Streamlining Your Proposal Process with Ignition: A Game Changer for Dark Horse CPAs

Many professional services businesses should relate to the often-painful experience of sending out proposals. Even when I work with vendors, it's clear to me when they dread building out proposals, and I understand why: it takes (sometimes) hours to craft the “perfect” deliverable that works for their client. Dark Horse CPAs was no exception, and in the first few years, we faced a significant challenge with our proposal engagement process for new and existing customers. Our system was fragmented and inefficient, involving multiple steps and tools that didn't align with our vision of being a tech-forward, innovative accounting firm.

The Problem: An Antiquated Process
First, I want to give you a summarized version of our client’s proposal and engagement onboarding process BEFORE switching to Ignition. Once we qualified the client and collected the necessary information, the real work began. Jumping between different systems, sometimes sending a rough quote in an email before building a proposal in MS Word to send via email (again) or DocuSign or PowerPoint. It was a mess of services, descriptions, pricing and contract terms. Once signed, we sent another form to collect CC or ACH authorization. Waiting for that to come back, then onto QuickBooks Online to set up the client and send them an invoice (if they didn’t fill out an authorization form) or set them up on a sales receipt…tell me if this starts sounding familiar so I can stop reliving this. While this might be manageable for a small firm (although I don't know why you would want to continue this crazy process), it quickly became cumbersome as we grew.

A Desperate Need for Efficiency
We realized that to provide a seamless client experience and leverage our staff's time effectively, we needed a better process. We evaluated several tools, including HubSpot which we were already using for our CRM system and had recently added the "quoting" ability, but found that some essential features were missing, at least for our use case. While evaluating, we focused on combining three critical steps in our engagement process: a clean proposal delivery with options, executing an engagement letter, and collecting & processing payments.

Discovering Ignition
During our search, we came across Ignition, a tool that immediately attracted us with its core features. On the first demo, we saw how using Ignition allowed us to streamline our process by integrating these three steps into a single, cohesive experience.

Key Benefits

1. Proposal Delivery: Ignition enables us to present multiple options to clients in a clean user interface. This feature is crucial for upselling and benchmarking different services, as it allows clients to compare options easily. The creation of these options is equally streamlined. Pro Tip: this new feature can be time-consuming, which is why I recommend always building the most robust option 1st, duplicating it within the proposal, and deleting the services that don't apply to the 2nd or 3rd options. This alone probably saved us 2,000 hours annually across the firm in proposal building.
   
2. Engagement Letters:The software dynamically adjusts the engagement letter based on the selected services. This means we can provide concise, relevant terms without overwhelming clients with unnecessary information. The engagement letter grows in complexity only as needed, based on the services chosen. Be aware, this does take some time to set up at the onset and may not be completely necessary for every type of business. You can always default to keeping everyone needed in a single engagement letter, we just liked this dynamic functionality, so we went the customization route.
   
3. Payment Processing: Our firm operates in a fixed-fee capacity for 90% of our engagements, so adding a form of payment is a required step with every new client. Ignition offers flexibility in payment methods, including credit card and ACH. It also allows us to pass credit card processing fees back to the client if desired, which helps mitigate our merchant processing costs. This flexibility meets clients where they are, providing options that suit their preferences. You can also bypass this entirely and require only ACH payments. After using Ignition now for a couple of years it’s important to note that I believe Ignition is best suited for firms that offer fixed-fee engagements. Billing hourly is possible in Ignition, but if your company ONLY bills by the hour, I would not recommend using the payment processing feature since there are better time tracking tools that are integrated with your accounting software.
   
4. Integrations: Now that we have all this data being captured in 1 place, we need to pass it to our other systems, the most important being QBO. Ignition has strong native integrations with the core tools we use but also allows for various Zapier connections so we can pass information to systems like HubSpot once a proposal is signed, and the client is engaged. One important thing in this whole process, you need to understand how a new tool fits or impacts your current workflow. Every tool has upstream and downstream effects, and you don’t want to be surprised AFTER you implement. It’s possible that you saved 3 steps in one area but gained a step in another. If you have evaluated the new workflow with the new tool early, you will be able to manage through the change. I am always aiming for a net reduction in steps and streamlining the processes and it’s ok if a new step is added elsewhere if the overarching workflow is improved. That was the case for us.

Transforming Our Workflow
If you haven’t picked up on it by now, implementing Ignition has been a game-changer for us. We've combined three separate steps into a single, streamlined process, significantly enhancing both our efficiency and the client experience. Once the engagement is kicked off, we can easily monitor cash flow, failed payments, expiring CCs, and the client gets alerted when the payment method needs to be updated. These once manual steps are now completely removed from the workflow.

For those of you that are already reaching out to Ignition to set up a demo, I encourage you to map out your current proposal process so you can visualize ALL the steps and how Ignition would fit or adjust it. Although Ignition has been life-changing for us, remember what I mentioned about upstream and downstream impacts on our current workflow that needed to be addressed before making a firm-wide execution.

Continuous Improvement
I know I have been singing Ignition's praises this entire time but let's be honest, no system is perfect. Ignition's core functionality has solved many of our challenges, but now that those challenges have been solved, we look for other things we can improve that Ignition can help us with. Their team is responsive, eager to up-level and adjust where necessary, and constantly updates the tools within the system for ALL our benefit. The largest area that I believe Ignition can further develop is their reporting or data accessibility. There is an enormous number of powerful sales KPIs living in Ignition that I am excited to extract once their updates go live. Look out for another post on how I use that data to drive business decisions for the firm.

A Recommendation for Professional Services Firms, Marketing Agencies, Construction Companies & Advisory Firms
So, who could benefit from Ignition? In my opinion, any business that sends a proposal to a client. Here is my short list:

• Marketing Agencies
• Professional Service Providers
• Contractors & Home Improvement Businesses
• Accounting Firms
• Advisory & Consulting Firms
• Travel Agents

I am sure there are more, but we can start there.

Conclusion
Speaking for Dark Horse, we've seen incredible results since implementing Ignition. Our workflow is more organized, transparent, and scalable. We started with 2,000 clients and $5M in revenue when we moved to Ignition and are on track to serve 6,000 and over $20M in revenue this year, 100% run through this software. It scales as we scale, and aside from everything mentioned above, is the most important thing we care about. If the story I shared sounds eerily family for your business, this could be the silver bullet you have been looking for.

About Dark Horse CPAs

Dark Horse CPAs provides an integrated suite of services including tax, accounting, fractional CFO, and wealth management to small businesses and individuals across the U.S. The firm was established to transform the client experience by offering personalized, high-quality services that small businesses and individuals deserve. As Dark Horses in their industries, these businesses benefit from advanced tax strategies and accounting insights typically reserved for larger companies. With a nationwide presence and a team of dedicated professionals, Dark Horse CPAs is committed to your success. Get a quote today.