Watch this exclusive session to discover how Ignition’s latest product releases can ignite your firm’s growth by helping you price smarter and get paid faster.
From practical AI embedded directly into your pricing and proposal workflows through to smoother client onboarding and easier ways to get paid for out-of-scope work, we’ll dive into this year’s hottest features and reveal what’s coming next.
Whether you’re a current Ignition customer or thinking about joining us, this is your chance to learn how to make the most of these updates based on first-hand customer experiences.
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Revenue is leaking from your firm, and you can't see where. It's not a growth problem. It's a broken revenue process. Work is manual. Revenue is missed, and growth stalls. Proposals, billing, payments, workflows, they're all disconnected. But there's an easy fix that sees firms grow revenue twenty four percent within twelve months. Meet Ignition, the platform that ignites your firm's revenue engine so you can sell, bill, and get paid faster. Win clients with professional proposals created in minutes. Upsell effortlessly with service packages and add ons and never undervalue your work. Use AI powered pricing insights and earn up to forty percent more revenue from existing work. Automate billing from day one. However you bill, it just works. Spoke changes? Bill instantly so no revenue slips through the cracks. Capture payment details upfront. With ninety one percent of payments in Ignition collected automatically, firms get predictable cash flow and peace of mind. Connect Ignition to your existing tech stack and let automation handle the rest. Join over eighty five hundred businesses already running on Ignition and scale faster with revenue that runs itself. It all starts with Ignition. Hello, everyone, and welcome to our twenty twenty six product update webinar. It's been a huge year for product innovation here at Ignition, especially when the AI transformation that is undertaking how firms operate here today. We wanna go through exactly how the accounting per and professional services firms of today aren't just fighting capacity challenges, but they're fighting profitability pressure, workflow inefficiency, and cash flow delays all at once. With that, we're gonna show you exactly how our latest innovations here are helping firms solve for all three of those issues in one place. I'm super excited to have you here today. Whether you're new to Ignition or you're already a customer, there's gonna be a lot to learn from our expert panel. And just a quick note as well before we begin today, this will be recorded and sent out to all attendees and anyone who was unable to attend live at a later date also. We're gonna go ahead and we will kick things off with some introductions. So my name is Brad Wyler. I will be your host here today, and I am a real regional sales manager for Ignition. We also have Tammy Hahn, who is our senior vice president of product here at Ignition as well. Ryan Embry, our director of partnerships at Ignition, and Alnisha Jones, who is an Ignition customer and founder of ASC Group, an in a New Jersey based accounting tax and advisory firm. And she combines deep industry expertise with a modern approach to accounting and technology. Super thrilled to have all three of you joining me here today. Now going through an agenda. Today, we're gonna cover off our latest features that have been released within Ignition, not only igniting your growth and efficiency for cash flow all in one place, but some new ways to also save time using AI. We know that this is becoming ever more important to adapt within your practice, your firm, your professional services agencies to make sure you're getting paid faster and eliminating time spent on mundane room, manual admin. We'll also hear directly from Alneeshia on how she has scaled her business with Ignition and some real life examples of how she's utilizing some of these different features that you will see today. With that, I'm gonna pass things over to Tammy to get us started. Awesome. Thanks, Brad. So quick context on who we are for anyone that's joining for the first time. So Ignition has been around for twelve years. Today, we're the platform that automates proposals, billing, payments, and workflows for service based businesses all in one place now powered by AI. So why we exist is pretty simple. It's to save you time. It's to make you money, and to get you paid what you're worth on time every time. So over eighty five hundred firms run on Ignition today from solo bookkeepers to top one hundred accounting firms to consultants and agencies. And what we've consistently heard from every one of them is the same. The firms that win are the ones that treat revenue operations as a system, not a series of disconnected tools. So that's the problem that we solve. Next slide, please. One more. Thank you. So what should you expect from Ignition this year? So we have four focus areas that's really shaping how we're investing, and they all ladder up to really one vision, building the AI powered revenue platform for service businesses. From lead to renewal, we're automating your revenue engine so that you can spend time with your clients and not on admin. So our first pillar is AI where it matters. For us, that means AI doing really two jobs. First, taking admin off your plate. So drafting proposals, chasing invoices, etcetera. You'll see that later on in this webinar with AI proposal creation and a little bit about our MCP. And number two, where AI matters is surfacing insights you couldn't easily get to on your own. So the kind that grow revenue and lift profitability for your business. So we'll talk more about that later with our enhancements to AI price insights. Our investment in AI revolves around saving you time or making you money. It's not AI for the sake of AI. Our second focus area is to further open up our platform. So your data, your workflows, they shouldn't just be locked inside of Ignition. So we'll talk a little bit more about our reporting API and advanced reporting so that you can run Ignition data with the tools you already use to run your firm, and we can pull in the signals we need to give you smarter recommendations back. Our third pillar is providing you more ways to capture revenue. So the shape of how firms charge clients is changing very fast, and Ignition really needs to flex with it. So flexible billing like milestone and retainer, easier invoicing for scope changes and change orders, simpler client payment experiences with the payment portal and guest checkout, just different ways to bill, but all with the same outcome of getting you paid every time. Finally, our fourth pillar is to help firms as they're scaling. So Ignition runs the gamut from solopreneur to top one hundred firm. And as you grow, the platform has to grow with you. We're investing in more granular permissions and roles so the right people see the