A Q4-ready client onboarding system for Bookkeepers

Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining us on today's webinar hosted by Ignition. What we'll be running through is how you can make some optimizations to your onboarding system as you head into the new year. Quite a really good point in the year right now to start thinking about what kind of changes you wanna make in your firm and how you kinda take that actionable before we head into another new year as this year is already flying by. For those of you that are new to Ignition, Ignition transforms your sales, billing, and payment process, and it's used by over 80 hun 8,500 accounting, bookkeeping, and tax firms all around the world. With Ignition, they are able to engage their clients smoothly and get paid faster and really kinda streamline that onboarding process, which we will talk about today. So if you are new to Ignition, you will get a little bit of background here on Ignition, which is so you can kinda learn a little bit more and encourage you to stick around to the end in order to see a demo. A little bit about Ignition. As I mentioned before, everything starts from that first interaction between you and your clients. So that could be from this time you get a new prospect into your firm by setting off a initial lead questionnaire and then kind of managing that through that sales pipeline through maybe go through a sales call and then ultimately send out that proposal and engagement letter. Ignition can then automate your billing. So for those of you looking to move to more upfront or recurring billing, Ignition's gonna be a really great solution to tie that scope of work into how you're getting paid. As I mentioned before, getting paid, so we can collect both on ACH or credit card. For those in Canada, we can do credit card or pre authorized debit as well too. And then Ignition also helps when it comes time to manage out of scope work. So if scope creep does arise with your clients, you can quickly add or remove a new service to your engagement with your client. You can go ahead and send them a change order if needed, and then Ignition does close that loop when it comes time for renewal. So if part of this process considering going into next year, if going through the process of, running a price increase across your clients or running some sort of renewal process to offer your clients new service levels can be a really powerful thing as you look to grow your firm. So if you aren't set to renew your engagements already, would highly encourage you to think about what you can do to renew your existing clients going into the new year. We'll run through our first poll here. So we'd love to know for those of you on the webinar, you know, what do you know about Ignition? Was that kind of the first you've heard of it? Maybe you're already your customer. So go ahead and answer that first poll for us, and that will kinda help inform how we run through the rest of the session. So which is great. We've got a lot of folks that first time hearing about Ignition, so, you will get to see a little bit more throughout and then think about how Ignition can kind of fit into that holistic onboarding process that you might run-in your firm. Alright. Looks like we've got that poll ready to go. So enough from me. We're really excited to bring along side, one of our customers here at Ignition, Jeremy Wells. I've had the pleasure of getting to know Jeremy probably over, the last five to six years, maybe even longer, through his journey, for starting his firm and now running, as COO and head of tax at Steadfast Bookkeeping. Jeremy, great to see you today. Would you go ahead and give everyone an introduction to tell a little bit more about yourself and your firm? Yeah. Absolutely. Thanks, Ryan, and thanks, Ignition, for having me today. It's always a pleasure to hang out with you for a little bit and be able to talk to people interested in Ignition. I started back in about 2018 and very quickly realized that the admin side of the firm was gonna get more and more complicated and more and more expensive both in terms of, you know, time and money if I wanted to hire somebody. So I very quickly started looking for tools that would help me and Ignition was one of first ones that I introduced in my firm. But I have been running a tax and accounting firm in some sort of role, some sort of version since 2018. In '24 2024, I merged my solo firm into what is now Steadfast Accounting and have been doing that, for about two and a half years now, operating as COO, and head of tax. And, in the meantime, I've been interested in, helping our clients with, of course, tax return preparation, but also planning, and then also talking with other, tax professionals and accounting professionals talking about tax law, and then, their practice management, especially including things like pricing and, getting paid for the work that we do. Great. Well, thanks, Jeremy. We're we're really excited to have you here today and and get those insights from you here throughout. So as I mentioned before, what we'll be covering today, is kind of think about that onboarding process and why that can be a scavenger hunt, we can call it. It can be a big bottleneck for you or your team constantly chasing down different information from your clients and really ultimately a bottleneck for you to start the work and deliver value to your clients. We can think about how we can start to standardize some of that, how we can connect your scope of work to your billing, and then we will show you a little bit later on a bit of a demo on Ignition, how we can kinda fit into this process as you look to build it out. Jeremy, we'd love to kinda hear from you, you know, what does your process look like today? You know, you're going into a new year, maybe. What does that process look like? What are maybe some optimizations you're looking at? Or, you know, how do you think about that onboarding process? Yeah. So, you know, and this ties in well with Ignition. Right? Because the it's always a big lead up to getting that prospect to sign the proposal. And at that point, you know, we we do like to celebrate just a little bit whenever we get a new client, but that just means the work has really started for us. Right? And so very quickly, we transitioned into onboarding, and we provide several different kinds of services in our firm. We do both accounting and tax, but we also have several roles within our firm. We have not only tax and accounting and bookkeeping, but we've also got the what we call a client success manager, which is essentially