about another. Tech improvement that we made a few years ago and how it impacted just the firm in general and really what I do in a pretty big way. So what I'm gonna talk today about is when we moved to Ignition.

So this used to be called Practice Ignition, and they had a rebranding to the name Ignition a couple of years ago. And it is essentially a proposal and a payment acceptance platform and a lot of things. So I'm gonna tell you the story of how I got to Ignition and why it has changed my firm. So what I was doing when it came to issuing proposals and setting prices and having agreements signed by clients.

Once we got past that, that hourly billing system that most accounting firms were using back in the day. So I would say this was probably, you know, it was a few years ago at this point, I was using word, so Microsoft Word to generate the agreement form where I would have all the language, the verbiage, the this is what it's gonna cost each month and a place to, to be signed.

And so it was kind of a template, but I was never really good at making word templates, so it was kind of rough. I also was using Excel to kind of drop in numbers and figure out did I need to increase their price based on these billable hours. And there was a whole lot of calculation kind of happening based on time and how many tax returns we did and, and so I was using Excel to kind of help me come up with the pricing.

Of course, I would then have to print it all into Adobe because I didn't want to send them a a Word document that was editable. So it would go to Adobe and then we'd email it or we would mail it. So sometimes I would print it and mail it back in the day, and I would also then get that back and we'd have to, we used QuickBooks desktop.

And QuickBooks QB time is what it became, but we were using TSheets before it was QB time to generate the billing, pull in time, writeups write downs on all the invoices, wait to be paid and back in the day it was mostly by check. If we were running a credit card, we were kind of running them manually in QB payments.

If someone came in to pay a bill, we were using Square, so we had multiple. Platforms happening here to get an agreement out and also for renewals. So guess what didn't happen? I didn't do the renewals. I rarely did them on time. I had no system in place for tracking and making sure that an annual renewal was going out or a price increase was happening.

I had no system for if someone midyear, mid, mid kind of working on this that, that they'd made a change. They suddenly hired somebody and they needed to add payroll. I didn't have a good system for that, and when it did come time for me to finally say, oh gosh, I really need to get these people updated.

We're doing so much more work. I was very fearful of the increases and what it was, what pushback I'd get from the clients. I was always a little unsure of the language. I was constantly changing that Word document depending on what we were doing. And it was, it was just very clunky. And when I say I didn't renew things on time, I had clients that I had not done a price change.

For 10 years because I hated the process and it took so much time. And at that time I was still very heavily into doing a lot of the, the client work, plus managing the team plus handling operations and. There was a lot there, and so this would be the thing that I would procrastinate the most, and then the longer you procrastinate it, the more you feel like, well, this is silly.

I, I can't send 'em one now. It's been so long and it was a process that was so disjointed. That I couldn't delegate it. I tried. I tried to delegate pieces. I'm like, okay, I can have somebody update the Word document or pull the time reports or whatever. And it just, like I said, it was too disjointed. It was bad.

So I. I had to make a change. I put it off way, way, way too long because I first heard about Practice Ignition. 'cause it was, that's what it was in 2017 from one of my peers in one of my coaching groups. And I was like, yeah, yeah, we're not, I'm not ready for that yet. You know, I, it was a system that I'm like, it sounds great, but I don't, I can't afford it or I can't, it, it's just not for me.

So I started a little bit after I heard about Ignition. I started working with on subscription model. That was that three-tiered system where you've got your good, better, best type selection. And I was building that into. My Word document into this very manual labor intensive system and was continuing to accept payments that we were having to run, either checks that we were depositing at the bank via check scanner, or square or QB payments.

We were running these things manually and still didn't have a great system for when those needed to renew. So it wa it was tough that I heard about it in 2017. I started doing subscription billing in about 2018 probably, and starting with, you know, k kind of my new business clients is what, where that started.

But the system and the process was still very clunky. And I still procrastinated it, and it would take a long time for me to get a proposal to a potential new client because the system, it was something I, I really, really detested. So. What happened that made me finally say, do something different? Well, I will say that in 2021, I lost a fairly good sized client.

You know, they made a change and I was looking at the revenue streams, like, oh wow, I need to get some of these fixed price agreements and subscription agreements updated. We need to get some price increases out. So we were going into the fall. And in that year, the annual conference that I go to was in October.

Because of the pandemic, it had gotten shifted and so it was in October and when I was there I was on the exhibitor floor and I talked to Practice Ignition, and that was in October. And I had already hired someone who was starting in November and she was. She's my manager. First time I put a manager in place, she was coming in and she was going to take work off my plate, which meant I would've time to implement the system and I wouldn't have to try to teach her anything relating to related to this old, clunky system that I had been.

Doing or not doing for years. So with Sarah coming on board, I said, okay, you know, if I, if I do this right, I should have time before this new season is rolling in that I should be able to, to implement this. So, wow, I was so glad that I did. So it's what the system itself does if you're not aware, is it's a professional.

Proposal system where you can create templates, you can put your services in there. You can pick and choose how you want them to be billed. You want 'em to be billed annually. Is it a one-time fee? Is it a monthly fee? How are you gonna set that up? You can set up templates for tiered three-tiered proposals.