right things and can do the right things. We have better support for multi office firms and multi entity clients, so the complexity inside your firm doesn't slow you down. So underneath all of this, one principle under underlines everything. Every feature we ship should earn its place by saving you time, growing your revenue, or getting cash faster in the door. And that's the bar. Before we dive in, we'd love to hear from you. Brianna, can we maybe launch the poll? Give everyone a couple seconds to answer that. Seeing a lot of changes in there, a lot of things that are top of mind for everyone at their practices. Okay. We'll move on to the next stop. So let's kick off with this year's top releases to help make you more money and effectively become more profitable. When it comes to that, Ignition is really here to help you spark revenue. Now one thing that we wanna make sure that you understand is if you are lacking confidence in your pricing and raising pricing, we are here to help you with that. Ignition customers who increases prices over you while utilizing our AI powered price insights earned on average forty percent more revenue on the services that they reviewed. Now with that being said, my big question I have for you here is what would you do with forty percent more revenue just by clicking a button? Now, Brianna, I'm gonna get you to launch a poll here as well because I'd love to hear, you know, a little bit more about if you're looking to increase pricing and effectively if that's something that is top of mind for each and every person who is on this webinar. Alright. Let's dive into pricing insights. So within Ignition, you have AI powered price insights. What AI powered price insights is designed to do is to give you tailored pricing suggestions for your services built on real proposal data. This is gonna help you ensure you're not only pricing effectively, but if you're maybe undercharging, you're getting that clarity on how much you should be raising prices year over year based on real life proposal data and what we have in our system to ensure you effectively are making that revenue that you should be that you might be leaving on the table. As mentioned before, this is effectively helping customers find an average of forty percent non realized revenue that they should be making that we can help you recapture as you continue to scale your firm within your practice as well. Now, Alnisha, I'd I'd love to know how you're approaching pricing within your firm and how you might be using AI price insights to gain some more confidence as well. Yeah. So we we price, based on value. And I think as accountants, sometimes we undervalue the service we provide and the comfort level we provide our clients. There's not a whole lot of professions where people come to us because they literally fear, a government agency will drag them out of their homes and arrest them. But that's what our clients fear. Our clients fear they'll mess up their accounting, they'll mess up their taxes, and then they're going to go to jail. Like, we provide a huge level of comfort for them, but sometimes we, sort of put ourselves in a place where we say, well, I'm just putting numbers into a software or I'm just putting numbers on a tax return, and we do so much more than that. And I think the pricing insights helps you to really understand and convey that value to your client. I also think that accountants, although we talk about money a lot, sometimes we can be a little shy with pricing. And we don't wanna talk to our colleagues and say, oh, this is what I'm charging because we don't want people to judge us. So if you don't wanna have to go back and forth with your colleagues and perhaps share your pricing, I think this is a fantastic tool to be able to get some additional insight very, very quickly too, without having to ask a bunch of people. Now for us in particular where this comes into play, we do have starting prices, and we publish our starting prices right on our website. But we adjust those prices based on complexity. So to be able to put together a proposal and then provide some additional information about the complexity we know about the project, that helps us to ensure that we are pricing, individually based on the complexity we expect for the client. And sometimes that's an adjustment up and sometimes it's down, but it's sort of like having a second set of eyes. And it means that I don't have to be directly involved with every single proposal that goes out the door. So I find it very helpful for, existing services, but adjustments for complexity, but also super helpful for new services as well. That's awesome. I really appreciate the context and how you're using that too. Definitely a great great use of it. Now with this, this is available to all eligible customers in Australia and US. Now inside of your Ignition instance, you do get three price insights for free, and thereafter, that is a purchase of an annual add on. Now you can see here, here's a quaff here is a quote as well, from Alnisha herself, which which you just heard in live time as well. But effectively, it's a great way to make an instant profitability boost by utilizing the surface, which is great. Now I'm gonna go ahead and actually demo this live time for you. So I'm gonna pivot really quickly here, and I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen inside of here. So I'm gonna share my tab instead, which is taking you directly to the Ignition platform. So inside of this, you're gonna effectively to utilize pricing insights and building out your proposals. I'm gonna walk you through that whole flow as just how easy it is to pressure test your pricing, ensure that everything is automated for you from the point of onboarding through to payment, and also collecting additional documentation you might require from a client such as a a seventy two sixteen form here in the US or perhaps it's a it's a consent form, etcetera. So you can go into create new and hit proposal. That's gonna automatically generate your new proposal for you. Within this, you're gonna see that you have the ability to choose templates. Now you can create and save your own templates at your practice, or you can effectively utilize our provided templates that we have inside of Ignition with which have suggested scopes and some guiding on pricing if you are just getting started or perhaps you wanna introduce new services. I'm gonna go ahead and click utilize template. From there, I can then choose exactly who I wanna send this out to. So I can feed in clientele directly from my ledger if I am connecting QuickBooks Xero, you know, and Thomson Reuters or CCH. Or in this case, I'm just gonna go ahead and utilize a, satirical client. Now from there, I can go into my services, which has already been put inside of here. I wanna analyze my price because perhaps it has been a little while since I've effectively ran a pricing upgrade. I can go and click analyze price. I can effectively