our account manager. So we've got several different roles and several different kinds of work being done. And onboarding is really where we start to connect all those different loose threads together between the proposal and actually starting to deliver those services to the client. So we have a relatively structured, sequence that we manage through our practice management system. Now this, you know, everything that I'm gonna talk about today is relatively agnostic in terms of the kinds of software and the specific programs you're using. But, in our firm, we use a, practice management system called TaxDome that allows us to, set up the workflow of onboarding. And if you think of any sort of job that your firm is doing, if you think of it in terms of different stages, and at each stage, there are some things that need to happen. There are some tasks. There are some messages that need to get sent out. There's some information that needs to be gathered. And so we've structured our onboarding flow, according to what we think is gonna most effectively move that prospect who just now signed up and become a client, move them into starting to deliver services to them as quickly as possible, but at the same time, make sure that we have everything we need before we get started in that. So it it's a lot of back and forth between us and that new client. It's a lot of information gathering, but we've got that sequenced out all in steps. And so everybody inside the firm knows exactly who's responsible for what, and the client is kept in the loop as much as possible. It also includes a onboarding call. We use, we use the entire Google Workspace, suite in our firm. And so the video call, tool in that Google Meet is what we use. Our CSM or client success manager, they'll get on a call pretty quickly with the client to go over any missing information, make sure we're all clear on expectations, all clear on what services are are signed up for and what that timeline is going to look like. Now we're going into q four. That process gets a little bit, a little bit more a little tougher, a little expedited, can, this time of year. Primarily, I run the tax side, of the firm. I know we've got a lot of bookkeepers in the audience today, but, you know, a lot of the bookkeeping workflow, especially in q four, is trying to get the books clean and ready to go for a tax return. We file extensions for all of the tax returns in our firm. Now there's still a lot of work that needs to happen. We don't just put everything off till for six months and act like that's fine. But what it does is it gives us a little bit of breathing room so that we're not rushing through q four. We never wanna rush. We don't wanna make the client feel rushed. We don't wanna feel rushed during onboarding. Onboarding is a critical touch point. It's where we either meet all of the expectations that we set up when that prospect signed up as a client or we start dropping balls, And we definitely don't wanna do that. So we try not to rush. We try to make sure that we're sticking to, our process no matter what time of year we're in, but that is, that's essentially what our workflow looks like. Yeah. Really helpful there, Jeremy, to to kinda walk through the different stages. So just kinda play some of that back. It seems like, you know, everyone kinda starts with that, initial proposal. And then from there, we start to kick off different systems, request, meetings in order to kinda create that experience. I wanna go back to kinda that initial proposal and service offering standpoint. You know, how do you delineate different service offerings that you, provide to your clients? Is that through different packages? How do you kinda set that initial scope up front so you know that once you actually start working with that client, everyone's kinda clear on that same page? Yeah. Absolutely. You know, and this is something that in in lots of firms and especially ours, something that evolves over time. When I was running my firm solo, I used to joke that I never sent the same proposal twice because I was constantly tweaking. Every time I would go through a discovery call, every time I would go through sending a proposal, every time I would sign up a new client, I would find something about the way I had described a service or something about the way something was phrased in the service agreement or engagement letter that I didn't quite like or I wanted to update or I realized it wasn't clear. And so I would constantly be tweaking that. Now in our firm, we pretty much settled on we have two sets of services. We are as our name implies, we're primarily accounting and tax. On the tax side, we offer, of course, tax term preparation. We also offer tax projections later in the year. We work with a lot of small business owners, and either they don't have normal wage income and withholding or they do, but it's not going to be enough to cover all of their tax liability. And so we try to run projections before the end of the year, give them a good idea of what needs to be paid in before the end of the year so that come tax time when we're actually preparing the return, nobody's surprised. That's our goal. And that's pretty much what happens on the, tax side of things. On the accounting, side, our bay we have three tiers essentially of services. Most basic is we're doing fairly straightforward monthly bookkeeping. We have delivered financial statements. We've not delivered financial statements over time. We essentially let the client decide whether they want us to send those or not. We've realized that most clients, we send it to them. We never hear anything back. That said, we always include, whether you're bookkeeping or tax side, we always include unlimited communication in our proposals. Now to some that might sound scary, you think your phone's ringing off the hook or you think your email inbox is out of control from that. Actually, what we find with a lot of our clients is that we're begging them to ask us more questions. We're begging them to talk to us more. And so we tell them it's unlimited communications, be specifically to encourage them to bring those questions to us. Because it's always easier to answer whether something is a deductible expense or not when they're thinking about making, that transaction as opposed to six months later or as opposed to asking why it wasn't deductible on the tax return, those kinds of things. So, we we definitely wanna encourage communication. And then also on the tax side, if they run into any problems with the IRS or with the state revenue agency, we will look at the