Ignition, the leading contracts, billing and collections automation platform for professional services, today revealed its latest planned product innovations after generating over $2.7 billion in revenue for its 7,500+ customers in 2024.

These product announcements will redefine how service-based businesses sell, bill and get paid for their services, and include:

• Agreements-integrated deal pipeline management and forms to shorten sales cycles and prioritize profitable clients
• Industry-first capabilities to automate bulk price increases when creating or renewing client agreements
• More ways to automate collections by importing outstanding invoices into Ignition
• New app integrations to automate workflows and processes
• A new plan designed specifically for solopreneurs

Greg Strickland, Ignition’s Global President, says: “Strong client relationships, sustainable profits and predictable cash flow are the lifeblood of any professional services business. Our long-term vision is for Ignition to become the platform that enables small to medium professional services businesses to attract, win, manage and retain their clients. This is just the first step toward this vision.”

Optimizing sales processes for professional services

In the first half of 2025, Ignition will launch Deals – a new way for customers to view, manage, and automate their sales pipeline, seamlessly connecting leads to proposals, agreements, billing, and payment collections. Replacing spreadsheets, emails, and notes, Deals (currently in private beta) enables customers to track opportunities, qualify leads, and automate pipeline progression, all while integrating with the processes that drive revenue.

Ignition is also making it simple to collect information to qualify leads and onboard clients with customizable Forms, which can be shared by email or linked directly from a website to automate deal creation. Whether a ‘contact us’ request or new client intake form, customers can leverage Forms to identify, prioritize and onboard their most profitable clients — and save time by eliminating manual spreadsheets and countless zaps.

This follows the launch of several features earlier this year bringing e-commerce innovation to professional services, including proposal add-ons and discounts. By offering a ‘shopping-cart’ online sales experience that allows clients to add extra services within a proposal, Ignition customers have generated over $2.2m in additional revenue since June.

Dane Thomas, Ignition Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, says: “Many small businesses are still managing their sales pipeline and collecting prospect or client information using spreadsheets, emails, phone calls and even pen and paper. By bringing this all into Ignition, we’re removing the pain of dealing with manual processes and multiple tools to manage different parts of the sales process. Customers will be able to jump straight into Ignition to capture and qualify a lead, create the deal, send the proposal and close the sale faster and more efficiently.”

Growing revenue and profitability

In Q1 2025, Ignition will also make it easier for businesses to confidently raise prices with bulk price updates, the latest feature in its Auto-Pricing capabilities suite. With Ignition’s Accounting and Tax Pricing Benchmark revealing 57% of US firms plan to increase prices in 2025, this new capability will enable customers to automatically raise prices in bulk when creating proposals or renewing agreements for multiple clients at once.

Ignition already offers one-click price increases when renewing individual client agreements. To date, customers have increased prices by 8% on average and generated $8.7 million in extra revenue since using this feature.

Improving cash flow

To help eliminate late payments and stale high accounts receivable (AR) balances, Ignition will release additional auto-payments capabilities in Q1 2025.

Customers will be able to import outstanding invoices from QuickBooks Online and Xero into Ignition, and share an online payment link with clients to collect a payment method and automate future collections. This complements Ignition’s existing auto-payment features, whereby clients can provide payment details upfront when signing the proposal to pre-authorize payments. In 2024 alone, over 3 million payment transactions were made via the Ignition platform.

Automating workflows through integrations

To build upon its existing integrations, Ignition will release further enhancements to its Intuit ProConnect Tax integration in time for tax season. This will provide customers with more customization when creating proposals, and allow them to view and filter clients by ProConnect return type, return status and e-file status for greater visibility of their tax workflow within Ignition.

In addition, Ignition recently joined Wolters Kluwer's CCH Axcess Marketplace program, with plans to integrate Ignition with the CCH Axcess™ product suite in the first half of 2025. The integration will include the ability to import and sync clients from selected CCH Axcess products into Ignition as well as automating workflows such as invoicing once engagement letters are signed.

Additional integrations are also planned with Thomson Reuters to enable accounting and tax firms to streamline their client engagement and collections processes, including a direct integration with Onvio and 'plug and play' import from Practice CS into Ignition.

Catering to solo businesses

In response to market demand, Ignition is also releasing its new Solo plan globally later this month. Designed specifically for solopreneurs generating less than $150,000 in annual revenue, the plan enables solo business owners to automate contracts, billing and collections from only $39 per month when billed annually. The plan will become widely available in the US, Canada and the UK from mid-December following its recent release in Australia and New Zealand.

To date, Ignition customers have built nearly 2 million client relationships and generated over $9 billion in revenue in total via the platform.