select the service I wanna do it to. And to Anisha's point, you can add additional context that might affect their price as well, aka a VIP client, cost sensitive client, or perhaps they haven't filed in a couple of years and you're going to be doing multiple multiple filings for them. You can then click get price insights, which will then run a real diagnostic in live time for you here as well, which will then tell you exactly where you fall within the pricing, standardized pricing, or comprehensive services. It's gonna give you the full breakdown of why you should effectively either update your pricing or, leave them where they're at. Now with this, I'm gonna go ahead and click adjust. I'm gonna apply the price increase automatically here. Now from that point, I can then click next. I can automate my direct, job titles and job flows into places like Carbon, FinancialSense, all within Ignition and assign jobs to others that will be within my firm that will get automatically prompted once this has been signed. You can capture payment all in one place by way of credit card or direct ACH or preauthorized debit transfer. Include an automated engagement letter so that way you're doing any manual admin in creating these for moving things forward. And now brand new for Ignition this year, you can actually include additional documentation for your client to sign all in one place rather than sending additional documentation outside of Ignition or otherwise. And from there, you would just create a presentation view which would wrap everything up with a nice bow and effectively be able to send it back to your clientele. Now effectively with that, that demo is a little bit on how Ignition works within the flow overall and how you can utilize pricing insights to give you the confidence you need and boost that revenue by up to forty percent in quick in quick fashion. With that, I'm gonna pass things over to Ryan to talk a little bit more about our next feature. Great. So I've been with Ignition, over eleven years, and I think I've gotten to see the the real impact that Ignition makes in our customers. They really value the dataset and the insights they get from an Ignition. But I would admit, you know, we haven't made that data so easy for you to access over the years, and there's maybe certain data that you haven't been able to see. Really excited to announce that in the coming months, we'll be launching our advanced reporting, which will basically give you brand new insights into things all around your revenue. So if you go to the next slide here, Brad, we can show a couple examples of what these advanced reports might look like. So for example, you can actually dig in and look at your revenue and how that's forecasted over the span of the year. You can drill in and see the difference between existing revenue versus net new, and have all of these insights that you might have not had before. You'll show the go to the next slide, Brad. You can see an additional report. So when we launch this, we'll give you roughly ten net new reports that will break down different information about your revenue and your billing data. It will also give you some flexibility to drill down a little bit deeper. So what you're seeing, for example, here is a breakdown of all of the total revenue across my client base. Maybe I do wanna filter that down by partner or manager, and maybe segment out recurring versus nonrecurring work. So we're really excited to give you better access to your data to really help you make those better decisions on how you can grow your revenue. Additionally, another request we've heard from a lot of you over the years is that you'd love to get the data outside of Ignition and potentially put that a business intelligence tool. So what we've now un unlocked as well is our reporting API, which would basically allow you to hook Ignition up to a third party system to get that revenue data out to build your own reports. Again, some of you might not be familiar with APIs, so that might not be relevant to you. But I think in a world of AI where this is all becoming much easier to access APIs and data, really, could be important to you in the future when you think about how you're getting those insights out of Ignition. And if you go to the next slide here, you can see a, an early kinda testimonial here. So we've we've given access to Justin Kern, who's one of our advocates at Ignition of Dark Horse CPAs, and he's already been able to unlock some new visibility in his firm to help them make those better decisions based on the data coming out of Ignition. So we'll show a little bit more later on about how you can get the data out into other systems as well too. But at this point, I'll hand it back over to you, Brad. Yeah. Perfect. Now there's a lot of things we've already covered, but there's no shortage of things still to come. With that, I'm curious for everyone who is in attendance here. Tell us in the chat which one of these features so far has actually, excited you most and what you were looking forward to utilizing your firm. We'd love to hear your feedback on what we've already shown. And, Alnisha, I wanted to ask you a question too. Like, I'm curious within your practice, how do you use the dashboards that are already available in Ignition to help improve some visibility across your business, if you wouldn't mind? Yeah. So since we send all of our proposals through Ignition, it's really helpful to be able to see sort of what's all in one page. Right? I am a like the fewer the clicks, the better kind of girl. So all on one page, we can currently see, what's outstanding and what our numbers look like compared to the previous year. We can see, the scope of, like, what we've offered in proposals and, like, what are we seeing in the monthly billing, what services are recurring. Now I am very excited for advanced reporting because there are things that I would love to see more of. Somebody was saying in the chat they do three tier, proposals. We do similar. And I would love to see, like, what people add on most frequently because maybe that's something that we should just go ahead and put in proposals. We love add ons around here, because we're not salespeople. We're just accountants. So, you know, accountants don't like asking for more money. So having people upsell themselves is fantastic. I'd love to see more about what people are adding on to their proposals. Another thing I find really helpful in the dashboard, and it helped us change how we do proposals, was how long the proposals are outstanding. And that determined when we would make our proposals auto expire. So sometimes we'll offer something, complimentary if you accept this proposal in x number of days, and we found that that helped people to make a decision a little bit quicker oftentimes. So, yes, we use those to sort of figure out what we should be offering more of, perhaps less of, and how quickly we should try to get clients to accept, proposals. But