notice that they got. We'll read it with them. We'll explain to them what's going on. And if it's something that we can resolve with a notice or a phone with a with a notice response, a letter back or a phone call, we'll include that as well. But, you know, this is all stuff that we've just over time working with our clients realized that they either need or don't need, they're asking for or not asking for, and that's essentially where we're at now. Nice. And then maybe just talk me through for for folks that maybe are new to, like, package type service offerings. Maybe just talk about some of the benefits you've received and and how that ultimately helps you downstream when it comes to onboarding and delivering that work later on. So clients know what they know and they don't know what they don't know. And we're supposed to be the experts here. And so if a client comes to us and says, I need a tax return done. And we say, okay. Well, give us access to your QuickBooks Online and let's see how that looks. And they give us that access as part of discovery, and we're looking through the last couple months and the bank feeds are out of date. There are no bank reconciliations. There are negative balances on the balance sheet. Pretty quickly, we realized, no. Like, eventually, you need a tax return, but that's not what you need right now. Right? There are some other issues going on. So we definitely want to make sure that we are covering everything that needs to happen for a client. And so it's a balance between what clients are coming to us and asking for. And a lot of that gets built up as additional services or add on services or higher levels of our tiers, but a lot of it is just driven by what we know they need. And so when we are working with them and we realize, look, most of our clients coming to us, they're either going to have messy books or they're going to have books that were that they did themselves or they were working with, you know, a a much less experienced, much less effective, professional helping them. And so we're just going to go ahead and do some checks and do expect to do a little bit of cleanup work. So we just go ahead and include things like that into our packages. And so it's it's just developing over time, realizing the kinds of clients that you're attracting, the kind of work that you're consistently doing for them, and especially those out of scope things that just seem to pop up. Yeah, it's never fun to do out of scope work with one client, but you can either respond to that by saying, well, you know, that's just how it is, or you can respond to that by saying, this is obviously something that's needed in the marketplace, and so I'm gonna add that to this package that we're going to offer. And so a lot of those out of scope services, things that we hadn't anticipated before, a lot of those things are where we get the ideas for building up packages or entirely new services for our clients. Yeah. So you mentioned those packages, and I think when onboarding too, sometimes we we start to think about all that, things we're requesting from our clients as far as doing the work. How do you think about, you know, your billing and collections model, and how do you bake that into your onboarding? Do you require your clients to to pay upfront or put their payment information in front? And how do you kinda bake that into your process? Yeah. So we primarily work on roughly what what we think is a subscription model or as close to it as we think we can get in professional services. I I like to compare the way we work to something like Netflix for example. Netflix, they've got their entire library of movies and shows that you can watch. I think they've added some games, other stuff too. Right? But if Netflix has it, it's available. And as long as you're paying, right, Netflix will keep providing that content and that service to you. When you decide that you don't want to have any of that anymore or you don't want to pay them anymore and you stop paying them, well, then you don't get to watch their movies anymore. You don't get to watch their shows anymore. And so I like to think of our firm similarly to that. You want us to do some work for you and we're happy to do that work. And so we as part of our agreement, client signs up, they start paying us monthly starting with the day that they sign up. And as long as they keep paying us, then they stay a client of ours and we keep doing the work that we agreed to do for them. If they decide they don't want us to do that work anymore or if they want to take a break or if they want to move to a different firm or they shut down their business and so they don't need the the services that we're providing anymore, that's all fine. No feelings hurt, you know, no no love lost. But at the same time, we just, once they stop paying, they're not a client anymore. And so that's how we have operated that. Now there are obviously pros and cons of all of the different pricing and billing methods out there. But because we're doing it that way, and Ignition was you know, when I was start this is the way I've always run my firm is based on that monthly flat fee model. And when I started this back in 2018, it was pretty much either time based billing or something else. And that's the way a lot of accounting firms were operating. And Ignition was one of the few providers in the space that I found that made it relatively easy to do the kind of billing that I wanted to do, not tracking time and then sending invoices, but rather that consistent revenue stream from my clients. And so that's part of why I initially signed up with Ignition. It's part of why I've been, you know, a customer there for a long time, because it just makes it relatively easy to manage all of that in my firm. Nice. Yeah. And I think, you know, for firms that, you know, maybe we're not thinking about that billing model change, I think it really does starting that expectation upfront with your clients, and they know what's included and what's not, and being able to automate the billing. There's all those benefits that kinda come downstream. Jeremy, let's maybe talk about when things go wrong in onboarding. You know, how do you identify that whether it's an an issue with a client not being responsive or potentially might even be something in your team. Like, I guess, how do you think about and identify those those things that might be going wrong in onboarding and what kind of actions you might take to fix them? Yeah. No. That's that's a year round challenge. Right? That's always something that we're dealing with and and whether