Weâre excited to launch our new integration with Gusto to customers in the US. This makes it even easier for you to offer People Advisory services and bundle Gusto subscriptions in your proposals.
Itâs all part of our joint partnership to help the accounting profession combine financial expertise with people-focused guidance.
Why connect to Gusto?
Fast-track proposals: Automatically populate Gusto clients details when creating proposals to save time
Transition to People Advisory: Access our three-tiered pricing People Advisory proposal template, ranging from full-service payroll compliance to guidance on complex people operations
Our Gusto integration will also help you Simplify billing for Gusto software soon. You'll be able to automatically calculate your clientâs monthly Gusto subscription cost based on real-time employee headcount. Stay tuned!
After many months in the making, we're excited to release multiple signatures in BETA for our New Proposal Editor. With multiple signatures, up to ten people can sign a single proposal outlining your engagement terms - ideal for engaging clients with multiple directors or owners in the same company, or couples filing joint tax returns where eligible.
If youâre offering proposal options or require payment details upfront, you can select a primary signatory - ensuring that your main client contact accepts the proposal before any other relevant parties can digitally sign. Best of all, you and your client will be kept in the loop every step of the way - with email notifications and status updates to every signatory, a digital audit trail for every signature, and a signed agreement sent to all signatories.
Existing customers will need to contact us to join the BETA program. We'll be releasing this functionality widely in the coming months.
Weâve made it easier to understand whatâs happening with your client payments, including any payment disputes or client refunds youâve issued, via the updated Disbursals view. This tracks when client payments collected through Practice Ignition reach your linked bank account.
Next time you head to Payments > Disbursals, youâll see a more detailed and accurate view of all your client payment disbursals. Youâll be able to easily view disbursal details, including any payment disputes or client refunds, and have peace of mind that the disbursal amounts are accurate and up to date.
Weâve also improved our Disbursals data export, allowing you export data for a selected date range and view all payment collections for that period in one file to make any reporting and reconciliation you need to do much easier.
Weâre committed to making the payment collection process easy to understand and manage, so look out for ongoing improvements in the future.
Next time you create a proposal, you'll be able to create more custom workflows, set up the job category and budget and nominate one workflow per client or proposal as the âbilling jobâ to manage your WIP in Xero Practice Manager - all from the 'Automation' tab. You can even view, create and edit future XPM jobs in the Client view via the new 'Workflow' tab.
Also new: If you edit an existing service while creating a proposal in the New Proposal Editor, admins can now elect to save those edits back to your service library, eliminating the need to navigate back and forth to make changes.
We've improved our Zapier integration for the New Proposal Editor, with five new Zapier triggers to automate your workflow. For example, you can update your sales pipeline automatically when a proposal is sent or when a deal is lost, or send an internal email or notification when a proposal is sent out to a client. So if you've been using the "Proposal State Change" trigger to automate your workflow using the Classic Proposal Editor, you can now do the same using our New Proposal Editor!
Have you ever struggled to figure out which client project a particular item of work relates back to? Or wanted to know when a client agreed to a certain service?
If so, we hope you'll enjoy this update. You can now see the proposal name and project name (if specified) alongside each item in the client Billing Schedule and Invoices views. The client Services view also shows this information for each service that the client has agreed to.
After many months in the making, our New Proposal Editor now supports Xero Practice Manager (XPM) to automate your jobs workflow!
Weâve used this as an opportunity to reimagine the workflow experience to make it more flexible, and give you greater control and visibility over your client jobs and tasks. You'll now be able to create more custom workflows, set up the job category and budget and even easily view, create and edit XPM jobs at a client level.
To get early access, admins users can go to Practice Ignition Settings > Labs and turn on âenable XPM with New Proposal Editorâ. The new XPM workflow is currently in beta, so weâre still fine tuning the experience and welcome your feedback.
It's now easier for you to give us your feedback! 🥳 If you click the profile drop down menu on the top right in the app, you'll now see a Give Feedback option under more resources.
Your feedback immediately filters through to our feedback triage tool where a member of the product team will read, tag and categories each item. Sometimes we may reach out for more information or context about your business problem, though if we don't be sure to know that everything you tell us informs what we build next and how we do it.
