Night Owl CPA switches from Anchor, adds $162K revenue within a year
After a frustrating start with Anchor, Night Owl CPA switched to Ignition to streamline proposals, billing and payments, helping the firm maximize revenue through price increases and higher-value advisory services while saving weeks of admin time and eliminating A/R.
“The thing I love most about Ignition is I don’t have to think about a lot of the things that I used to think about.”
Scott Schweiger, Founder, Night Owl CPA
The challenge: Turning a paper-based practice into a scalable firm
When Scott Schweiger acquired a retiring CPA’s practice in 2024, he inherited a solid client base and a big opportunity.
The practice was primarily focused on individual tax returns and heavily reliant on paper. Scott’s vision was different. He wanted to use the existing tax business as a foundation for Night Owl CPA while growing higher-value business advisory services.
At the time of the acquisition, Scott bought a book of roughly 350 individual clients and 10 business clients. Managing that volume with manual processes wasn’t an option.
Scott had seen the alternative firsthand at a previous firm, where proposals were created in Word, converted to PDFs and sent through DocuSign. Renewals consumed significant admin time and customized proposals were difficult to delegate.
“I wanted something modular, proposals that I could delegate, that would be easy and streamlined, and I’m a big fan of fixed fee and automatic billing.”
Scott initially chose Anchor, attracted in part by what appeared to be a lower-cost option. But the onboarding experience quickly created more work than he expected.
The setup took nearly three months before the firm could start sending proposals. Scott found imported services required manual formatting, and after going live he discovered another sticking point: receipts weren’t available at the time.
That mattered to Night Owl CPA, as did the process of producing PDFs for the firm’s paper-based clients.
By January, busy season was looming. Scott needed an alternative that could get Night Owl CPA up and running fast.
Having used Ignition at a firm he worked at previously and after speaking to other firm owners who recommended Ignition, Scott made the switch.
“After such a frustrating onboarding experience with Anchor, I switched to Ignition. I was kicking myself that I didn’t just go with Ignition from the start.”
The solution: From a weekend setup to weeks of time back
The contrast in Scott’s implementation experience between Anchor and Ignition was immediate.
After spending weeks getting to the point of sending proposals with Anchor, Scott set up Ignition over a single weekend.
“Getting set up was super easy. There were a lot of good templates on Ignition to start with, so I didn’t have to customize everything all at once.”
Ignition’s templates gave Scott a starting point he could customize as the firm evolved. Ignition’s QuickBooks Online integration also helped connect Night Owl CPA’s billing and accounting processes.
That flexibility proved particularly important for the firm’s clients who were used to paper-based engagements. In its first year, Night Owl CPA mailed engagement letters to around half its clients. By year two, after more clients became comfortable interacting with the Ignition platform, the number requiring mailed engagement letters dropped to fewer than 30.
“For our older, less tech-savvy clients, they found Ignition pretty easy. That was a big win.”
Cutting proposal preparation from hours to minutes
Before using a streamlined proposal process, Scott remembers some proposals taking four hours to prepare. Pricing had to be calculated, templates updated, documents converted to PDFs, uploaded to DocuSign and sent for signature.
With Ignition, Scott estimates preparing a proposal now takes just 15 minutes. Meanwhile, he says automatic billing saves him around six hours of his own time each month compared with his previous manual processes.
“With Ignition, I save at least 10 hours a month on proposals alone. Add in the 6 hours a month I’m saving on billing, and then renewals and pricing, that’s weeks of admin time saved every year.”
Turning price increases into $50K in additional revenue
Ignition has also helped Night Owl CPA make pricing changes easier to manage at scale.
Scott can apply standard price increases across groups of clients, while customizing increases for clients with more complex needs.
“I love being able to apply price increases in bulk across all our standard clients, and then it’s easy to tailor price increases for our non-standard clients. It’s super efficient.”
Scott estimates that price increases alone generated approximately $50,000 in additional revenue for his firm in the past year.
The firm also experimented with a prepaid offer for a select group of clients. Clients could prepay their fees in exchange for holding their price for the year. Scott expected around 20% of clients would take it up. Instead, 75% took up the offer.
Reducing DSO to just two days
For Scott, getting paid has become something he spends far less time thinking about.
Night Owl CPA typically gives clients two days after an invoice is issued to flag a question or update their payment details before payment is processed.
“Thanks to Ignition, I have no A/R. Even though I have about 200 more clients than before, my A/R is way less.”
Across hundreds of clients, Scott reported just one unpaid account, from a client paying by paper check.
“I don’t really think about billing or accounts receivable. If I’m thinking about billing, it’s because I’m thinking about the growing bank balance.”
Building the advisory firm for the future
The operational changes are helping Night Owl CPA move toward Scott’s longer-term goal: fewer low-value, transactional relationships and more recurring business advisory work.
The firm added approximately $112,000 in new client revenue this year from advisory services, despite servicing fewer individual tax clients.
Scott sees that transition as a deliberate rebalancing of the firm.
“New advisory engagements are structured with fixed monthly fees and automatic billing. And Ignition does the heavy lifting for me.”
For Scott, that might be the biggest difference of all. Proposals, engagement letters, billing and payments no longer demand the same mental energy.
“The engagement letters are all signed and managed for me, I know where to find them, my staff can go look to see if we’re engaged in scope. So all the manual headaches are gone.”
After initially choosing Anchor, and now having experienced a full year with Ignition, Scott’s assessment was simple:
“I’m kicking myself that I didn’t just go with Ignition from the start.”