that's onboarding or any other service. Right? There are always gonna be a handful of clients that we know are gonna struggle to get us information on time. And so we do try to be proactive. In fact, in our firm, we create an entire position as client success manager, CSM, that, is responsible for maintaining the client relationship. Normally, that's done at the owner or partner level of the firm. And my business partner, Andrew McDonald, and I, we decided when we merged our firms together that we really wanted to take the focus off of ourselves when it comes to managing that client relationship, that we want our clients to feel like they have the support of our entire firm, not just one of us. And so creating that position that the sole responsibility of that position is to maintain the client relationship. So that means reading and responding to messages. Now none of them are technical experts. They are not bookkeepers or tax professionals. Rather, they are client service specialists. And so they don't know all of the answers. They come to us and get the answers. But here's the thing is because they're the ones responsible for the relationship, if we're dropping the ball and not getting them a response on time, they let us know. And at the same time, they're the ones holding the clients accountable. My business partner and I, we don't have to track all these deadlines. We don't have to go out and ask clients and beg them for those last few forms that we need from them. It's their job to do that. And it's a lot easier for them to maintain that relationship than it is for us and along with all of the other parts of the job that we have to manage. And so that's part of it. And the CSMs are always willing to reach out to the clients in whatever kind of way, makes sense. And so we try to keep our communication flowing through our portal. I mentioned earlier. That's what we use for that. But they're also happy to email directly, to pick up the phone, send a text message, or or call them. And, you know, sometimes it it just gets to the point to where we have to say that a client is what we call nonresponsive, and we've got an entire workflow for that as well, where we have some message templates that get a little bit more direct, a little bit more aggressive. And now it's no longer about, hey. We need this form from you. Now it's about, hey. We haven't heard from you. And if we keep not hearing from you, then we're gonna have to just stop services. Because I saw one of the questions in the chat is what if they start paying monthly, but they don't get us stuff? Well, you know, we're making a commitment. They they're making a commitment to us to pay us, right, and to get us information that we need to be able to do the work for them. We're making a commitment back to them to take that information and do the work for them. Well, if it's not possible for us to do the work, we don't want to be on the hook for do it for work not getting done. Right? And so we will reach a point in a client relationship where we say, if we're just not getting what we need and you're not communicating with us and we're not making sure that both sides are clear on the expectations here, then this relationship just doesn't work. And and we'll be happy to admit that if the situation gets that bad. We really don't wanna do that. We've only had to do that a handful of times over the last couple of years, and it's never fun when it does happen. In the meantime, if it's one or two documents, yeah, this is why we file extensions. This is why we have on hold statuses in our practice manager to make sure that everybody internally is clear on why a job isn't getting done on time. For example, it's because we're either waiting on something from a client, they're waiting on something from a third party of theirs. We and we try to just make sure that internally we're on the same page as far as why that's happening. At some point, you know, you you you can't force a client to give you everything you need, But we do try to proactively stay ahead of that. We do have people in our firm who specialize in communicating with our clients and making sure that they're clear on what we need from them. Yes. No. Some really good tips there. I think that one that you mentioned at the front there of the that client success manager having someone outside of the partner owner role that's managing that relationship were really powerful, especially if you are looking to grow and then ultimately creates that that really strong client experience. And then, you know, I have a lot of, like, there around. And it always leaves us to where if the if the client relationship really is if there's some frustration, if, you know, there's some hard feelings going on there, it reserves us to where we can come in, right, at the end of that process and try to salvage the relationship rather than us getting involved too early and being the reason, you know, that the relationship went sideways. Yeah. Yes. And that other piece of, you know, having that that system in place for something does go wrong, what what does that look like? You know, we didn't quite get to off boarding, but, know, there could be a a flow there too where someone does get get off ported as a client, and and it might be better overall for you and your team moving forward to take those steps when needed. Would love to go back to the poll now. For you guys on the the webinar today, we'd love to know where does client onboarding slow down most. So is that chasing details across inboxes, missing access or unclear scope, repeated questions, hand off between sales and delivery? Alright. Looking at this. Yes. Looking like chasing details across inbox and spreadsheets is definitely the strongest one there. That's something we've definitely worked on in our firm. And, you know, when you're doing both tax and accounting work, it it can be easy to because tax documents, those are PDFs most of the time. They just get uploaded into a portal. Accounting, now you've got spreadsheets and invoices and receipts and some clients are stuck in their old ways of emailing a lot of that in. Some clients wanna they don't wanna upload that into a portal. Sometimes it's spreadsheets and we have a lot of different programs now. So for example, I mentioned Google Workspace. It's really easy to create what, Google's version of Excel, Google Sheet, create a spreadsheet there, and then you just share it with somebody. Well, you know, if they share that with our firm, then is that really a file that we keep in the portal? Is that a file that we keep in Google where, you