2020: Product transformation and more flexibility than ever before

Here at Ignition, we pride ourselves on listening to our customers and striving to meet their ever changing needs – and 2020 was no exception. This has been an incredibly difficult year for obvious reasons. However, despite this, we’ve managed to roll out the most transformational product changes to affect the Ignition platform in seven years. Our platform is more flexible than ever before, giving you, our customers, more ways to surpass your client expectations.

Why have we done this? Well, we believe that exceptional client relationships should be at the heart of every professional services business. To help firms become more client-centric, we need to evolve the Ignition platform to deliver value at every stage of your client lifecycle – beyond simply proposals, onboarding, and payments.

Our brand-new Client Billing Schedule and proposal creation experience are among the first product milestones to shape the future of our platform – and we can’t wait to roll out even more exciting, innovative features in the future.

This year, we rebuilt our entire billing engine to provide you with an all-encompassing ‘single source of truth’ for client services, billing, and payments. Client invoices and payments are no longer spread across multiple proposals – instead, they’re now consolidated under a single client view, which we will continue to enhance going forward.

With the new Client Billing Schedule, you can manage upcoming billing in one place and easily find or adjust when clients are going to be billed next. It also gives you a centralised view of your clients’ invoices and payments history. So the next time your client calls with a query, you’ll be able to quickly pull up their specific client record to instantly provide them with an accurate update.

We also reimagined the proposal creation experience from the ground up with the release of our New Proposal Editor*. This allows you to customise your proposals to suit every client, with endless billing combinations, pricing, and service options to choose from.

That’s not all. We also added more billing options, including hourly and variable unit-based billing, and gave you more control over your billing (such as adding multiple billing schedules in a single proposal). Plus, we added proposal options, so you can give clients more choice and upsell services by offering up to three different pricing options.

In addition to evolving our platform, we also released a number of exciting product enhancements – such as our ready-made terms and services templates and our new Discover page – to help you save time and get started with Ignition as quickly as possible.

Our legally vetted, regionalised engagement letter templates are available to customers in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, US, and the UK. To assist customers in helping their clients better navigate the uncertainty caused by COVID-19, we also launched the business continuity planning service library. So whether you’re new to Ignition or simply reviewing your services or terms, you can use our default templates in your client proposals to get started.

Meanwhile, our new Discover page includes a range of educational resources to help new customers get started and onboard more easily. In the future, we plan on making this your go-to place to start making the most out of any new or existing features.

To help further automate your practice, we integrated with Intuit Practice Management (IPM), enabling jobs to be automatically created in IPM once a client accepts your proposal within Ignition.

We also introduced video support for proposals so that you can wow clients with Loom, Vimeo, or YouTube videos, making any information you share much easier to digest. You can insert videos to welcome clients at the start of your proposal as well as right after a client goes ahead and accepts.

In Canada, we launched Pre-Authorized Debit (PAD) as a client payment option to help customers streamline the payment collection process. With PAD, clients can easily enter their direct debit details upfront in your proposals, which means less time chasing overdue invoices and more time helping clients.

In the US, we optimised the payments process to reduce ACH processing times from seven to six business days. In Australia, we partnered with Stripe as our new payment sub-processor to provide customers with a superior payments experience – building on our successful partnership with Stripe in the UK, US, and Canada.

As you can see, we’re getting better each and every day – and these product improvements are only the tip of the iceberg. Overall, in 2020, we released 30+ brand-new features, 350+ enhancements, and squashed 220 bugs – helping you get paid 915,000 times, with over 365,000 proposals accepted across 20 countries.

Best of all, there’s even more to look forward to in 2021! To check out all our product improvements in 2020, visit ‘what’s new’.

New to Ignition? Book a demo with our sales team to see the latest product enhancements in action.

*The New Proposal Editor is generally available in the US and Canada. Customers in other markets (Australia, NZ, UK and South Africa) are welcome to join our public beta program.