Brian Clare on Ignition & Asana

Last you heard from me, was when I penned an article on using Zapier to pull your sales workflow together by integrating Pipedrive with Ignition. That article was looking at your pre-sales process, helping you streamline management of leads and get them into PI to create your proposal and sign a new client.

Today, I'm talking about ways you can take an accepted proposal and start populating your project management platform with tasks and projects to get client-work kicked-off. 🎉

You might be wondering why you would want to integrate Ignition with a workflow app. Have you ever entered information in two systems when you didn’t have to? I have, and it’s a huge time suck.

By integrating PI with your workflow app (Asana in this case), you can save a ton of time by not having to manually create projects, tasks, and workflows in your workflow app every time a new client decides they want to work with you. This means that you’re able to automate the information flow from proposal acceptance to workflow app.

For example, you no longer need to wait for your sales team to notify you about a new customer to kick-off your onboarding workflow.
This also means that there is no gap between the sale closing and the revenue-generating work beginning. In other words, you can drastically speed up the “time to revenue” metric.

Before I jump into how you can do this with Asana, I want to highlight two great products that have native integrations with PI; Karbon and Xero Practice Manager (XPM).

If you don’t know either of these products, you should. They’re both highly regarded as excellent options for project management within your Accounting Practice. Especially if you have a few (or more) employees.

PI and Karbon or XPM have taken care of the integration for you, based on best practices. There's need to set up a process through Zapier to get the same result.

The features are powerful. For the size of my firm (2 partners), we chose Asana. Here’s a quick breakdown of the two products:

Karbon is a robust work and communication hub that practices of all sizes use to track client communication from first contact as a lead, right through the customer journey. It allows the partner, to keep a close eye on how work is tracking and the capacity of their team at a glance.

When a new client signs their Ignition proposal, it automatically logs details of the onboarding process in Karbon, updates client information on the dashboard, and creates work and tasks for the team.

Xero Practice Manager allows you to manage workflow and recover costs quickly with the real-time view of ongoing jobs and work in progress. You can quickly create tasks and monitor staff performance, client profitability and other relevant measures.

When a new client signs their Ignition proposal, it automatically creates all relevant jobs throughout the length of the engagement, updates client information on the partners’ and managers’ dashboard, and creates work and tasks for the team.

As for Asana, I use it in my firm and it works quite well when you can Zap information from PI to Asana. I’ll assume most readers are on either GSuite or Microsoft 365. If so, that’s great. Why? Because there is a chrome extension that you can add to your GSuite or MS365 that easily allows you to create tasks from an email. That’s a key feature that differentiates Karbon and XPM - you can link your email directly inside of those platforms. But, at least we have this chrome extension to the rescue.

Here’s what it looks like in Outlook. The first screen shot shows the two buttons you can pick from to add a task from an email. The second and third screenshots show the details behind clicking each of those buttons.

Now that you know a super quick way to get information from your email into Asana, let’s take a look at Asana itself and understand some of the features available.

You’ve decided to use Asana as your workflow app. Great choice! We love it at Blueprint Accounting. It helps us immensely to track ongoing work, decide where to slot in new clients for onboarding, and, of course, automate information flow from PI. These are just a few of the reasons why we use Asana. Let’s have a look at some of the features that it boasts, according to the Asana website:

I would have to agree with this!

The first feature that comes to mind is beauty. Is that a feature? No, not really, but damn Asana looks good. So, let’s actually call this the User Interface (UI). Asana’s UI is so easy to navigate around and understand what’s going on. It’s bright, colorful, it just makes sense. You don’t have to be a genius to understand how to use Asana.

Are you a fan of checklists? Great, Asana has that. Not a fan of checklists? Even better. Asana allows you to create Kanban boards, too. Here’s what they could look like, with some additional setup of course.

You can also create a true project plan with dependencies and a Gantt Chart. A project managers dream! It actually looks great too (did I mention the UI):

There are a ton of other features too, such as:

• A calendar view to monitor workload and see the bigger picture of ongoing and upcoming work
• Direct integrations with over 100 of your favorite apps like Slack, GSuite, MS365, Dropbox, etc.
• A Portfolio view to monitor the status of projects in real-time, allowing you to address issues quickly and efficiently
• Custom Fields to track… ANYTHING! We use it for priority (high, medium, low) and status (in-progress, waiting, need help, off-track, blocked)
• Templates, Privacy, and more

Walt Disney once said, “Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination in the world.” Asana can be your Disneyland, just use your imagination and you can build your workflows however you want within Asana.