know, that's its native file format? So, you know, it's definitely there's definitely all this technology, especially the collaborative technology, is great. There's a lot of benefits to it. It can also complicate a lot of these questions and and how we deal with that kind of information flow in the firm. So as we mentioned before, Ignition can help in a few components here. So, you know, ultimately, keeping that scope billing and payments kind of upfront. So as Jeremy mentioned, you know, his firm's really embraced kind of that subscription model. So being clear on what's included and not included upfront and then having that client kind of on auto billing and payments is really kind of that way to kinda keep those things in sync moving forward. We think about tech stack as well too. So how do we kinda have different technology potentially throughout this? So as we talked before, Ignition can either integrate into some of these tools or we've got some of that built in as well. And then we think about kind of some form requests too. Ignition does have some form functionality too. So if we think about an onboarding form of capturing some of that information, we can really kind of include that information in there upfront too. Let's kinda run through these here and would love to know your advice, Jeremy. You know, if we think about some of these actionable things that firms could look at going into the new year, where would where would you kinda start if if, or where are you even starting? And, you know, you mentioned that constant improvement process. So, what what would be your recommendation to the folks on the webinar today? Yeah. We and and some of this actually happens back in discovery, which if if you don't know what I mean by that. So when when a when someone is interested in working with our firm, whether that is through a referral or through direct contact with us or, through our website and our social media, ultimately, we're gonna ask them to go to our website and fill out an intake form. And from that, we get a little bit of information about them, but it's just what they're typing into the boxes. Right? So, you know, the the the actual accuracy of that information might be a little dubious. So at that point, based on that, we decide whether this could even possibly be a good fit or not. Because some of the things we're asking them about is whether or not they would even fit in with our firm in terms of things like niche, size of the business, you know, what they what kind of services they're actually looking for. So at that point, if we want to go forward with them, we ask them to schedule a discovery call, and then we also ask them for access to their bookkeeping and to upload a copy of the tax return if if they're interested in tax services. So, you know, we try to get as much information during that discovery process as possible, but it's always gonna be partial. There's always gonna be more information even once they have signed on as a client. So we do as part of that onboarding process, we do send them questionnaires. One in particular that's asking them for a lot of the information that, for example, wouldn't actually show up on a tax return, but it would still be relevant to understanding them, their business, their financial lives, those sorts of things that that we're also not gonna get just having a conversation with them during discovery. So definitely, you know, as far as standardizing what kind of information you're actually looking for from them and that you're asking for from them, you know, start and and, again, this is something you kind of figure out for yourself over time. What information do you need in order to determine whether you want to work with this prospect, you know, this prospective client and that's all part of discovery. And then what do you need to actually start doing work for them once they've signed up? And that's what it needs to happen during onboarding. You need information for both, but it doesn't have to be the same information. So try to think about what you need from your prospects and from your clients and split it up into those, two different buckets and then start building those information requests based on, those two different buckets. And, of course, you know, templates is a big part of that when it comes to, the information that you're asking for. Some of that, we're sending them a message and in the portal once they've signed up as a client and asking them to upload stuff. Some of that is gonna be an actual questionnaire form that they're filling out. And then the other thing is one of the role one of the tasks that our CSM has is to review once the prospect has signed up and is now an actual client is to review the proposal that they signed up for. And so one of the integrations that we use with Ignition, I mentioned Google Workspace earlier, is that it will save a copy of that proposal into a folder in our Google Drive and that's the file system that Google Workspace has. And that's accessible by all of our staff. So the CSM can go look in that folder generated for that new client. They can open up that proposal. They can look at the list of services, and then they can start adding that information to the client's account in our portal so that everybody you don't have to go to the proposal to figure out what they signed up for. Now it's just in our system. And so if there's ever a question of, did we agree to do this for them? When did we say we were going to get their bookkeeping done each month? All of that is just in our practice management system already. Nice. Really kinda helpful there. And then I think something important there, you mentioned all all this information gathering you do before they even become a client. How do you handle do you ever get pushback from clients of, hey. I don't know if I wanna share that information too. Why do you need to get access to my QuickBooks? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Gotta handle those objections. Yeah. Absolutely. We I mean, a good case in point about six months ago, had a prospect that was interested in in tax and accounting services. And so naturally, we asked them for them to upload a copy of their tax return and did push back and actually uploaded a copy of a nondisclosure agreement, an NDA, and wanted us to sign that. And so we checked with our, insurance provider. My business partner called the firm's attorney. It was a five minute phone call. Attorney said, yeah. Whatever. Sign it. You know? It it it didn't feel, you know, too too aggressive of an ask. I mean, after all, we're dealing you know, the nature of our business is we're dealing with a lot of sensitive and what could be personal information, for our clients. And so on one hand, we can say, yes, it's necessary that you give us this information so that we can decide whether we wanna work with you and once we start working with you so that we have all information we need to do that work. But then on the other hand, I don't think it's unreasonable when a prospect does say, yeah. That's kind of personal. Am I sure I can trust you with that? We we can't just assume that because we're an accounting firm and we do this for lots of clients, we can't assume that every prospect is gonna come to us with that same level of trust as someone that has been a client for years and is happy to just upload whatever we ask them to into the portal. And so sometimes there's gonna be a little give and take. And it comes down to more of just a judgment call and sort of the tone of that request. They were very polite, very respectful about how they asked for that, And so we were happy to oblige. And but, you know, we did that after we checked on our end. Right? You know, we got advice of counsel, advice for our e and o insurance, and everybody told us basically, yeah, this is fine. Go ahead and do it. And so, you know, that's always what I'd recommend. Whenever it comes to those sorts of questions of I'm not sure if I should do this or can do this, the best place to go is always your insurance provider. Nice. Love that. Seeking the professional help where you can always better than Absolutely. A Google or a chat GPT response these days. Exactly. Exactly. Well, there's There is a place for those tools, but if something happens and our firm is on the wrong end of a lawsuit, I'm not expecting Chad GPT to help us out much there. Yeah. Alrighty. I do wanna thank you, Jeremy, for for joining us today and and kinda sharing those insights. I think just kinda recapping some of those actual points, you know, thinking about how you standardize that that kickoff. So Jeremy talked about the various different templates he has in his different systems. So based on the type of services they end up taking up, you can really kind of use that and then make sure those are reusable. And then thinking about that kickoff, so as Jeremy mentioned before, as a clear understanding of when he gets that proposal signed, his team can kinda take that document and run with it so they know, hey. We're gonna prepare the books by the fourteenth day of the month. We're gonna do bookkeeping for x number of bank accounts, all of those clear kinda nitty gritty points. Make sure that everybody's on the same page from the client, the team, to kinda keep that smooth relationship moving forward. I am gonna hand it over to my colleague, Connor, who's gonna walk us through a bit of a demo on how this can take place within Ignition. And so I will pop it over to you, Connor. Thank you so much. Assuming you can hear me okay, Ryan, on your end? Beautiful. I'm going to share my screen. Just stand by for one moment here. Okay. Here we go. So welcome, everybody. Let's let's get down and dirty into the weeds of of the tech. We all love learning new tech, don't we? But the reality is bringing on a new software or potentially changing softwares is a big is a big lift. And and the change management process is never fun. It's always scary. So understanding the differences in the different technologies in the accounting and tax and bookkeeping eco ecosystem that we operate in is is important. So why don't we go through a couple real life situations that we discussed today, and let's see how Ignition might compare to your current process when it comes to taking a client from intake to sign to signed off and to paid. So we'll do the lead to cash process here, and we'll go into a renewal and a one off charge and go through some common situations. So what you're looking at on the home page here is some basic revenue reporting on what has been collected from a payments perspective, any failed credit cards or expiring payment methods that are on file that we can get ahead of, and some CRM light functionality and reporting surrounding conversion rates around deals that are in your sales pipeline. So first thing that I'll point out is when you open up an Ignition account, it already comes prepopulated with an industry standard service library. So whether you are in Canada, I know we have a lot of Canadian firms on this call, or The United States, you'll have a service library and terms template added into your Ignition account based on your geographic location. So if you're looking to get an account that's right out of the box, this will come prepopulated for you. The next thing you'll see here is the intake form that we had discussed earlier. So we can go ahead and create a number of intake forms that then could just be copy and pasted and hyperlinked onto your website. You could email this to a referral if you get a referral where where we will capture client information and details so you can qualify the lead. And from there, if you are using Ignition's deals pipeline, once the client fills out the form, they will automatically be created as a deal for you to manage. So recent use case for some firms that we are working with is what are the insights in terms of how often are we converting these leads, how much revenue is in open pipeline. So if you're looking to get a bit more of an understanding on what your average deal size is, how many leads you have in in stage, and how quickly are we closing these, then this could be a good tool for you too. So let's say that we're ready to onboard the client. We can do this a couple ways, right, from the deal tile, or we can click on create new in the top left, and we can just quickly create a new proposal. So client comes in the door, in person, virtually. We have a number of prebuilt templates for you that are out of the box ranging from bookkeeping, tax, compliance, you name it. These are all ready to go for you to help you price and package your services and set the scope of work clearly. So client fills out the form. We have a quick meeting, and I'm ready to get a contract in front of them. Now ask yourself how quickly after the discovery call when your client's ready to move forward is a proposal or contract in their inbox, and how quickly are we collecting that first payment? It varies for different firms, but imagine your contract is in the client's inbox within thirty minutes to one hour as a new standard. This is how that can be accomplished with Ignition. We select the template. We click on use