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- Record your meetings. Ethan Cooney and Ben Walker both said the client meeting holds the context everything else is built from.
- Transcript to proposal. Ethan showed Ignition pulling services, and any prices mentioned, from a meeting transcript into a draft proposal.
- Proposals from a prompt. Ben showed Claude creating a new proposal and a 10% roll-forward through the Ignition MCP, each in under a minute.
- Find the work you’re not billing. Ethan had AI compare a meeting with a client’s current agreement and list out-of-scope work worth proposing.
- A person sets the fee. Both said every proposal and price is still checked by a person before it goes out.
Ethan Cooney, who leads sales and partnerships at Ignition across APAC and the UK, showed Ignition’s built-in AI features. Ben Walker, a chartered accountant and founder of Inspire Accountants in Brisbane, which Ethan said looks after about 300 family groups, showed what his firm runs through Claude and the Ignition MCP. They focused on one workflow: scoping, pricing and getting a proposal to a client after a meeting.
The onboarding workflow
Ethan listed the steps: the meeting and notes, a scope of work, the engagement letter, waiting for signature, AML and KYC checks, authorities and logins, a payment method, the work, chasing information, invoicing and chasing payment. He said this still takes hours per client group a year at about 80% of the firms he speaks with.
Ben said that in his firm only the client meeting is manual now, with people reviewing some steps. His advice to firms on Ignition was to use the built-in payments for every client, not just some, to get headspace back.
Record the meeting first
Ethan said both workflows depend on the meeting, so his one takeaway was to record it. Ben said 99% of his firm’s meetings are online and recording is enforced, because everyone forgets. For in-person meetings he suggested moving online where possible, and noted that pocket recorders on one audio stream may struggle to tell accountant from client.
Ethan’s demo: transcript to proposal
In Ignition’s proposal creator, Ethan uploaded a meeting transcript. It extracted ten services, took any prices mentioned in the meeting and filled the rest from his service library. He removed services that didn’t belong, adjusted the monthly and one-off fees, and changed a quoted range to a minimum price. He said a refine button takes plain-English instructions.
He then ran the price insights tool, which he said benchmarks a service against Ignition’s data set and offers low, medium and high bands, a justification and upsell ideas; the user chooses whether to apply anything. He stressed that the final fee and how much detail the client sees stay with the firm. He also showed a new library of pre-built prompts in Ignition, and a new branded, mobile-friendly proposal he said can be produced from a transcript in under a minute and a half.
Ben’s demo: proposals through the MCP
Working in his firm’s live Ignition account with a demo client, Ben prompted Claude to create a proposal for a new company setup and monthly BAS. Claude drew on his Ignition service library and on pricing guides and policies the firm keeps in Notion, and created the draft in under a minute; a team member then checks it. His favourite setting is requiring payment details on every proposal, so clients can’t accept without them and project work is paid up front. He said Ignition handles AML checks after acceptance, and Karbon handles the onboarding work.
His second prompt rolled last year’s proposal forward with 10% added, including updated descriptions, in under 30 seconds, where he said it took five or six minutes when the MCP first came out. He said to always keep a person in the loop, since it can get things wrong, especially at first.
Ben said his managers price and send proposals, working from a menu of services and a pricing calculator, after a partner has walked them through dozens of proposals.
Finding unbilled work
Ethan asked AI to compare an existing client’s meeting with what they had agreed and how he had priced similar work. In his demo it found five services of extra work, priced at or below existing rates, and offered to draft the proposals. Ben said work slips through the cracks every year, and that a prompt follow-up after a meeting gives clients the chance to say yes.
Ben said speed matters in sales: a proposal 30 or 40 minutes after the meeting beats a Word document two days later. He compared it with buying a shed, where the business with the faster, clearer sales process won his order and made him trust its delivery too.
Closing
Trent described a firm whose partner questioned meeting notes from calls run by team members and, he said, found £60,000 of opportunities across the first three meetings.
Key moments
“There’s so much rich context in these conversations.” — Ethan Cooney
“Even if you’re not automating all these AI things after that, just please record your client meetings.” — Ben Walker
“How much work is slipping through the cracks for us all every year?” — Ben Walker
“With AI, I feel you’re limited by your imagination and your time to implement.” — Ben Walker
- About 80% of firms Ethan speaks with still spend hours per client group a year on onboarding
- Under 30 seconds for Ben’s roll-forward, down from five or six minutes when the MCP launched
- £60,000 of opportunities across three meetings, from the firm Trent described
The fees on screen were demo figures for sample clients, not a guide to what to charge. Each firm sets its own.