Our regionalized proposal templates do all the hard work for you, with pre-populated services, pricing, and billing schedules. When creating your next proposal, simply select the provided template youâd like to use from the templates browser as a starting point. Enter your client details and customize the services, pricing or billing as you see fit - or use the proposal template as is.
Provided proposal templates will also be launching soon in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the UK. Learn more
If you haven't captured your client's payment details upfront, you can now add online payments by default to invoice emails sent by Practice Ignition. Clients simply click âPay Invoiceâ to add a payment method and securely pay your invoice online. Payment details are stored securely for future use, and clients can even select to pay future invoices automatically using the details provided.
You can also add online payments when you manually send an invoice via the Client Billing Schedule, and if you've already invoiced your client, simply share an online payment link with them at any time. With this new addition, you now have the flexibility to choose how you get paid.
If you're on our Professional or Scale plan, you can now easily create your own customizable proposal templates using our New Proposal Editor. Simply build a new proposal or save an existing draft as a template in your custom template library. Custom proposal templates can help you simplify your client proposal process by creating standardized templates for your most popular services, and getting high quality proposals out the door faster. You'll also be able empower your team to create proposals using templates to engage clients consistently with less hand-holding. Learn more
To enable 2FA, simply sign in to Practice Ignition where you will be prompted with the setup screen.
We've released updates to the new Client Billing Schedule which give you flexibility to make one off adjustments to billing - without losing the benefits of automation.
Try clicking on one of your future invoices in the "Billed Automatically" section. You'll find you can now edit the invoice date, prices, payment method and more. It's even possible to move items back from Automatic to Manual billing.
For items in the "Billed Manually" section, you can now edit prices, add notes and change the expected billing date.
What's more, all these changes will be reflected instantly on your Dashboard.
With the New Proposal Editor you can include multiple options in your proposals; set flexible billing for variable prices, and any combination of recurring or non-recurring billing types in one proposal; and have more control with clearer proposal date and length controls, that are separated from billing controls - plus much more!
Read more about the New Proposal Editor to find out if it's the right time for you to join our BETA program.
This update is only available in accounts that have our new Client Billing Schedule enabled. Client Billing Schedule is rolling out to all accounts over the coming weeks.
Any manually billed item on the Client Billing Schedule can now be deleted. If work isn't going to be billed to the client for whatever reason, you can now simply remove it without creating an invoice. This lets you keep your manual billing list for each client completely accurate.
This update is only available in accounts that have our new Client Billing Schedule enabled. Client Billing Schedule is rolling out to all accounts over the next month.
When creating invoices for work that's being billed manually, you can now see the "project" that each item relates to. This is particularly important if you're providing the same service to the same client across multiple projects or scopes of work.
The name that you set when creating the proposal is used as the project name for each item.
While we have not supported Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) for the practice-facing parts of our app for some time, we are now ending support also for the client-facing parts of our app.
We have made this decision in light of a shrinking market for IE11 and as Microsoft themselves announce an end of support for IE11 in their own products. It has become increasingly hard to continue to provide support for this browser and an end of support will allow us to better focus this time on product improvements in other areas.
Though IE11 makes up only a small fraction (~3%) of client sessions, we don't want to compromise our customers' proposal conversion rates as we remove IE11 support. This is why we have introduced an unsupported browser alert page for clients.
IE11 users who visit any client portal page will see an alert page to indicate that their browser is not supported. From there, they can copy and paste the URL into a modern browser such as Edge or Chrome. We also provide a QR code to make it easy to open the portal page on a mobile device as an alternative.
We have made some updates to the client states to simplify and better reflect a clients state in your business.
We now have 4 client states (instead of 5) - lead, active, inactive and archived. Leads are clients who have never accepted services from you, while inactive clients are ones who have expired services. Active clients remain as those who have an active engagement and services with you.We have also added some additional segments to the client view to segment by Proposal state - drafting, awaiting acceptance and lost. These will show you all clients with proposals in these states.
According to our customers, line item service prices on the emails sent to clients are rarely useful.
Based on this customer feedback, we have removed these line item service prices from the client invoice notifications and payment receipts.We will continue to show subtotal, tax and total, as well as the service names.
When you are rolling over or duplicating new proposals, we will now default to the new accept page design if this is the default set in your account.
Still not using the new accept page design? Let us know why.
Practice Ignition now integrates with Intuit Practice Management (IPM).
After connecting IPM to Practice Ignition, work will automatically be created in IPM when your client accepts a Practice Ignition proposal.
Intuit Practice Management is currently only available in the United States for ProConnectâą Tax Online and LacerteÂź
We've begun the roll-out of our new Client Billing Schedule. This feature is gradually being rolled out to all accounts over the coming weeks.
With the Client Billing Schedule, you'll be able to see a complete record of future billings at the client level. All client billings for every proposal can now be found in one place!
The new client Invoice & Payments view shows you a full invoice history for each client. You can also manage all payment collections for the client here, and see a timeline showing the invoice and payment collection history.Client Billing Schedule is also the new place to go when invoicing "On Completion" or "Estimate" services. You'll see all items for the client that need to have a price confirmed before they can be billed in the Manual Billing area.
Finally, the clients list has a new filter which allows you to show clients with services that are due to be billed now, within the next week, within the next month or at any time.
To assist us in providing a superior payments experience, we have changed our payment sub-processor for Australian payments to Stripe.
We have already successfully partnered with Stripe in other regions and have seen how their product investments over time have led to better and better service for Practice Ignition customers in those regions. We have now aligned this service for our Australian customers.
You can now find the Discover page by navigating from the sidebar within your account (it's below 'Dashboard' 🕵ïžââïž). Our initial focus will be helping new customers get started, while our goal for existing customers will be to use the Discover page to curate education and self-onboarding of new features.
We will be releasing new content as we go, which makes this your go to place for discovering how to make the most of new or existing features. Tell us what you think!
We've finished rolling out some improvements to the way taxes work within Practice Ignition. New accounts now have a pre-loaded list of tax rates that's suitable for their region. There's also no longer a requirement to connect an accounting ledger if you want to display inclusive of tax prices to your clients.
When you do connect an accounting ledger there's a new section that allows you to quickly map the local tax rates to those in Xero or QuickBooks Online.
We'll be rolling out some changes to our payments system and Stripe integration starting from Wednesday the 18th of March, 2020. As a result you may see a notification banner within your payment collections, disbursals and payment setting pages requesting you to supply additional information.
The information requested is dynamically driven (based on what Stripe already has on file) and you will not be required to re-enter any previously submitted details. Many accounts will have all the necessary information and wont be required to enter anything further. Submitting this information is important and a failure to do so can result in delays to future payouts.
The information Stripe is required to collect differs from country to country, and typically includes (but is not limited to):
- The individual creating the Stripe account
- The business associated with the Stripe account
- Any individuals who ultimately own or control that business
This request for information forms part of Practice Ignition's and Stripe's continued commitment to ensuring our Know Your Customer (KYC) obligations are met. These requirements come from regulators and are intended to prevent abuse of the financial system.
Today weâre announcing support for Xero Tracking Categories on the Professional and Scale plans! 🎉With this new time-saving feature, weâre making it easier for you to compare or review sales across different parts of your business so you can improve performance where its needed most. Set tracking categories on your clients in Practice Ignition and theyâll automatically be included on your invoices in Xero.
We have made the proposal short link available from within the proposal export. Use this export to quickly access these links in bulk - e.g., to do an sms follow-up of proposals awaiting acceptance from within your chosen sms app and include the proposal short link.
Pricing changes happen and the team at Practice Ignition can now help you manage them even more easily! You may want to update a price in bulk for instance if a software subscription vendor changes their prices and you need to pass that onto you clients.
Note that Xero are increasing their subscription prices in Australia effective March 18th, so if you'd like to quickly apply the price increase in Practice Ignition, check out this article. It describes how to get in touch with our team and start a request to update prices in bulk.
- Your guide to updating vendor software prices with Practice Ignition
- How to change your service prices in bulk on active proposals
We've made a small change to the format of our subscription invoices. Payment fees are now grouped by payment type (ie. Direct Debit/ACH or Credit Card) and are grouped for that billing period. Previously payment fee's were calculated and sent across throughout the billing period.
This change should make it easier to read our invoices and will help to cut down the length of the document. You may see a mix of the old and new format on your next invoice however moving forward we will only issuing invoice with the new format.
We've rolled out some improvements to the way taxes work within Practice Ignition. Starting today, new accounts have a pre-loaded list of tax rates that's suitable for the selected region. This means that there is no longer a requirement to connect an accounting ledger if you want to display inclusive of tax prices to your clients.
When you do connect an accounting ledger there's a new section within the ledger app settings that allows you to quickly map the local tax rates to those in the ledger.
This update is for accounts created on or after the 13th of February 2020. An update for all existing accounts will be made in the coming weeks.
If your clients have elected to pay you by credit card, you will now be able able to quickly access a list of clients who have an expiring credit card on file.
Access a list of clients with a credit card on file expiring before the end of next month via:
- A filter on the clients screen (go to clients, click 'filter' and enable the 'expiring cards' filter)
- Direct click from the dashboard on the "expiring cards" widget in the payments panel
This allows you to review this list, and follow-up with these clients to update their credit card details
We know videos make it easy for our customers to digest information, so why not share the love by giving you guys the power to attract new clients and enhance their onboarding experience with video? Today we're announcing video for proposals, providing Professional and Scale customers the capability to add a video that plays at the start of a proposal and another video that plays right after a client accepts a proposal.
We have upgraded our integration with Quickbooks Online to use oAuth 2.0, offering greater security and identity management.
With thanks to our wonderful beta testers for their feedback and support, we are excited to announce direct debits are live for all accounts in the UK! With this announcement, weâre making it even easier for UK-based accountants and bookkeepers to capture client billing information up front 100% of the time.
Today weâre releasing a cashflow boosting, time saving update for all our customers using Practice Ignition Payments. Your clients will now be notified if their payment fails, allowing them to retry the failed payment themselves - which means faster turnaround of payment issues for you!
Happy automating! 👩â💻
We have now released Single Sign-On with Xero 🎉This functionality will allow our Xero users to seamlessly switch between their core apps.
You can now export the full details of all payments contained in a particular disbursal. This export can be useful if you want more information about what specific client payments are contained in a disbursal.
From now on, any time a proposal changes status in PI, you can trigger a workflow in your other apps! For example, you move a proposal from Draft to In Review â you can automatically notify a colleague that the proposal is ready. A proposal gets marked as complete â send a thank you gift automatically (yes, you can do that).
Duplicating a proposal will now also keep the original brochure attached to the new proposal.
Super user tip - create draft proposal(s) as a template that can be duplicated. This saves time when setting up similar proposals, as little as 10 sec to create and send a proposal from a duplicate!
We have added some new placeholders allowing you to personally address emails from the sender selected on a proposal.
You can now bulk send proposals from draft state, without moving them to in review.
We have also added events to the proposal history and given you easy access to the micro-deposit verification form in case you need to re-send this to your client.
We've made some improvements to enable rollovers and continuous recurring billing to work better together.
In the rollover process, you can now choose to exclude proposals with continuous recurring billing from rollover. This helps if you have a mix of recurring and non-recurring proposals, or proposals billed ongoing (versus renewed annually).
Simply elect to exclude these proposals and you can focus your attention only on proposals that need to be rolled over!
If you do want to rollover some proposals that have continuous recurring billing (e.g. you are reviewing your prices) then you can instead opt-in to include these proposals for rollover.
If you do select any continuously billed proposals for a rollover, we will turn off continuous billing on the original proposal (to avoid billing your clients).
If your clients have elected to verify their ACH payment method via micro-deposits, you will now be able to quickly access a list of clients who are yet to verify their account - allowing you to follow-up with these clients and get paid faster!
You can now access a list of your clients with verifying ACH payment methods from
- A filter on the clients screen
- Direct click through from the dashboard "awaiting verification" widget
This allows you to review this list, and follow-up with these clients to have their payment methods verified.
A great way to add a personal touch to proposals is to use a personal message. You can now also control who that message appears from when a client view it.
By default, the message will appear to be from your company, but this can be changed to instead appear from any current user on Practice Ignition.
Practice Ignition aims to be as automated as possible, and most of your clients will have an email address, but for those few who donât (and still operate entirely by snail mail) you can now create proposals for these clients without adding an email address.
We have added two new exports for you to see your services revenue for your practice and for each client. This revenue can be calculated for a certain period of time and exported directly from the dashboard! 🎉