seeing it all in one place, seeing if there's an issue with payments, as soon as you log in, very, very helpful, to not have to look in a bunch of different places. Yeah. That's awesome. Helping you move with velocity, but also find some additional revenue based on trends. Love that. Okay. Let's jump into sparking some efficiency. We really wanna look here at some AI features that can help eliminate all the admin that is currently be done being done within the firm that effectively everyone hates doing. Now with that, we we know how much manual work still exists within firms, and we wanna see how AI can effectively and drastically reduce the time you're spending on this. We could effectively give you eighteen hours per week back on average by utilizing Ignition, and customers are saving that not only when they're engaging clients, but managing scope changes, billing, collecting payments, and reconciling invoices. With AI entering the picture and us continuing to build out with the AI narrative, there's gonna be ways we can unlock even more time savings than the usual within the Ignition platform, and we're excited to dive into that a little bit more. But I'm gonna launch a poll here really quickly before we hand over to Tammy to walk us through some of these additional features that will help you eliminate this admin. So we'll launch the poll now. How comfortable are you using AI tools? K. Seemed a pretty good split between very comfortable and somewhat comfortable. I'm I'm glad to see that that already and people having some some moderate level of comfortability and some experts here as well using AI every day. I'm definitely guilty of that. I probably use it more than more than I should. But either way, it's getting better and better every single day too. Okay. Let's go ahead. And, Tammy, I'll pass things over to you here to to kick us off with, with some additional pieces. Yeah. Awesome. But, yeah, I love seeing that pull. More people using AI and getting much more common. Our next investment is one I'm really excited about, and it's a sneak peek of something coming very soon. AI proposal creation embedded directly in Ignition. So here's why this matters. The obvious answer is time. AI proposal creation cuts hours of admin out of every proposal you build. But the real impact isn't necessarily just the hours you save, but it's the deals that you win. Next slide, please. So think about how a new client engagement starts today. You're on a call with a prospect. You're taking notes. Maybe you've got a transcript recorder running. The call ends, and because you're busy, you don't get back to those notes for hours, sometimes days. The whole time, your prospect hasn't heard from you. So in sales, there's an old line that time kills all deals. Every day your prospect waits, the deal cools off. They lose context. Maybe they even talk to a competitor. Next slide, please. So you've really got two things to optimize for at once. One is speed. So getting that proposal in front of your prospects as fast as possible to win the deal. And then two, revenue. Making sure the proposal reflects the right services at the right price so the work you win is profitable work. So AI proposal creation paired with price insights you saw earlier is how we help you do both. So instead of going back to your notes hours or days later, you give Ignition the inputs you already have. The transcript from the prospect call, maybe an engagement letter or an email exchange or form fields that have been completed, even a paragraph of notes that you typed in the moment. Our AI generates a proposal ready draft with services, descriptions, and pricing all sitting natively in your ignition workflow. So, Alnesha, I know this is one you've been asking for for a little while. What would AI proposal creation do and change for your firm? This this is such a big deal. I I should probably open up an Ignition tab and see if the team doing this is hiring because I I need this out, like, so fast. So just so you know how things used to work for us, I'm I'm an Ignition client who came here sort of doing what ignition offers in a very, very disjointed way. So similar process just across five or six different platforms, not efficient at all. But what you were describing about having the call and going back to your notes and the prospect cooling off, that's exactly what we were dealing with. Because we used to do a lot of consultation calls before we really got down to a better, way of filtering clients out. And then we do six calls, and then it'd be like, oh gosh. Gotta send the proposals. And although you start off being excited about sending proposals, eventually, it just becomes another job and not something that you really wanna do. So for us, at least having ignition in place, puts everything in one spot, but we still have to go back and review the notes and put together the proposals, which means, it still takes what I feel to be twice the work. We had to do the call, and then we have to go back and review it, and then we do the proposal. So I cannot wait to be able to say, here's what we talked about. We do use a notetaker, an AI notetaker, and just dumping that in. And I just wanna make sure that I flagged this because I've had this happen before when you were saying the complexity. Right? You the person mentions to you that they have payroll, but maybe you don't notice that they said they had payroll and they need your help with the time sheets and payroll runs weekly. And the way you might have priced that could have been very different than you would have priced a payroll for two people on salary. Like, those little things are how you end up with Scope Creek. So I think, we will do a better job of getting out a more accurate proposal and quicker. I have dreamt of being able to I wish I was smart enough to do it. Like, have ignition up and have the client talking to me and literally be building the proposal while we talk, and I think this will get us as close as possible. So I cannot even wait for this to come out. This will be game changing for someone like, me and and the women I work with who feel like we juggle too many things. This will just cut out easily two hours of sending proposals at the end of the day. Awesome. Thank you so much for sharing. I'm excited about this one too. Before I toss it over to Ryan, there's just two more things I wanna call out with AI proposal creation. So first, this is embedded in Ignition, so not bolted on. So you're not jumping out to another tool and back. The AI knows your service library, your pricing, your branding, and the draft lands inside your proposal flow, ready for you to refine and review and send. So second of all, you're always in the driver's seat. So the AI gives you a starting point. You edit, you accept, you reject. You still get to check to make sure that everything looks as you expected it to. We're not making the decisions for you. We're just getting you to your decision faster and getting your prospect their proposal faster. So there's another way to get to the same outcome, and Ryan's about to walk you through that as well. So our MCP lets you do the same work from your own AI assistant, whether that's Claude or ChatGPT, whichever you use. Same outcome, different starting point. So native in app with this tool and then AI assistant via MCP. The choice is really yours. And with that, I'm gonna hand it over to Ryan to share a little bit about that. Thanks, Tammy. So really excited to announce our MCP. I've been totally nerding out over this over the last couple of weeks as soon as I've hooked up my demo account to the MCP. So for those of that are new to MCPs, basically, it's a model context protocol. It allows you to basically prompt within your AI agent of choice. So think Claude Cowork or ChatGPT, and ultimately pull insights from Ignition or drive actions. So I've put together a quick little video to walk through a few use cases that I was able to put together here. So again, I'd really encourage you afterwards to go test these out. That's really the best way to learn. If you're struggling, ask the AI. It probably knows the answer as well too. But I'll show you a couple of example use cases here in this video and encourage you to test it out. So the first one I wanna talk about is getting some business insights. I know everyone was super excited about reporting, but now thinking how you can actually interact with that data that's coming directly out of Ignition. So in our first example here, what I did was prompted to basically pull a whole bunch of data from Ignition. So things around my cash flow, things about my revenue, my service mix. So it was able to give that to me. And what it was also able to do is generate a report. So what I'm pulling up now is in a visualization of some of that data. Again, do you need all of this to show at once? I just kinda wanna show you what's possible and the insights you could get. So certain things like a cash calendar, when is certain cash flow gonna hit my account and which day? What makes up those payments? Maybe any suggested actions for me and the team. So getting some of the commentary on the data and suggesting that next step or next action, is where AI becomes really, really powerful. So as you can see, there's a whole bunch of things that you can do when you build that out. The next one I wanna show is creating a proposal from a spreadsheet or document. So in this example, I've seen a whole bunch of our customers use pricing calculators over the day. I know you guys have all whipped these up in Excel or Google Sheets and you love them. So you can still use those pricing calculators and basically hook those back up to ignition through the MCP. So what I'm showing here is an example calculator that I built where I can add in different complexity levels, transactions, and have it spit out different prices. And then you can see is basically based on my prompt, I said create a proposal based on the pricing and the services in my spreadsheet. So what that went and did was create a three option proposal in Ignition, in drafts for my client, Brad, And then I can go in and review that proposal, so you can see those options got selected automatically. It went ahead and feed fed in the pricing from my spreadsheet, so those prices went in. So you can think about all of those different ways that you might be able to come to a proposal. Again, is it feeding in notes? Is it feeding in transcripts? Is it feeding in spreadsheets? To really get that proposal created faster to give you that time back and get this out the door. The last use case I wanna show, is going to be around, getting those insights into how you can grow your revenue. So I think within Ignition, we we have really good data around what your clients are paying you today, and when's the last time that price changed. We also know what services those clients have today. So in this example prompt, I basically ask which clients are most likely need a price increase, And then I also asked it which clients could be a good potential for a cross sell. So you can see, I'll point out Space Ranger. He's still on the same pricing from two thousand twenty four. So it's recommended action that we really go through and increase that ten percent. So you can get that action and go ahead and take that back in ignition. So we'll kind of flag all those potential opportunities based on your prompt. And then in the next example, we're looking at those cross sells. So right away, Alpha Dental, they're on our CFO services, but, you know, just because they're getting those CFO services, could we actually take over the bookkeeping and the tax as well? So again, a really cool examples there. Would encourage you to check that out. We'll share a little bit more later on how you can turn this on in your Ignition account, but really gonna make it helpful for you to get those those business insights and and make those better decisions on on how you look to grow. Super exciting. I really appreciate you sharing that too. Here here are a couple of quotes as well from from some customers who have used the MCP and have been able to to see the exact impact that's gonna have inside of their firm. But, you know, given the guardrails that Ryan just walked through and how we're approaching this from an ignition perspective, Alicia, I'd be curious, like, what are your thoughts with this approach, and how how do you see it potentially benefiting benefiting your practice and your day to day as well? Now while I will say, like, I am a typical accountant and I get nervous about about sharing data and all those sort of things, I feel like if I knew that this information was safe and guarded just like I feel about everything that goes into, AI, because I feel like we're giving AI a lot of our data. If I knew my client's data was protected, this makes me very excited. Just seeing what other people are saying about it and saying that they don't even have to open Ignition to be able to extract data. It just feels really exciting. I feel like we spend a lot of time gathering information and attempting to get insights, so I am down for whatever gets us data faster, accurate data faster. Totally agree. And and to everyone in the chat too, like, I'd love to hear what you're most excited about when it comes to this, whether it's AI proposals or, you know, the the ability to do this in app or connect your MCP. Would love to hear which of these is most exciting to you and and what you're looking to adapt inside of your practice. Ryan, I'll pass it back over to you. Yeah. In addition to, you know, our open platform, we want to be able to release more integrations into those AI workflow flow tools you're using today. So a couple examples of these that are coming soon. So Digits on the general ledger side, and then we'd have seen a lot of our customers using, AI notetakers, such as Vinyl, Ping, and Abacore. So all of those are coming soon. Integrations. So