template. Now from here, it's gonna be a very quick eight step process where we are just selecting the client. If we need an additional signatory, for example, two business partners, husband, wife, when we want the contract to start, right, when they sign on a specific date, and if we wanna set a term on the contract. So right now, we're gonna have a d default set to twelve months so that in twelve months, I'll have an annual renewal process. So Ignition will alert and remind me that this client is up for an annual review and likely a price increase. So step two is going to be, is this client receiving the standard three tiered pricing package I've built out, or do we need to, edit the scope of work and get a little bit more granular to customize the scope with the client based on the conversation that we've had? If we do, we can update that scope of work. I can change the price around. If we need to add in let's just say we're gonna be doing this client's tax return as well. I'm going to add in a one off service that we're gonna is gonna be billed upon completion. And let me add in a ten forty individual return. Now the purpose of me showing you this is all of your payments can be collected, and you can collect a payment method upfront for the work that you're doing even if you're not collecting at the beginning of the contract so that you're not chasing any accounts receivables after April 15, for example, or for the Canadian deadlines that right when that tax return is filed, we are collecting right away. And instead of setting a fixed price, let's just set a minimum price, and I'll put this minimum price at $300. And you can see on the right hand side here, the billing mode is manual, which means your team is gonna be given a collections report, and we're gonna bill for this manually based on the time and material or the variable amount. And it's gonna be billed upon completion versus all of the automatic billing that goes out at the end of the month or on a specific date. So let's set up, you know what? I wanna collect on the last day of every month, the thirtieth of the month. And let's change that actually to the last day of the month. So the billing is gonna repeat for a fixed amount at this point. If you're using some tools that Ignition directly integrates with, like a practice management system like Carbon or FinancialSense, additionally, we integrate with CCH Access, Thomson Reuters, Ultratex, Practice CS. Even with some Zapier creations, we can execute transferring data into your practice management tool. So for example here, we are mapping services and ignition to the work items in Carbon and assigning it to an employee to automate the tasks. Next, we will keep payments turned on. I'm gonna leave credit card on, ACH on. And from here, we move on to terms. We have our terms template set up. This is our legalese. Any additional documents you need, for example, power of attorney disclosure agreement, NDA, we're getting all of our signatures and initials signed off in one workflow instead of sending multiple DocuSigns that execute reminders. We're getting this all done under one roof. So we're consolidating what typically is fragmented processes around PDF, Adobe Sign, sending a QuickBooks or a Xero ACH authorization form, plugging it into your billing system. All of those steps that take up administrative work are now removed. And let's see what it looks like. So there is no a client portal. This is a frictionless experience for your client, keeping it very professional where we are sending an email. It has your branding, signature requested from your business, and email copy. So why don't we go ahead and send this, and let's see what it looks like for the client. Now that took me about five minutes as I was also explaining how the functionality worked. So what what does that mean to you if if you can get this proposal out the door at this speed at scale where you still get to customize it per client, but the backbone and the template is already there. So now we can execute. What does your client see? They see a video if you'd like to include a video, a quick note from your client. If you'd like to include a brochure or a PDF or any type of deliverable, you can include a document, and Ignition does build our clients custom brochures as part of signing up. Three options. We're looking at a three tiered pricing package where I'm offering, hey. Just your monthly essentials to cover your bases, but in the middle tier, I'm recommending we do quarterly advisory. So now what we're doing is we are tacking on additional services to let our clients know, hey. There's additional revenue opportunities, but value we can provide. One cool idea that a few of my clients did this year was they added on audit protection as an optional add on for a $150, and they saw a few thousand extra dollars in revenue coming. So once the client selects the package now what does the scope of work? We talked about, like, earlier in the call today. Anytime a client asks for additional services, are we billing for that? When they ask you for a quick question or send you an email, are we capturing for the out of scope work that occurs? Any add ons? Here's the pricing schedule. So we're gonna charge at a fixed rate 770 doll dollars every month. Or if it's tax service, so if we go back and we select the tax service and we go to pricing, you can see that the prices are to be confirmed, and we're gonna be billing upon completion for the work. Now enter in our payment method, credit card, or ACH for in Canada pre authorized debit. We can surcharge and pass over the credit card fee, and then we'll sign off on the engagement letter. Additional documents, we'll sign off here. And Bob's your uncle. Voila. The proposal is signed. Both parties will be emailed a copy of the signed agreement. If you're using Google Workspace like Jeremy is, then we can set up that workflow so that this contract is then automatically created in the secure internal team's document management portal for them. So what happens next? We can schedule a meeting. You can put a hyperlink here. You can put the link to for them to sign up for your portal. So if you're like Jeremy and using TaxDome, register for your account here. Helpful resources. And that is how we effectively collect the client's payment method up on file so that we are running a zero AR firm. So the billing, therefore, if it's at a fixed rate in that case, is then gonna be automated every single month. So let's take a look at a recurring billing schedule that we have set up here. So we're looking at okay. I am collecting $750 