Amazing. Collect digital signatures include a terms sheet, so all of your legalese is on a term sheet that you can have multiple ones depending on what services you're providing. And incorporated it in that is the ability to take an electronic payment automatically credit card, a CH debit card, and you can force that they have to put in a payment method when they sign.

So this system, I started out thinking, okay, it's gonna be really complicated. I don't have a lot of standardized pricing, and I thought that was going to be an issue. It was not, it actually helped me in creating the packages a little bit. You know, it laid it out very easily for me to say, okay, here's, here's the first one.

Let me do this next one, and it's gonna copy this over, and then I'm gonna add these add-ons. Actually, since I've gotten into this system, they've added so many great features that weren't even there before. But it was something that I was able to start with my clients that were on existing recurring monthly fee agreements.

I started renewing them first because even if I wasn't going to move them into the three tiers like I was doing with new clients, I could at least take my old word and say, okay, here's the stuff we were doing. Let me build that into this ignition proposal, and then force that payment. So get that payment because what we were doing was spending so much time chasing money, following up with accounts, accounts receivable.

You know, if you didn't pay us on time, at some point we're gonna stop doing work. Somebody has to follow up on that. Running credit cards, chasing expired credit cards. Securing credit card information. There was a lot of pieces to that old system that Ignition was able to just incorporate. It tracked the expiring cards, it tracked the expiring proposals, and it added things that, since I've been in it since 2021, they've added a renewal.

Button that allows you to essentially start with the old proposal, hit renewal, and be able to adjust pricing in there very easily. It knows all the terms from last time, all those things. It has added forms and questionnaires now that you could send out. It's added landing pages if you wanna send somebody to a landing page.

It's, there's a lot of things in there that make my life so much easier and in conjunction with ignition. We use Canopy now as our practice management software, and this is just to go back. This is not a pay, I'm not getting paid from Ignition or anything like that. If you wanted to sign up for Ignition, I can put my link so that I could get.

Something back from them. I think they give me like, uh, $50 or something. But I'm just telling you this because this is a system that has changed, I don't wanna say changed my life, but definitely changed my firm because now that we are using Canopy and we use Ignition. So in Canopy, we will go in after we've signed a new client and automatically put a task in there to renew their subscription agreement.

12 months from now. And so then that pops up on my to-do list. So every month I have a list that of people that I need to do a renewal for, and I can go into Ignition, it'll coincide. It'll show that, yep, these people are coming due and I can go in and just. Do them. And if it's something that scope hasn't changed, we haven't added anything, we haven't deleted anything, then those are very quick and the clients have gotten used to signing that and just letting it kinda roll along.

And if it's something that I need to change or I've seen over the year, I'm like, okay, we need to upsell them. Uh, maybe they need an add-on for coaching and we can put an add-on. So not just you take this whole package, but you could take this package and you could also add on. Payroll, you could add on coaching, you could add on sales tax filing, whatever it is that we can kind of create these things and make it very easy for the clients to see what we do.

So what other services are we offering to them that they may not know that. They need it. There's also a great communication tool in there. You're putting in an introduction where you can say, Hey, this year the fees are going up because so and so software raised their prices and we're passing that through to you or whatever.

And it's very professionally done. We use that system. Once it's been signed, we can grab the PDF and we, we save the signed subscription agreement into their permanent file in our canopy, which is where we keep our files. And it's just so. Streamlined. And right now as, as of this past tax season, we just moved all of our 10 forties, our individual tax returns into subscriptions last year, and we put theirs, whether it was an annual renewal or a monthly subscription, and the the annual is also subscription.

They just got to, they prepaid it. We put all of those in ignition, and I can say that right now. 99.9% of our billing is done through Ignition. We have two monthly subscriptions. One has a bank issue that it just didn't ignition and, and their bank didn't like each other. And then one was just one. I haven't, I just haven't gotten it changed yet.

That's on me. It's, it's a little, little amount and we also. Don't collect any more checks. So I would say less than five. And I think of those, I mean, it's some of my older individuals who aren't online and, and so they'll, you know, mail in their tax documents with their, with a check to pay me. And so there's maybe two, maybe three at the most.

So this is something that has completely changed the. Our billing system. I mean, how and how much time I was spending and has made the renewal process something that I don't dread anymore. I mean, it is absolutely a breeze and it's happening. It's happening annually. It's happening religiously. It, it's something that in, you know, on our horizon is for me to be able to delegate.

That process of renewing where all I'm doing is approving maybe what the increase, if they're having an increase or giving some feedback on, oh, yep, we need to add, um, this particular service and someone else can do it, because it's all systematized. Templated, the services are accurate and everything that you put in there is editable so you can change it.

However you want. And it has made it so much nicer. You have no idea how embarrassed I was, but that by not doing these in such, in a, in a professional way, I mean, I was just letting him ride. I'm like, I, it's too much work for me to do an increase now. It is just so, so easy. So I will say that the things that I have heard from other people about Ignition is it's expensive now for me.