really excited to continue to build out our open strategy and build integrations into the AI tools you're using in your day to day business. Super exciting to see these coming. Okay. We're gonna go ahead and dive into the next step. So really wanted to explore a little bit more about how Ignition is making getting paid more simple for your practice and your business. Now if you're sick of chasing payments, cash flow and stress from that can be one of the biggest operational gaps and drains for any firm, especially when teams are still manually following up on invoices. But firms using Ignition do see an average of ninety one percent of their payments being collected automatically without lifting a finger. We've invested more into billing and payment automation this year to make getting paid even more simple and faster and easier for you on a day to day basis. And I want you all to think about that. What if ninety one percent of your payments were collected automatically and it was just directly in your bank account without having to do any follow-up? Think of what that might mean for the cash flow predictability and just ultimate, you know, comfort that the business has in knowing that this is flowing through automatically. Now some of the the ways that we are focusing now on getting you paid that we have added in this year, there's simpler ways for your clients to pay you. By giving your clients a simple flexible way to pay you, you can reduce friction in your payment process and bring more payments into one place. We've also have easier ways to manage scope creep, whether it's unexpected work or a quick project or an add on service. You can bill for it in seconds by making quick adjustments, getting client approval, and keeping your cash flow moving on a regular basis. We also have more flexible billing. So setting things up, within billing that reflects how your work actually runs so you can reduce manual work, improve client clarity, and capture more revenue through consistent workflows. We do also have simpler invoicing work flows as well as things like change orders and additional service functionality that will be upcoming that you can utilize for your clients and expanding billing options such as milestone billing and retainer billing to ensure that your clients are able to pay you the exact way you wanna get paid for any of these services. These updates are really about giving you more flexibility and more confidence across the entire payment experience from proposal acceptance through to collection, and most importantly, helping you spend less time chasing payments and ensuring that you have recognized revenue and are focusing more time on your clients for the work at hand. I'm gonna just quickly read out a quote here from Don Brolin as well. With Don, I was exhausted from worrying about money. I would bill clients by the hour, send them the send them the invoice, and pray that they paid by Friday so I could make payroll. Now I just click require payment upfront and bam. The proposal goes out in ten seconds and I don't think about it. I don't manage accounts receivable for hand or handle payments. Ignition has totally changed that for me. Fantastic quote and obviously love to hear that from Don. Alnisha, I'd I'd love to hear yourself as well. Like, what you love most about Ignition payments and how that's been able to change how you spend your time within the practice, maybe not having to focus so much on the accounts receivable side. Yeah. I I've almost always believed in advanced payments. I think it's very unfair to have to add on to doing already stressful work and then chase payments. So I think that's a big part of operating more efficiently. What's helpful for us is being able to decide if we wanna pass on the credit card fee to the client, versus take it on ourselves. I find that to be very, very helpful. I I like that clients have a really easy time paying on their own. They don't come back to us with a lot of questions about how to pay. They can choose to save their payment information for future invoices. They can change their own payment information. It really just took that off of our plate. In a in a much larger firm, that's a whole, like, job. Right? It could even be a whole department, and it could literally just be handled. I also love two things. One, Ignition will follow-up if the payment failed. So I will be notified, but Ignition sort of handles that. There are very, very, very few times I could probably count on one hand, times that we've had to get involved with failed payments. Ignition will automatically retry it. They'll let the client know that the payment failed. And two, prior to me using Ignition in our firm for payments, there were times that with our previous payment processor, the payment would have appeared to have gone through. And then, like, two weeks later, the money would be taken back out because the payment didn't actually go through. We've never had that happen with Ignition. Like, the payment actually cleared, and then it gets deposited to our account. So it's just like small things there that we don't have to worry about. But we do almost all of our billing automatically. We'll get all the money on the first of the month. It's in our account by the fourth or the fifth. It's easy to reconcile in QuickBooks Online. That's what we use for bookkeeping. So it's sort of like a a set it and forget it process. It's not part of anyone's job to do account I mean, it's part of Ignition's job. But Ignition is a heck of a lot cheaper than having someone have to do accounts receivable work. So, yeah, it's it's no one's job. It saves us a ton of time, contributes to why we're able to work a year round four day work week for sure. Amazing. Tammy, I'm gonna pass this one over to you here. Awesome. Thank you. So before we wrap, there's one more thing I wanna talk about. So everything we've shown you so far is shipped or shipping soon, but there's a whole layer of innovation happening at Ignition that's earlier than that. So experiments, prototypes, what if type of features we're testing with customers before we decide whether to invest fully. So that layer is Ignition Labs, and today, I want to invite you to it. So here's why lab matters. We've always believed that the best products are built with customers and not just for them. The firms who use Ignition every day are the best people to shape what Ignition becomes. Labs is how we put that belief into practice. And the pace at which we can do this has fundamentally changed. So we've transformed how we build product at Ignition itself. So our teams have adopted an AI native development process that lets us go from idea to working experiment in days, not weeks or months. That means we can test more ideas, learn faster, and respond to what you actually need, not what we think you need many, many months from now. So labs is the front door to that sort of velocity. So here's how it works. Everything in labs is opt in. You