The full session, lightly edited for readability. Click a time to jump the replay to that moment.
Transcript powered by-
Trent McLaren: This morning's 10am main event is Pricing and onboarding with AI: easy for you and your clients. I'm joined by Ethan Cooney and Ben Walker. Well, I'll hand over to you and I'll let you guys take us away.
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Ethan Cooney: Awesome. Thanks, mate. And hello, everyone. Really enjoyed the sessions so far. Thanks, Trent and the team, for having us on as part of the summit. I was saying earlier, I found it really difficult to think about what to talk about today, because there's such a wide gamut of, I don't know, willingness to play with AI, knowledge about AI. It's kind of difficult to do a one-size catch-all sort of session, but today we've gone pretty practical, and we're going to focus on just an onboarding workflow that all of you would experience with your clients. So, scoping and pricing work, getting an agreement or a proposal out to a client after you've met with them.
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Ethan Cooney: I'm gonna spend a bit of time showing you some of the native or inbuilt AI features that we have at Ignition, and Ben is going to go through and give you some more advanced MCP stuff and share a few examples of how it's working in his firm. As Trent said, please ask us questions in the chat. Love to have some engagement through the session as well, and answer as much as we can.
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Ethan Cooney: Just by way of brief intro, I've been working in this space for just over 10 years now, been with Ignition for 7, so I head up our partnerships and sales here across APAC and the UK as well. I was just saying to Trent earlier, it seems like we've seen more of each other in the UK than in Australia. We are launching a ton of stuff at the moment. It's difficult to keep up with, but it's a really exciting space to be in, so excited to share some of that with you today.
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Ethan Cooney: And Ben, really stoked to have you here with us. For those who don't know Ben, he's a CA and founder of Inspire Accountants here in Brisbane with me, which he still runs today. They look after around 300 family groups of business owners, all on Ignition, for a long time. I think you're one of the first users who came on board. Since earlier this year, he's also been training other firms through High Performance Accountants with some amazing content. We've done quite a few webinars together, whether it's on AML or AI or pricing, or firm operations. There's a ton of really cool stuff that he talks about.
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Ethan Cooney: And the great thing is that all of the stuff Ben's going to show you today is running in his firm. It's not just a demo environment, it's not a sandbox. He's actually got these workflows up and running in real life with clients. So he's told me a couple of examples here. He's got Claude preparing the first draft of monthly BAS and IAS work papers. More recently, the full year-end process for business owner family groups, with accountant review. Claude's also drafting all of his proposals and renewals in Ignition, which is really cool, so we'll have a look at some of that today. But Ben, how are you doing?
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Ben Walker: Yeah, good mate. Ready to roll, ready to roll.
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Ethan Cooney: Ready to roll. Before we get stuck into it, and this is going to come up at the end, but what have you got for us today as a bit of a takeaway?
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Ben Walker: Yeah, I mean, there's a limited amount of time to go through some of this stuff, but I have included a heap of the prompts I'll show today, but also some others as well, in a way that you can access if you want to jump on that. And I've also got another free course for people who've played around with a bit of ChatGPT, but haven't explored Claude, want to know what the buzz is. I've done a free short course on that one too. There's a link in the chat box, but I'll post that at the end as well.
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Ethan Cooney: We have a lot within the product, so from qualifying and capturing interest through to managing sales pipelines, sending contracts. Really, sending proposals and engagements and collecting payment was the bread and butter of what we do, but now, with the possibility of AI, there's a whole ton of stuff that's sort of opened up for us.
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Ethan Cooney: So, the four areas I'm going to look at are how we can price with confidence using data in our engagements, and how we can turn conversations into proposals. We've launched an integration with Vinyl on this, actually, as well, where you're able to really quickly draft scope of works, engagement letters, proposals based on conversations that you've had with clients. You can also drag and drop other recordings in, transcripts in, and the like. Find additional billing opportunities, so where there's new work that surfaced as a result of a meeting or an inbound request from a client, and then talk to some of the ways that you can work smarter with other tools in your ecosystem.
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Ethan Cooney: Here's a quick view of all of the embedded AI tools that we have within the product, and I'm actually going to jump in and show you what some of these look like now, to give you a real practical view of how this works. So, being able to create services, being able to generate descriptions for those services. It's a really common thing we get asked: how do I actually communicate in a concise way the value of what I'm offering to a client? So you can use the inbuilt service generator to do that. Price Insights actually uses a closed set of large-scale industry price guides to help you get a more accurate view of how you're pricing your agreement, so that's using an AI engine that you can prompt and get really accurate benchmarks and results. Proposal creator, so you can actually build whole proposals using it as well. You can refine proposals by using plain English prompts in there as well.
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Ethan Cooney: It's pretty exciting stuff, so I'm going to jump in and show you what this looks like, but before I do that, I just want to talk about this workflow a little bit, which is probably familiar to all of you, and I feel like we've been talking about it for many years now, but we are still speaking with firms who are spending hours per client group on these workflows around onboarding. So having the meeting, jotting down the notes, or hopefully transcribing the notes if you're there yet, finding time to generate a scope of work or a proposal. If they're not doing that, perhaps sending out a summary via email. Finding time to draft that engagement letter. Perhaps you're using a template or something at the moment, and waiting for signature on that from a client. Then starting or commencing our AML and KYC checks.
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Ethan Cooney: We're then commencing onboarding, so getting all of our authorities and login information and stuff. We're then hopefully capturing a payment method upfront. Then we're able to actually start the work, inevitably chase clients for more information at some point, complete that work, get around to doing our invoicing, and then chasing up payment. This is still 80% of firms that we speak with, that are spending hours and hours, or people on their team are spending hours and hours, on this per group per year. So I'd love to know in the chat, if you're happy to share, how are you saving time on these tasks? I'd love to know what's worked really well for you, what you're using in your practice, if there's any silver bullets that you've found to help save some time on this. And Ben, I'd love your thoughts. What did this look like for you in the early days?
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Ben Walker: Yeah, so I was lucky to find Ignition literally in the first few months of starting my firm, back in 2013, and obviously a few of these features have been built in since then. But I'd say the vast majority of these, in fact, the only thing that's manual now really is obviously the client meeting, and then there's some automations right through. I mean, there's still human-in-the-loop review for a few of these steps, but one thing to the next to the next is a beautiful way that Ignition helps us with all that.
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Ben Walker: And even I still talk with accounting firm owners who are very much Ignition users, but they're still not using things like payments that are built in, or they do some payments through Ignition for maybe their MRR clients, and some once-offs are happening the old way. And my recommendation is just lean in, just have one way of doing things for all your clients, and you'll just get so much headspace back, and probably some hours back in the admin team as well.
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Ethan Cooney: Love it. Thanks, Lisa, for jumping in the chat too. You're the only one there, so if anyone else wants to contribute, please feel free. So let's start with this. We're going to show you an example of how AI can really do the legwork here. So reading meeting context, either for a new client or an existing client that we're doing a review for. Sorting out the in-scope from out-of-scope work. This is another big area, or a blind spot, for a lot of firms, where we're not sure what the client's actually agreed to, and what we're doing is just adding more and more work, and kind of hoping that they'll be happy to pay the fee, or writing off a chunk of it and just charging what we charged them last year, plus 5%.
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Ethan Cooney: We're looking at how we price from historical agreements, from pricing worksheets, so internal stuff, connecting it up to Notion, connecting it up to your internal work papers there, or sense checking it with the industry benchmarks, and then drafting that proposal and all the follow-ups as well. Tanya's in the chat as well, which is great. Templates, payments through Xero. Jay's also now using Content Snare, which is a great tool. So thanks, everyone, for jumping in there, that's cool.
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Ethan Cooney: The key thing here is that you're still making all these decisions. To Ben's point, there's humans in the loop for review at all times. The final fee that's put in front of a client, what you don't show, how much detail you show, all of that's in your control still, but all of this stuff we're able to take the legwork out of. So these are kind of the two workflows we're going to talk about today. And I'll skip across into the app in a second. Both rely fairly heavily on the context of the client meeting, so if there's one takeaway, and I think the Vinyl crew would be in alignment with me here, it's record your meetings. There's so much rich context in these conversations. This is where the bleed happens, to the point Trent made in the earlier session: how much of this is lost and not documented. So this is the number one thing. How are you managing all of that, Ben, particularly for in-person stuff?
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Ben Walker: Yeah, so the good thing is 99% of our meetings are online, which is great, and we essentially enforce recording through the apps that we use to record. The benefit there, and maybe Trent touched on this earlier, is you've just got so much rich context from those client meetings. And everyone forgets stuff. I mean, I probably could tell you some key points of a tax planning meeting six months ago, but not the whole thing. And so I just feel like you have to be recording. Even if you're not automating all these AI things after that, just please record your client meetings.
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Ben Walker: I've seen mixed options with in-person. People get the pocket devices, people get all sorts. I'd just say shift to as much online as you can, but there still are options. I think Vinyl's got a feature where you could even pull up a Teams meeting. The danger you've got with those pocket apps is, how does it tell who you are? Who's the accountant and who's the client? That's the risk where you've only got one audio stream, but I reckon AI is pretty smart at working that out anyway.
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Ethan Cooney: Yeah, I think a lot of the new tech around voice identification is pretty on point now. So it can do that. Awesome. Well, let's get into it. This is probably familiar to a lot of you who are on the call that are using it, but there's some new stuff here that you might not have seen. And then, as I said, Ben's going to talk through some MCP use cases and go a little bit deeper on this stuff. On the left here, we've got our central command hub. Oh, I've got a little bit of a sneak peek of what's coming there, so I should move off that screen pretty quickly.
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Ethan Cooney: But we've got our proposal creator here. So this is just creating a new proposal. You'll notice a button which says Refine with AI in the top right there. But what if I'm starting from scratch? I know that I need to get an agreement out, either for the new year, or maybe I've just met with a client and I need some services here, and something to start with. So this tool just lets you upload an existing scope of work, an agreement, a meeting transcript, any sort of similar document, and we're able to extract all of those services and add them to the proposal. So let me just find a transcript here.
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Ben Walker: Yes, I didn't know you had this until you showed me yesterday. It's amazing.
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Ethan Cooney: Yeah, that's it. It's so difficult to keep up with it. So let me just show you here. It's going to take a couple of seconds, and it will extract all of these services from this transcript of a meeting that I've had with my client. It's also going to pull in the exact prices, if any, that have been mentioned. If prices haven't been mentioned, it's going to pull those prices from the library. So I can see here, add these 10 services to the proposal, or if I'm sense checking this and going, you know what, that doesn't look right, we're not going to do the FBT return, we're just going to add those eight services to the proposal. Lisa, you can actually use the MCP to clean up your service library as well, to make that really easy.
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Ethan Cooney: So you can see here, it's already built this full proposal for me. I might want to remove that FY26 catch-up, so that's a bit of a funky one that's come in, but everything else looks on point. It's pulled in some automatic prices there, which I can adjust, which are being billed on a monthly basis. So I might go $550 and $250, and then we've got some one-time services that are billed up front, so for payroll setup, for a trust and company setup, and a structure review as well, which it's given me a price range for. So I might have said in the meeting to the client, it's going to be around $4,000 to $6K. If I wanted to shift that to a minimum price, and say, hey, it's going to be from four and a half, or quote them something more concrete, I can make that change too.
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Ethan Cooney: Once I've done that, I might want to cross-reference this against my pricing library or my own pricing matrix, which you can do through the MCP if this is in a draft proposal state. I might also want to analyze this against the industry, so this might be, you know, CBD clients, large dental practice, 3 million turnover. And what that's going to do is look at the large-scale data set that sits behind Ignition and give you a broad price benchmark of what you could potentially charge for this service. It's going to give you some justification. It's going to give you typically three options, like low, medium and high bands for that particular service, and it's going to give you some upsell suggestions as well, if you wanted to do the gold tier thing and add more value into it.
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Ethan Cooney: So you can see it's given me a bit of a price range here. It's told me that I'm on the upper end of that price range, it's given me a positioning, a service comparison, some profiles, and some insights there, as well as three tiers that I could potentially look at. I can prompt that again and get more refined. I can choose to apply the price, or I can leave it as is. So Ben, I'm curious to hear, with this workflow at the moment, are you going to start using this now that I've showed you yesterday?
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Ben Walker: So a lot of our work's done through the MCP itself, which, because it's got other connectors, straight to email or other things that our Claude can reference, we'll probably use that. But I think that just talks to where we're at with our AI implementation at Inspire. But again, I'm very impressed. If I was in the early stages of AI adoption, the drag a transcript in here to do a proposal generation is wild. That's amazing.
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Ethan Cooney: And I'm just putting in a prompt here, that's like a refinement prompt. So if I want to change anything here, I can speak to it in plain English. That was just like, let's do an in-depth review where we understand COGS and pricing. We can build a service for it. We can edit the request, we can say change the fee. All of this can be done within Ignition without connecting it to a third-party tool. So for those of you who aren't using, or comfortable using, those connectors, Claude or GPT, or what have you, and plugging that into these sorts of tools, there's a fair bit that you can leverage within the apps themselves. I think Karbon's got their own AI thing that's come out as well. A lot of tools are building their own AI assistants that are coming out alongside it.
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Ethan Cooney: In fact, at Ignition we've just built this tool and launched it, it's called Parks, which is our own AI platform, which enables you to use a whole marketplace of pre-saved prompts, so you're not having to come up with them on your own. So you can see here there's a service brochure builder, a cleanup of duplicate clients, a service library cleanup. There's a whole ton of pre-built prompts here that you can access as part of that. This has only just come out in recent weeks. So I think you'll find that, more and more, the tools that you're using are going to have playbooks, predefined pathways that you can navigate if you're not inclined to build it from scratch yourself.
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Ethan Cooney: Cool. Ben, I might just show what an awaiting acceptance proposal looks like, and then I will pass it over to you. So what does all this look like at the client side? And this is a really new thing, actually, that we've just launched. This is a new proposal, what we're calling a branded proposal. And so you can go from that transcript, which I showed you earlier, to something that looks like this in under a minute and a half. And to me, I think this looks really sleek. It's all mobile responsive as well, so you can see what it looks like on your client's phone, as well as if they're viewing it on a tablet or on a computer.
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Ethan Cooney: You can switch between the two while you're editing it as well. You can see this is all built with AI. You can include client testimonials, you can include team profiles and headshots of your team. It's already pulled in all of the scope of work, the services, all the detail there as well, which is pretty cool. So it's all the entities within the agreement, because this is a group engagement. It's included a fee for our onboarding and AML. It's got our ongoing services, there's a ton of services in here. It's also got optional services, so clients can opt in to say, yes, I want to add some individual tax returns as well, for instance. And then it's got our typical pricing view here, and the sign and acceptance piece after adding payment details.
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Ethan Cooney: So this is all fully customizable, but you can basically create this entire proposal without even logging into Ignition, and if you do log in, you can do it just off the back of a transcript, which I think is super powerful. So hopefully, to my earlier point, you can see all of these items here. This knocks out a good 80%, aside from meeting with the client, to Ben's point, getting the login details and some of the onboarding stuff from them, and actually doing the work. So I think that's a win. Love to hear any feedback too in the chat. I'm trying to keep up. Ben?
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Ben Walker: Yeah, just a lot of the sales admin is just removed with this sort of stuff, even the post-sale admin.
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Ethan Cooney: Absolutely, absolutely. I might hand it over to you, mate. You've got a couple more in-depth use cases to show us.
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Ben Walker: Yeah, alright. I'll talk a little bit more to the MCP side of things. When Ethan said you don't even have to open Ignition to draft the proposal, that's the sort of thing I'm about to show now. Just bear with my sharing. I also am working live on my own client file. My Ignition file is the Inspire one, I don't have a demo like Ethan does, so I'll just have to take the sharing slowly.
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Ben Walker: Now, what I've got here is a pre-done prompt, but basically, I've got a new client, Kestrel Plumbing, with the director, and again, I've called the client webinar demo, so I can easily identify what to get rid of after today. They need a new company set up and then monthly BAS. I've just given a fairly straightforward example here of a proposal that I want Ignition to create. Now, there are connectors you have to set up before you go and throw that into Claude. We've also got a ton of context and other connectors, such as Notion, which is where we store all our policies and even pricing guides and things like that. And we've also got these service libraries set up in Ignition, which is what this should come from.
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Ben Walker: See, it's already done. The proposal checks out at just over 5K for 12 months. I'm creating the draft now. Bang! I mean, that's not even 60 seconds. And she's done.
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Ben Walker: Cool. So I just clicked the link straight from Claude. If we go over to services, it's got company incorporation. It's pulled our pricing from our library. I don't think we've analyzed this in a while, I'll just click that for the sake of it and come back in a sec. We've also got a monthly BAS service line in Ignition. We've also got these service codes that we prefix as well, and that's just another further cross-check, or it links with our menu of services that we maintain in Notion, that reflects in our service library as well. And yeah, basically it's ready to go. So we've got services billed every month here, a once-off company incorporation here. I mean, there's your example. So the team would just check this is all set up.
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Ben Walker: Now, my favorite part of Ignition here is the payment section. We want to make sure Require payment details is on for every proposal that we send, and that means that they can't actually accept the proposal without, currently, only direct debit details popped in, given the old surcharge ban. We all love that one, I'm sure. And then we get paid, essentially, before we do the project-based work, and invoicing and payment are all taken care of. So that's the first workflow. Should I hand back to you?
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Ethan Cooney: I think maybe go crack on with the second one if you like, but in the meantime, with your onboarding tasks that follow this proposal's acceptance, what does that look like for you? Have you got automation set up to go and request docs from clients? How have you tackled that piece?
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Ben Walker: Yeah, so AML is built in. That was a company incorporation, which tracks AML. So Ignition looks after the AML checks on the back of the proposal acceptance. And in terms of onboarding, we've obviously got templates for work, we use Karbon for our practice manager and workflow manager, and then there's also standard info request stuff that's built into that as well. So that's at a high level.
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Ben Walker: Now let me get this share screen thing going again. And prompt number two, what's prompt number two? All right, so this is basically a roll forward of last year's proposal workflow. We do bulk renewals at tax planning time, so this isn't one we would use ourselves very often. We might have the odd once-a-year client that we'd entertain. So the example here is basically take last year's proposal, add 10% to it, and see what it does. Oh my goodness, this is so fast. I'm even surprised. About 2 or 3 months ago, when the MCP first came out, it was like 5 or 6 minutes. This is, I don't even think that was 30 seconds.
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Ben Walker: Wow, all right, so I mean, it's just nailed it. So let's go and have a look in Ignition again, which, again, it's about five clicks to get there, but we'll get there.
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Ethan Cooney: We should really set you up with a demo account for this, shouldn't we?
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Ben Walker: Cool, looks like we've got it here.
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Ethan Cooney: Catch-up accounts 2026 demo. Is that what you're looking at?
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Ben Walker: Yep. We've got Ironbark Electrical. If we go over to services, what we should see this year is a total of five and a half grand ex GST, which is coming through correct. Awesome. And even the description, it'll pull forward as well, change it to the 2026 year instead of 2025, and a couple of BASs in there too. And again, you always want human in the loop for this stuff. It can get stuff wrong, particularly the first few times. There are sometimes niggles with how it all plays out, but overall, they're not very complex prompts. It does know me pretty well, it knows Inspire pretty well, so that might be helping this, but overall, massive time saver.
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Ethan Cooney: Yeah, absolutely.
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Ben Walker: Particularly as our accountants handle the sales, obviously the new clients and existing, anything we can do to help those client managers with freeing up time in their calendar is paramount for us.
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Ethan Cooney: So, are you reviewing every proposal or price that goes out to a client before it's sent, or have you given that whole workflow to your managers?
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Ben Walker: Yeah, that's with our managers, based on a heap of training, and also it builds off menus of services and a pricing calculator. When we're in the process of training someone up, their manager, usually a partner, will spend a lot of time walking through dozens of proposals first, before they hand the reins over for them to go and price it up. And maybe for the tricky ones, they do get a review from the manager as well.
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Ethan Cooney: Cool. Yeah, that's great. I think this sort of thing is so valuable, just again to show another example of the context that you can pull from a transcript. But even if you're just copying and pasting notes from a meeting, you can get Ignition, or through the MCP, you can get it to cross-reference what the client's already agreed to. So for this one, I just said, I've just met with an existing client, we've identified some new services, can you look at what's been agreed, how I've priced them, and what opportunities there might be to adjust scope. Ensure you look at other agreements, how I've priced them, to get as accurate a result as possible.
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Ethan Cooney: And what it's done is it's found almost four grand there of realistic extra work for this year across five services, all priced at or below existing rates. So it said, look, the current engagement is this, it's $1,000 a month. What's urgent? Payday Super fix, our WorkCover wage declaration and reconciliation. Here's how we priced it, 12 hours at this out-of-scope hourly rate. You can see what's been excluded within their engagement terms. FY27 planning as well. So then it will ask you, do you want me to draft both of those proposals in Ignition? Which is really cool.