from this client every single month. The billing schedule is live and active, and it collects on the fifteenth. And this is hands off. Right now, this account is connected to a QuickBooks Online Ledger. So I can see every single month on the fifteenth, Ignition is creating an invoice in QuickBooks, marking it as paid, and dispersing the funds into your business's bank account. So this is what makes the administrative burden for your firm completely removed, and we can go right in to the the ledger and into your invoice. So imagine migrating all of your recurring bookkeeping or your recurring clients, whether they're monthly or quarterly, and it's just hands off where the invoicing is handled automatically. Ignition marks them as paid in your ledger if you're using zero or digits or QuickBooks. So what about all of our tax work or all of the, you know, services that are billed off variable amounts, hourly billing, milestone billing, deposit retainer, you name it? What we do is we will go into a revenue tab, and we'll see a billing report where we can look at all of our unbilled work, which is basically prebuilt invoices that allow you to collect for your clients upon completion of the work. So I think we use this client. Let's say client is the name, and it's time to collect for this client. So we filed the tax return or the work's complete, but we don't know the amount. It's based off time. We click invoice now, and we are going to enter in the final price, $500, or the number of hours. We have the payment method on file. So instead of sending this client just an invoice through Ignition with a pay now link, I'm gonna charge the client on file. And we click next, and we click collect. So I'm not waiting to collect after I've completed this client's tax return. I'm not reminding them to pay the invoice. I'm simply billing them, and I set up a five day collection delay. So I'm charging gonna charge their credit card on file five days from now, but I'm sending them the bill now. What happens year over year when we need to renew our clients? We are heading into renewal season November, December. Very busy here at Ignition. Let's take a look at a very quick way for you to get a quick win and reduce any type of price increase or renewal that typically is accomplished going through clients one by one. Let's look at all of our accepted engagements here or all of our contracts that are ending soon. So I'm looking at all of the contracts that are ending soon. We could also filter per per cohort. So we could filter our clients based off service, and we could say, okay. Let's collect all of our compliance accounts. Let's collect all of our business clients and renew these contracts in bulk. So for the sake of let's take all the clients that are ending soon and click on renew. So we're gonna renew these proposals in bulk, and let's also apply a price increase across the board. Let's do 6%, and let's round up to the nearest dollar so that it's gonna take last year's original revenue of roughly $400,000. And just like that, we have a quick win of $24,000. Now we know that in North America and especially The United States, 55 percent of firms are increasing their price between five to 7% year over year. So if you are not increasing your prices year over year for any of the services you're doing, then you are statistically falling behind when it comes to benchmark pricing in your market. And let's create the proposals. What am I doing here? All I'm doing is recreating 56 of these contracts, and we're duplicating it, bumping the dates up for the next twelve month term, and we can view the proposals. Now depending on how your firm is set up from a standardization standpoint, these will all be put into a draft status. So if you need to go through and have a partner review review step or you wanna go in one by one to adjust the price, then you have that ability. This will not be sent out automatically. There's still a human in the loop checkpoint. So let's go through, click all 50, and let's click send. And there we go. We've just effectively accomplished doing renewals for a a cohort of clients, and it's in a waiting now. So anytime you need an additional service added to a client's contract, then we can add additional recurring work. We can send onetime invoices where the client can pay the invoice themselves. Ignition has payment plans set up if clients aren't able to pay the full amount of their tax return, for example. We are launching in person payments and payments portal. So Ignition is a revenue engine that has the ability to collect and help you get paid and collect payment from your client in any way, shape, and form. So it's a great great tool to hit your wagon to right now. Most firms are learning that, yes, we need a practice management system. We need our connected ledger, our tax software. And, yes, you can accomplish billing and client engagement through those tools. But, really, how robust is it? And that is the the dance that we that we do to understand really the differences between all the softwares that we see in the space. So I hope this was helpful. There is more features and functionality to Ignition. But as a whole, if you're looking to just get paid easier, get paid faster, and avoid the headache of chasing down the money that you're owed, then I would definitely recommend scheduling a demo, taking advantage of the fourteen day free trial. There is no credit card required in order to get into the system and play around. And then if you're in The United States and stay tuned in Canada, but if you're looking to compare your prices and understand, hey. Am I underselling or overcharging? Ignition is SOC two type two compliant. We do have an AI pricing tool that can tap into anonymous billing data amongst Ignition accounts, and we can show you a price range if we think you are underselling or overcharging. So we can use your geographic location, find, in this case, 34 comparable businesses and services in my area. So this could help you close more deals. This can help you raise your prices and be be confident raising your prices and also help you shift business models if you're thinking of transitioning from, you know, the traditional hourly rate to a fixed or flat rate. So lots of value in the ignition system. Connect your AI tool through our MCP as well. I could go on for days. But for the sake of everyone's time, I'm gonna stop there, say thank you very much for attending. I hope this was valuable. Do not hesitate to reach out if you have questions, and we'd be happy to to learn more. Thanks so much, and let's call it there.