decide what to explore and when. So features are labeled in one of three ways. One, experiments are early stage, so expect some rough edges and expect to give us feedback. Early access is closer to release, so more polished, but you still get to shape sort of what that final cut looks like. And then there are some features that are invite only, where we work closely with a small group of customers on capabilities that need deeper partnership before they're ready for broader access. So you're always in control of what you turn on and off. So several of the features we've walked through today are already live in labs. You can opt in whenever you're ready. So there's more dropping over the coming weeks, and you can expect to see that continuous flow as the weeks go by. So if you haven't been to labs recently, you'll notice that it looks a little bit different. So we've redesigned the whole experience to make it easier for you to discover what each feature does, what stage it's at, and what to expect before you enable anything. It's a self serve discovery experience to make it easier to find and utilize what's relevant to you. So here's why this matters to me personally. The firms that get the most out of the Ignition are the ones that treat us like a partner, not just a tool. So labs is how we make that partnership concrete. So every toggle you flip, every piece of feedback you share, that directly influences whether a feature graduates, evolves, or gets rethought. So that's just how our road map will move. So if you take one action today, here's what I asked from you. Go turn on labs. Go to admission or it's already on. Go to your admission settings. Labs is there. Check out what features available, and tell us what you think. The future of the Ignition platform gets better the more of you go and do this and provide us this feedback. Brad, why don't you go ahead and close us out? Yeah. Thanks so much. Tammy, super exciting stuff with labs. Also wanna say the fun does not end here with this. If you are interested, please join us for our learning labs webinar series between June sixteenth and nineteenth to learn exactly how to apply the latest Ignition updates into your real workflows. I'm super excited, and there's so much to look forward to with what's to come with an Ignition for the rest of the year and for each of your practices as well in tandem with our product and all of the innovations we have made this year and what is to come. I do wanna close things out by saying a huge thank you to our speakers, Tammy, Ryan, Alnisha for taking the time today and for each and every one of you in the audience for taking time out of your day to join us and learn more about how how Ignition can help your firm. We truly hope you did enjoy our webinar. I have one last poll that I'm gonna launch right now as well, which I would love for everyone to answer. And then we've got a little bit of time left over as well, so we'll do some q and a, to wrap things out. But I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna launch that final poll here right now. K. Perfect. Now with that, I'm gonna go ahead and go to the q and a, and we'll ask a few questions that have come across to us as well. So the first question, that I've got here is for those of us that are nervous about raising prices, how accurate and personalized are the AI price insight recommendation? I do think with this, it it's something that is gonna be extremely accurate based on what you put into there. So, ultimately, you get to put in additional context. Your services are pulled from real life proposal data that is anonymized to help guide that conversation. And with confidence, we get an average forty percent revenue uplift across the board from what we've seen so far. These recommendations are based on real life. You can ultimately choose as well to apply them or not. So it's important to know when running that price insight, you ultimately get the final say on how you wanna price that service if you want to apply it or if you wanna continue on as such or use your better judgment. We're just here to help guide you and help find potential unrealized revenue within your practice that you already have there today. Now we do have a couple questions in the chat as well, so I'm gonna read one out. I've got a Brett Meyerson. I wanted to offer our clients financing for a larger one time engagements where we could get paid upfront and the client makes payments to a third party sometimes called buy now, pay later. Is that possible? I'm gonna maybe pause and see if there's anybody who wants to jump in and answer that question. I can take that one, I guess. So we don't have, actual lending capabilities. If you look in labs, there's, payment plans related to invoice now, so you can schedule those out. But as far as actually financing, like, a buy now pay later agreement, another thing I've seen customers do is actually just create a proposal and schedule that out across create that schedule yourself using the proposal instead of actually going through the the notion of of financing and and making the client take on that obligation. That's perfect. Appreciate you taking that, Ryan. The next one, I'm gonna just read out here is how do you see firms actually using the AI Proposal Creator day to day? Is it more to speed up proposals, standardizing services, or both? Tammy, I'll maybe pass this one over to you with regards to the AI proposal creator. Yeah. So the AI proposal creator, it is still currently in design. So a lot of the features will be released in sort of a staggered way. But, yes, like, we plan on taking transcripts, notes, etcetera, as the initial first pass, and then we will continue to build out integrations that standardize across different recorders as well. But there there will be multiple releases, and it'll just continue to get better as we learn more on what's actually being used and what is actually returning great results for you. Perfect. I appreciate that answer. I I am hoping that not only does it speed up getting the proposals out, like I said, I'm guilty of getting to the end of the day and being like, oh gosh. Now we have to get the proposals out. But I also think it will help to avoid that scope creep issue that, you know, flat pricing. We do everything for everybody at this price, it doesn't factor in the complexity because you're probably gonna do the proposals after doing a bunch of calls if you're anything like me, and you miss those little minute details. So my hope is that it helps us to not skip over those details and then have to go back to the client and say, that we've, you know, taken a better look at your engagement, we actually have to adjust pricing. We do our best to not have to do that, especially if it's something that we knew in the beginning and we just didn't plan accordingly. So my fingers are crossed. That's what I'm hoping for. Yeah. Love that. Ryan, I think this one is gonna be a a good one for you because it seems