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What Is Ignition?
Ignition is an all-in-one platform for professional services that empowers businesses to get paid faster, and run smarter.
Automate and optimize your proposals, client agreements, billing and payment collection to put an end to late payments, unbilled work and mundane repetitive admin.
With Ignition, accounting and professional services businesses get paid faster for all of their work, are more efficient and become more profitable.
Who Uses Ignition?
Accountants, Bookkeepers and Professional Services businesses.
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Reviews of Ignition
Alternatives Considered:
Best Proposal Software Available!
Comments: It has been so easy to work with Practice Ignition, and anytime I can't figure out how to do something, our account manager [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] has been really quick to help me! He even created a workflow map for our process which showed us what we needed to work on/could automate to help our business even more!
Pros:
We initially switched to Practice Ignition because it had the ability to collect payments when clients signed proposals plus it could do the reoccurring billing for us at the same time instead of us having to set it all up in QB. Clients can update their own payment settings, an the proposal process is really easy. Recently, they made changes which allow us to present multiple options within one proposal, as well as do variable billing and it has made things even better! Their support and webinars are incredibly helpful and we are so glad we switched to them! They really understand what we need for proposals and the bulk creation through support will definitely be helpful when tax season comes!
Cons:
The thing we liked the least was we couldn't send options within the same proposal like we did in our old proposal software, but that's changed now! I think the only other issue we really still have is the ability to collect international payments
Alternatives Considered:
Ignition - an important tool in my proposals and ongoing invoicing
Comments: It has been a gamechanger as far as preparing proposals and getting paid on time. I used to use a similar but cheaper product and it took a lot longer to prepare proposals and still meant I had to invoice customers directly. Ignition has absolutely made my life easier.
Pros:
I love that I can send a proposal quickly and then my clients are invoiced and pay when invoices are due. it has reduced my chasing people to pay invoices and having to remember to send them which was always my issue.
Cons:
If there was a way to get digital signatures that weren't part of the 'proposal' system that would be amazing. Also if there was a bit more personalisation of reporting so you could opt in to be notified when proposals were coming up for renewal etc
Alternatives Considered:
Everything you need except that one FATAL FLAW
Comments: I have tested 100's or Accounting Practise Management Quoting & Re-Occurring Billing systems in my many years as a QuickBooks ProAdvisor and found that of all of them, right now (August 2021), Practise Ignition has the most features you need as an Accountant to run a fully remote and automated firm. HOWEVER, that said, even with all these amazing features that are all in this one software (many are in others, but this one has the most), there is still one FATAL FLAW that (to date) they have not resolved. I do hope they resolve this soon because it is truly disappointing to not have this very basic feature in such a powerful system that has so many other incredible features to offer. No Refunds. That's gotta get fixed if this software is to be used in the Accounting Industry. There are workarounds for this, so for many people and companies, this may not be a deal-breaker for them. It's just that, this is not a cheap software so if you don't have the ability to REFUND your clients instantly when needed, that can really hurt client relationships. I hope that the Refund feature is resolved soon. Then this will be the best proposal and re-occurring payment processing system out there for our industry.
Pros:
The best features include: -Ability to have your lead enter their own Credit Card or Bank Account information so it stays secure when they go to accept the proposal -Re-Occurring Monthly Payments with the ability to set a custom reoccurring date -Ability to add an On Acceptance and On Completion payment as custom dates along WITH a Monthly Re-occuring payment on one proposal -Full Integration with QuickBooks Online (creates customer, invoice, and payment transactions related to all accepted proposal sales so bookkeeping is done automatically for you each time) -When a clients credit card fails, Practise Ignition will email your client to notify them of the credit card failure and your client is given the opportunity and ability to update their payment information on file themselves, putting this risk back on the client and saving you and your practice from having to do any manual entry or additional accounting gymnastics -Ability to add videos to your Proposal and previously created brochures to add beauty & interactive content to your proposals. -Multiple Templates for Services, Proposals, Engagement Agreements etc. -Integration with Karbon for task creation based on items in the proposal
Cons:
FATAL FLAW: NO REFUNDS & MONEY TAKES TOO LONG TO HIT BANK ACCOUNT (4 to 6 days) You can not give your client a Refund in Practise Ignition. That's right, NO REFUNDS. SO if you charge your client the wrong amount by mistake, or need to un-do an amount after they have canceled service, you can't push a button anywhere in this software to give your client a refund. You have to contact PI and ASK them if they will CONSIDER giving a refund to your client IF it is LESS than $2,000. If they approve, then they will process the refund about a week later. This is too slow, in my option. The workaround? They tell you that you should send a check, or use your bank or an outside system to send your client the refund. Which is MORE accounting work (the exact accounting work buying this software was supposed to solve), and since your client entered their own payment info, you don't have it to instantly give them $ back, so now there's more back and forth Correspondance and time-consuming effort needed that only takes seconds in all other comparable software out there. If the workaround is to use a different payment processor solution then one has to ask, "Why am I even using this one?". Now, if you have never given a refund in your life and you think it's so rare that this will happen that dealing with another merchant processor is worth for these one-off occasions, then by all means choose this software because it excels in more places than the competition. Just be warned.
Alternatives Considered:
Slow to disburse payments, must check billings are processed, professional interface
Comments: My biggest pain point is why they hold onto your money for so long before releasing it. If not for the good reviews, I would be nervous to use them for payments. I asked a customer to provide a payment via ACH so that I can get it quickly, it was debited from their account the day of and I have yet to receive my money on day 8 (business day 6). The software is indicating an estimated disbursement on day 9, so that means you may not receive the money into your account until day 10 or 11. In my opinion, this is excessive for an ACH payment and makes me concerned about their ability to manage cash. I have another payment via credit card that was pushed back an additional day and we're on day 7 and I have yet to receive it. If you are tight on managing cash, ask the customer to mail you a check or use QuickBooks for the invoice, you will get your money much faster. There were instances during tax season where I setup a proposal to collect a deposit at proposal acceptance and when it was time to close out the account, it was never charged, so you should double check your invoices. Once you get used to using the product, it is nice to have for proposal management and has an effective dashboard and ease of use to follow up with customers. I have yet to have a dispute from a customer about the contract, so their templates are excellent. The customer names don't integrate well with ProConnect and double your customers, which can be quite annoying.
Pros:
Professional interface for customers, ease of signing proposals and entering payment details for automatic processing. Dashboard for revenue and proposal management.
Cons:
Slow to process payments even ACH payments can take 7 business days. I have found that on several occasions that customer tax return deposits were not processed even though it was setup to pay at acceptance. Expensive monthly fee for small firms.
Alternatives Considered:
Time Saver, Bill Collector and Helps You Maintain Comliance
Comments: Very happy and can recommend. I run a very small firm, so I originally thought the cost was prohibitive for my expected level of use. But the subscription is well worth it. I have used it more often than expected & for reasons I didn't initially envisage, and the time it has saved is well worth it's cost in relation to my time that has been freed up. Finally, as a small, newish firm, it has introduced a level of professionalism to client facing materials that was lacking with my earlier processes.
Pros:
* Being able to collect client direct debit payment.* Being able to quickly draft a engagement agreement or authority document.* It's quite easy to use with a simple interface, and good customer client. This is excellent & very practical.
Cons:
* They tried to change the pricing model (remove a discount) even though I was originally promised a particular discount in perpetuity. It must be noted though that when I made a point of this, they were understanding and happy to honour the original discount promise.* Some features were still lacking, e.g. the ability to change pricing without have to re-do the whole process. But again, it should be noted, I think this has been updated and now rolled out (although I haven't used it yet).
Ignition Response
10 months ago
Thanks Axel for your kind review. You do now have the ability to edit active services in the proposal editor and send notification to your clients. You can get info on that, and all of Ignition's latest updates here: https://www.ignitionapp.com/whats-new
