Before using Practice Ignition, sending proposals, and engagement letters to potential new clients was a long and cumbersome process. Creating these forms took hours, even with the assistance of templates—and that was before they went through an internal approval process and then finally passed to the client, which could add weeks to the process.
The laborious process resulted in the client needing to print, sign, scan, and send the engagement letters back to PKF Ignite. This step of the process was admin-intensive for their clients, which added a further delay in receiving the signed letter.
Believe it or not, there was still another layer to this, on receiving the signed documents, they still needed to enter them into their accounting and billing software. Unfortunately, none of their systems talked to each other.
Manually creating invoices from the engagement letters left room for human error, inefficiencies and, of course, wasted time. “We were trying to make it effortless and enjoyable for clients to deal with our firm, but an admin-heavy engagement process was most certainly getting in the way.
According to Nicole Rousseau, Head of PKF Ignite for PKF South Africa, Practice Ignition revolutionised their engagement process. Practice Ignition enables them to bring up engagement letter templates, automatically populate them with terms of service, and add customer-specific details like payment terms with a few simple clicks.
Even better, is the fact that Practice Ignition makes life easier for PKF Ignite’s clients. Proposal, contract, and payment terms are all gathered together and ratified with one easy signature. “Once a client accepts our proposal, Practice Ignition automatically pulls the agreed-upon fees from the document to generate monthly recurring invoices in Xero. You can even go a step further and connect Practice Ignition to Xero Practice Manager which then creates a task in XPM based on the proposal. It makes task management super easy!”
Even with templates, creating proposals and engagement letters used to take Nicole and her team hours. With Practice Ignition, that process takes under ten minutes. The internal approval process was equally labour-intensive. Getting approval, chasing client signatures, and manually entering invoices could add weeks to the process. With Practice Ignition, the engagement letter is created, sent out, and signed—all within an average of eight hours.
But while PKF Ignite has already experienced substantial time-savings, Nicole says that’s not the biggest benefit. What she values most about Practice Ignition is that it enables her to make life easier for clients and demonstrates PKF Ignite’s value starting from the first engagement.
“Our average start-to-finish engagement time—from first contact, to receiving the client’s signed approval now gets done within eight hours. It’s a simple and intuitive process and there’s no need for follow up. That makes a massive difference and allows us to spend more time adding value to our clients. When clients see how professional and easy the engagement is, they can’t wait to get started and work with our firm.”