It continues to pay for itself. Are there cheaper systems out there? Maybe, maybe. I haven't looked because I'm so happy with them that it is still saving me so much time. Converting stuff to somewhere else is, is, that's not gonna be a time savings for me. So what you're charged for is monthly, your merchant fees for the A CH and the credit card that are processed, and then there's an annual subscription fee.

And right now I think I'm spending maybe. 150 bucks a month between 150 and $2,000 a month. I think it's probably closer to 150. $150 a month. I was spending way over $150 in my time to get any of this done. So I will say new proposals going out and renewals going out every month. And I'll say for new proposals, we're probably.

In the busy, busy season, we're probably doing three to four a week, and in the slower time we're doing maybe four to five a month. It just kind of depends, so that time is I am getting, like I'm doing my discovery call and then I'm able to jump in and do this proposal to them. In the same week, which was unheard of under the old way.

So I'm closing deals faster or getting to a discussion point faster than I was when they were just waiting and waiting, waiting for me to actually get some things done because I was procrastinating it because something I hated and I wasn't good at it, and all of the things. So $150 a month is worth every single penny.

The merchant fees themselves, they're all comparable. You know, yes, there's might be some that are gonna get it for you cheaper, but again, it's the, the impact of not chasing the checks, you know, that wasn't on me, that was on my administrative person. Having to record all the checks against the invoices, having to do all of those, those pieces, that was time that now she can spend on doing more important things for the firm than.

So that's great. And I, I will mention that it works with Xero and QBO, so it will send, you know, the invoices and the payments all into, you know, whatever accounting platform we're currently using. Xero and love it. And it is something that saves a ton of time. Uh, we were. Doing things a little bit before Ignition, obviously.

We were having to record all these payments individually into QuickBooks Desktop and it, it was just a lot. It was very cumbersome. It also works with Zapier that we can use Zapier to do some things to move things with into Canopy. I haven't explored that 'cause I'm not a Zapier expert, but. Zapier. I don't know.

Somebody can correct me, but I think that with that, if we were really to lean into that, it could do things like setting up the jobs in Canopy based on whatever service you have created in Ignition that they've accepted. It could go create some tasks in Canopy. That would be great. But right now we aren't leaning into that.

I think the next thing will be for us to really delegate. This renewal process that is still on my plate, but ho, ho. Whole lot less dread around it. And once we start delegating that, then we'll start looking at the onboarding processes. They've just recently added where you can send those forms and questionnaires.

And so we're thinking we're gonna start incorporating that into collecting some data. Pre-discovery call and also on that onboarding process. So once they've signed, they get this form sent to them for them to fill out with all of the information that we end up ha needing to collect, you know, kids' names and kids' birthdays and whatever.

All of those things. So they're really working to make it. Somewhat all inclusive. They have recently started working directly with Carbon, K-A-R-B-O-N, which is another practice management system, and so they're going to be integrating into that. Now we work with Canopy, that's who we use for our practice management, and they are working to roll out their own proposal system.

I would say that that would be the only time I would even consider moving at this point is if I was moving where it eliminated one more piece of software where everything was in canopy instead. So I don't know. It's right now. I, I love it. I have very few things that I say don't love about it. The one I, I mentioned people complain about the price, but for me it is worth every penny.

Still after four years, it is still worth every penny. The other thing would be the reporting isn't great necessarily. So I'm hoping they're going to be working a little bit on that, on kind of getting some reports that will show you upcoming billing. You know, what's, what's coming. They have like little widgets that you can see, but there's no reporting from that widget.

You would have to dump it to a CSV, but otherwise I don't run a ton of reports out of it. We are paperless and so I am kind of, of the mind of, you know what, it gives me the list of what payments are coming in. What payments have been collected, when they're gonna come in, and what proposals are out there, what are going to expire, what are lost?

It gives me in plenty of information. So it has definitely changed my, I would say, my attitude about managing and handling subscriptions, renewals, price increases. It's made it very seamless and easy. So. If you don't have something like that, I would say look, start, find something, because if you are still accepting paper checks or if you are still having to wait for payment or run someone's card manually, at any point you need to look at the efficiencies of having this type of a proposal slash billing system.

It is worth its weight in gold. And I am, like I said, I am not looking to make a change at this point. I'm looking to leverage it to do even more and better things in my opinion. And I think that had I not found something when I did, I don't know that we would've been able to grow as fast as we have. So because there would've been so much time still spent, it just administratively managing this process.

So. Okay. That is what I have to say about how Ignition has changed my firm. And really it's something that for sure if, if you're not using something for a proposal system, if you're still doing any of that by hand, it's worth it. So worth it. Okay? Remember that I am here to empower you to build a business that you love.

So as always, reach out to me. Let me know what you think. If you're interested in learning more about Ignition, I would love to hear from you. I will get the link posted for how to get. In touch with Ignition and I will talk to you again soon.

Thanks for listening to another episode of Accounting with Confidence. My hope is that my experiences can help you navigate the realities of owning and operating your business. Please subscribe or follow the podcast on your favorite podcast listening platform so that you never miss an episode. Feel free to leave me a text by using the, send us a text message link in the show description and let me know how I'm doing.