to be around the reporting API. So the question here is if we already use a BI tool such as Power BI or Tableau within our practice, what kind of insights could we potentially unlock using the reporting API? Yeah. I think any of the revenue or collection data, it gets pretty granular on the service level too. I'm gonna share a link to the reporting API. You can check out all the different endpoints there. But I've seen that most commonly, you know, looking at, forecasting out your revenue, looking at that breakdown of revenue by type. So whether that was recurring or one off, revenue per partner or manager. So I think my guess is you may already be connected your general ledger to that tool today. So you're just getting that invoice level data, but think about kinda getting that next level layer deeper, breaking it down by service, line item, and other other kind of features of other data points which are available within Ignition. Yeah. Perfect. This one almost expands off that a little bit here, Ryan. The second second question I had here is the MCP looks really interesting. I'm intrigued to learn more about, using this in my firm. Do you mind sharing some real examples of tasks other tasks others are automating with AI already using a a MCP? Yeah. I think, I showed that example earlier. I think, you know, updating, your service library, I think even getting data in, so such as maybe editing that engagement letter template. We'll be able to put out some more resources here in the coming weeks to to kinda help you build that out. I don't have a a huge list, but I think in that example I showed before, I think the key ones are that that kind of business insight data you can get, looking at revenue opportunities, and then that proposal creation flow or service creation flow. So being able to prompt the creation of a a client or a proposal based on some sort of data that you've got outside of putting it in. And would highly recommend if you don't already have I know there's some security questions, you know, look at getting a team plan on Claude, so maybe you're using Claude Cowork just to make sure you're keeping up with the security standards. Same thing with ChatGPT or or Codex or whatever AI tool of choice you use. But we're excited to see people kinda dig in a little bit further. Perfect. We've got one last question here that I'm gonna throw out there. And, Alnisha, you may wanna take this one because it's a it's a firm owner asking effectively where to start, and I think it might be best to hear that from a fellow firm owner. So I want my firm to start using more AI, but I don't really know where to start beyond the basics. Where would you recommend we start first within Ignition? Definitely start with updating your service library. We took that on as like a project, like an all hands on deck project just to make sure that we were communicating for so here's what's important to me. You gotta do what's right for you. We like succinct descriptions, but we don't want to be so succinct that it doesn't communicate value. Right? So we don't just say tax preparation. We wanna make it very clear that we have a detailed tax preparation process. We have a detailed checklist. We review that checklist before we even look at the client's documents to help them realize if they're missing documents. And I'd say in our firm, even though we talk to our clients year round, easily twenty five percent of them forget a document. And we recognize it because one, we know them, but two, we take a look at that checklist and we can identify, hey. You told us you sold stock. You you plan on sending us the ten ninety nine b, or should we just guess? Or right. That is part of our process. This is not the kind of firm where you come and you drop off a stack of papers and someone types in exactly what you put and then sends it back over to you. We do live review calls with every client. So being able to communicate that and then having the AI update it for you, that made it that much easier. Two, we use the templates in Ignition, and I don't think there's AI there, but we did put those descriptions from that AI library. Those services are in those templates. That is also a huge time saver. You will notice that you send out pretty similar proposals, and you don't wanna always have to go back and copy the last person, so just go ahead and create the templates. We've used the AI to draft the messages that go in the proposals. Probably the only, I'd say, custom thing we do is a Loom video. So I love the fact that we can do Loom videos and proposals. Some of them are recorded, but some of them most often are custom because we just wanna walk the client through the proposal. I find that that feels a little bit more personal, and they tend to sign faster, especially when I saw that they reviewed that video. But for sure, use it when you were doing your service library. Use it when you were drafting those messages that go out with the proposal. Of course, when the AI proposal creator comes out, we are all using that, like, collectively. We're not doing our own proposals, anymore, but that helped to standardize our service descriptions, and it really helped us to better communicate our values. So if you don't know where to start, start there for sure. It's a great breakdown. Really appreciate that. Okay. To everybody, once again, thank you for taking the time, to meet with us here today and attend today's webinar. I do wanna kinda summarize things up. I think in using Ignition in one AI powered platform, you can help unlock revenue, effectively unblock yourself by getting rid of that, that repetitive admin you are spending time on doing while giving your firm more freedom to move and scale with purpose. Now if you're taking one thing away from today, I think it's important if you are looking to get involved with labs, go and sign up in capacity and get yourself included to provide feedback as we continue to build out more and more on the AI front on a daily basis. Join that webinar series that was prompted there before from June sixteenth to the nineteenth to learn more about how you can adopt this in your daily firm. Or if you are considering Ignition and are not yet a user of our platform, book a comprehensive demo with a member of our team so we can show you exactly how this can work within your practice. But once again, just wanna say thank you for everyone for being here today, and we look forward to continuing the conversation and many more product updates to come in the future.
Why you should attend:
Discover how our latest features–AI-powered price insights, additional document signatures, simple invoicing, API reporting & more–will help you maximize revenue, efficiency, and cash flow.
Get tips and advice from Ignition customers on how to optimize pricing, unlock growth and accelerate cash flow.
Be the first in the know on what product releases are coming next and get sneak peeks.
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