Question

GoProposal vs Practice Ignition and why?

Marshall Martin
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Both companies claim to work well with Karbon, but I’d like to know about your experience and why you chose one over the other.  We’re leaning towards GoProposal, but it appears that most Karbon users using this type of app prefer Practice Ignition.  Does Practice Ignition integrate better?  Is there less manual work in Karbon after signing an engagement? Please share your experience so we can make an informed decision.

Thank you!

5 replies

max
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Userlevel 7
Badge +19

Hi @Marshall Martin, welcome to the Karbon community! 😁

We use GoProposal. I like some things, but I don’t recommend it for these reasons:

  • A few detail items that bug me:
    • If you press enter anywhere while filling out the form, it’s the same as hitting submit. There’s almost always an error, so it doesn’t move you to the next screen, but it’s annoying and demonstrates the lack of attention to detail while designing the app.
    • Adjusting the prices is finicky. It does a little refresh after you adjust the price up or down one dollar. Sometimes the refresh doesn’t go through, and you’ll adjust a few items that don’t actually end up going through.
  • Work sync to Karbon dumps all the work on one client (even if you have multiple entities in the proposal) and assigns all the work to the salesperson with no due date and a start date matching the proposal acceptance date. Lots of clean up to get the work items to the right start and due dates, recurrences, and assignees. It’s almost not worth syncing with Karbon in my opinion, lol.
  • Invoices synced to QBO needed to be set to recurring and payments turned on (if you use that). Our engagements are set up for automatic ACH, so we end up creating a sales receipt in QBO and inputting the client’s submitted ACH information. I often end up deleting the invoice in QBO and starting from scratch with a sales receipt.
  • Emails from the software are pretty ugly.
  • I like the engagement letter generation features (generates engagement letters based on the services selected), however we have some services that are incompatible (attestation services vs. non-attestation services), and there’s no way to add those business rules to the engagement letter, meaning someone could add attestation and non-attestation services to the same engagement letter, which results in contradictory engagement letter language. Bad news for us.

The only integration value I experience from GoProposal:

  • Adds work templates to work in Karbon
  • Looks up contacts in Karbon and QBO when creating proposals

I like the presentation of the proposal and engagement letter PDFs. The other integration features are either value negative or neutral, in my opinion.

 

 

Respect people and continually improve
Ashley Rhoden
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Userlevel 3
Badge +4

We use Ignition...

The one downside for us is that you have to engage every time you want to charge more. For example, if we do an ad-hoc service we can’t just auto bill the client, we have to create an engagement letter that they have to execute. We found a work around, if there are ad-hoc services that are highly likely the client will need we add them as “as-needed” services and select to bill manually. That way the client already accepted them and when we do the work, we can go into Ignition and bill the time without having to create a new EL. 

We have our work templates integrated with Ignition on a 1:1 relationship to the services. The work is then assigned to a “ghost” user in Karbon so we can determine what work is new vs old. I like this type of relationship because we never have to wonder if the work was setup correctly, if the client engaged then we have it in Karbon. We have the same problem as Max in that the work’s start date and end date correlate to the start & end date for the proposal, for us this is something we have to adjust as we are assigning the work to our team. 

In comparision to what Max is saying about GoProposal, I like the emails from within PI, you can share links to the proposal and it sends auto reminders to clients that they need to complete the EL. We have videos that we include with the EL, one when they receive it along with a personalized note about the engagement, a PDF about our timeline and processes, a thank you video when they complete the EL along with another note about what to expect next. It’s a very clean process and allows us to customize to our branding very well. 
 

Overall the customer service at Ignition has always been very helpful if I ever need anything. 

 

 

Marshall Martin
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@max @Ashley Rhoden Thank you both for your valuable comments and insight on these two apps.  It’s greatly appreciated as we try to navigate through this decision making process.  You both shed light on some pros and cons that we weren’t previously aware of and this is very helpful.

D
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My experience with Practice Ignition customer service have been horrible. When I left a bad review of the product and told others of my experience their head of customer service had my account removed and banned me from the platform. If you have a small or minority owned firm I do not recommend working with them. Also, for some reason, the company doesn’t seem to be growing. Their customer base is small and, last time I checked, they’re creeping away from their core brand and trying to broaden the appeal of the product to other professional besides accountants (I don’t like that).

1 star do not recommend 

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