You probably didn’t expect a Walt Disney quote in a blog about PI, Asana and Zapier, but here we are. Let’s have a look at how Asana can be used with Zapier.

From this point on, I'm going to assume you have a basic understanding of Zapier. If you don’t, I recommend that you watch this webinar from Ignition.

Asana has some pretty robust Triggers, Actions, and Searches. Asana has 11 Triggers and they are very powerful:

Have a look at some of those Triggers and what do you see? So many different ways to kick off multiple workflows from updates on projects, tasks, and subtasks. I’ll touch on some examples down below.

How about those 7 Actions?

There is a ton of opportunity here to improve your workflows with these 7 Actions. As you can imagine, I’ll be showing you what you can do with certain Zaps once a service or proposal is accepted in PI.

Finally, we have the 2 Searches:

I love Search actions in Zapier. They really do save you from duplicating information within an app. An example of this would be instead of adding information to a project automatically, maybe you only want to update the project. You would use a Search action to find the project and update it with some of the Actions mentioned previously so that you don’t end up with duplicate projects or information within a project.

As you’ve seen from the Triggers, Actions, and Searches, there are a ton of ways to move information around and get it into Asana.

The real reason you’re reading this, though, is to understand how information moves from PI to Asana. The goal of such a workflow is so you don’t have to manually update Asana each time a new client is added to your client roster.

Let’s consider how this scenario would play out if you didn’t have this integration. Your salesperson (maybe that’s you) would interact with the prospective client to figure out what services they need. You create a proposal in PI with these services and the client accepts the proposal (Yay!).

This is where it becomes extremely manual to update your workflow app. Of course, you can create a templated project in your workflow app (such as in Asana), which you can then copy to create a new project for your new client. But that doesn’t guarantee that the project will be accurate. It might be missing some tasks you need to include, and include some tasks you don’t need, resulting in potential confusion, ambiguity, and worse, scope creep.

This is where the true power of Ignition comes in. At a high-level, once a proposal is accepted, we can automatically create the client project and tasks specific to that client based on the service(s) in the proposal. The secret is the fact that each service is treated separately, allowing you to decide how your projects, tasks and sub-tasks are created.

Given that the key to this workflow is your services, it’s critical that you organize your service library correctly in PI. The best way to do this is to:

1. Define your service “categories”
2. Apply a naming convention.

At Blueprint, we took a good look at our services to decide on our service “categories”. These categories lay the foundation for our workflow. We have 5 categories:

1. Bookkeeping
2. Solopreneur (i.e one person businesses where we do just bookkeeping and bank reconciliations)
3. Corporate Taxes
4. Personal Taxes
5. Self-employed Taxes

With our categories defined, we then built out our service library with a list of services that fall under those categories. PI allows us to have as many services as we want, so we created several services within each category, which increase in scope and price based on the size of the client or the complexity of the work.

Next, we decided on a set of keywords to include in the Service Name. The keyword is critical to ensuring your Zap will create the right tasks for the right service. As an example of our bookkeeping services, the obvious keyword here is “bookkeeping”:

Going forward, any time we create a new service, we apply the same naming convention:

(keyword) - brief description of service (primary definition of scope).

You’ll want to come up with your own naming convention for your library too.

To achieve a sturdy Ignition to Asana workflow, you will need to use two zaps.

The first zap will look in Ignition to see if your client is brand new to your firm, or an existing client that is signing a renewal proposal (or change request). If the client is new, the zap will create a project for you. If they are already a client of yours, the zap will find your existing project, allowing you to add new tasks there.

The second zap then looks at the services in your proposal so that you can decide what happens next, based on the services that were accepted.

Let’s take a look at the following proposal as an example.

In the below image we can see that we sent a PI proposal to a client (let’s assume they were brand new). The proposal had 3 separate services.

The client accepted the proposal so my first zap checked out whether they’ve accepted a proposal before. It turns out they haven’t, so Zapier went ahead and created a project for me in Asana.

Next, I needed some tasks. Each service in the proposal requires its own task and sub-tasks (i.e. the things we need to do to be able to complete the task), and potentially, could be done by different people. Furthermore, one task is a one-time service, while the other two are monthly recurring services. So In our project we need to treat these tasks as separate. My second zap has gone ahead and created three separate tasks in the correct project.

With Zapier, all of what I’ve described so far has happened automatically. The true benefit of this is that every project will be a 100% accurate reflection of what your client has accepted.

Finally, I just need to make some slight tweaks directly in Asana (such as assigning tasks to my team and changing the recurring services to recurring tasks) and I’m all done.

Here’s a video showing the whole process: