One of the most important systems in your accountancy firm is your engagement system. The reason for this is because there’s actually only two ways that you can grow your accountancy firm. There’s only two ways that you can make more money; Either get more clients or give more value to the clients that you’ve already got.
Your engagement system is fundamental to achieving this growth and to do it well, it needs to:
- Price profitably
- Be able to generate the proposals whereby you agree the services and the fees that your clients will pay for those services
- Generate the letter of engagement
- Get it digitally signed off by the client
- And then generate the invoice and the payment after that.
So that’s the full engagement system and you now need to look at the ecosystem of technology and assemble the very best engagement system for yourself.
OUR ENGAGEMENT SYSTEM
When I first became a director of my accountancy place, we couldn’t assemble the technology to do everything that we wanted to do, and that was why we ended up having to develop GoProposal.
The way it works in our firm and how we’ve helped hundreds of other accountancy firms around the world, is by using GoProposal for:
- The Pricing
- Generating the Proposals
- The Letter of Engagement (and the digital signature), at which point we hand over into Xero/QuickBooks, and that handover is then done.
What we don’t keep doing is keep passing the invoice into Xero every single month. Why would we want to do that? Xero is perfectly capable of generating the invoicing every single month itself. So we hand the invoice into Xero, and from there you turn it into a recurring, repeating invoice and Xero will handle the invoicing from there on.
You then use Xero to trigger the payment in incredible direct-debit systems like GoCardless or IntegraPay.
This then enables you to amend your invoice in Xero each month because, for example, let’s say your client has got an extra member of staff on payroll or perhaps their bookkeeping workload has increased, all you need to do is make the adjustment in Xero and then automatically, that fee’s going to be deducted from the client by GoCardless or by IntegraPay.
This was the tech stack that we always wanted in our firm and by developing it ourselves, we’re now helping other accountancy firms to achieve the same thing.
Most recently, we’ve had our Xero integration enhanced whereby you can now specify the branding theme that you want to be applied to both your monthly invoices and to your one-off invoices.
The branding theme will then trigger off the correct payment mechanism within either GoCardless or IntegraPay, which created the very best experience for us; We’re able to take the best of breed technology that’s out there and make it work together for the growth of our firm.
Love to hear your comments below and in case you missed the video, here it is for ya, enjoy the bloopers.. 🤦🏻♂️👇🏻