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Ben Walker: I just think this is gold. How much work is slipping through the cracks for us all every year? How many opportunities are there for us to get in front of our clients with, hey, in our meeting you mentioned this, I thought I'd send you a proposal, here's the price, let me know if you're interested in going ahead with it.
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Ethan Cooney: Martienne, yes, doing everything through Claude. You can do it through ChatGPT as well, if you'd like. Do you guys use Copilot, Ben, internally?
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Ben Walker: No. We're here to use the serious one. I know there's plenty of people who use Copilot, but no. Call me opinionated, but I've heard way too many mixed messages. I had to play with it myself in the earlier days.
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Ethan Cooney: So again, in about 30 seconds, I've got renewals here for both of those agreements, which is really cool. I can open those directly in the proposal editor, which is what Ben was sharing before. You can see here, it's going to open up that proposal for me, ready to rock and roll with the Payday Super fix and WorkCover stuff, with those new services for that client.
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Ben Walker: So good. And just keep in mind as well, this is less accounting and more sales. If you've done a bit of training or work in sales, the quicker you can get proposals to clients, there's a correlation to a quicker decision, and they feel the relationship with someone who just acts and sends exactly what they're asking for. And that's where things like taking the transcript, whacking it through here, and literally within 30 or 40 minutes from the meeting finishing, they've got a proposal in their email, versus, if they're going for other quotes at other accounting firms, someone who takes a day or two to get the proposal out, and maybe it's a Word or an email proposal. I mean, you're just going to win.
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Ben Walker: And I go back to my experience of buying a shed. I know this is really wild to compare it to accounting, but I reached out to Titan, which is a really well-known shed builder or brand, but their sales process was shocking. They were subbing out work, and that made me a bit uncomfortable. They didn't follow me up. And I went to one I hadn't heard of before, great Google reviews, really good process, really good price. They didn't sub out concrete or things like that, all in one. And just really quick, and I just thought, look, if they've got really smart systems with sales, they've probably got really smart systems with delivery as well. Hopefully it's not just all on the front end, though. But I just feel like there's such a correlation to that. And it was a real good business lesson for me to go, cool, we need our systems at both sales and delivery to be smoking hot.
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Ethan Cooney: Yeah, absolutely. Cool. I'm going to share a little guide here. I know you've probably had a thousand QRs thrown at you on these sessions the last two days, but this is a guide that we put together on use cases and prompts and stuff that you can use, on this concept of sentence to proposal in one step, or transcript to proposal in one step. And then, Ben, I'm just going to flash up your couple of resources there, again, after what we've gone through today. So you've got a couple there that are free, one's with a code, and I think you mentioned it in the chat there as well. There's a couple of starter prompts that people can just copy and paste into their own instance, right? Does that include what we've just gone through?
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Ben Walker: Yeah, and a few others. I saw in the chat box the old service library cleanup in Ignition. That's prompt number six in the Ignition MCP starter prompts in the middle there. And I think there's nine in total that people can play around with. With AI, I feel you're limited by your imagination and your time to implement. So hopefully I deal with the imagination part by giving you those 9 starter prompts of how you might be able to test the Ignition MCP.
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Trent McLaren: You're crushing it. If anyone's got questions, you're welcome to ask things of Ben and Ethan.
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Ethan Cooney: What do you think? We went pretty practical. I know that folks were showing some more advanced agentic stuff over the last two days, but hopefully this has inspired you all.
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Trent McLaren: Practical is where we need to be. I think, particularly coming off my session, which was a bit more high level, this is a much better way to bring everyone back to reality. So if you're sitting in the audience, feel free to hit that react button and show some applause and love to both Ben and Ethan. I saw some comments, was it Annie? Did you say this is blowing your mind? Absolutely. This is the kind of stuff we're talking about. This is what it's all about, ladies and gents. It's showing you what you can do with it all.
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Trent McLaren: So basically, they looked at the meeting context. Sorry, I'll step back. The partner was not on the meeting. The team member, the accountant, was running the call, and like all things, they run the call, they cover the things they want to cover. The client mentioned a few things in passing, and the team member was like, oh, okay, that's interesting, but I'm just going to focus on the things I need to focus on. The partner came through and then asked questions of the meeting notes, and uncovered £60,000 worth of opportunities across the first 3 meetings they ran that on.
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Trent McLaren: But yeah, you can do this with obviously lots of other ways as well. And then that's a one-click proposal creation on the other side of that flow, right? It's found the opportunity, drafted the proposal, and then you have the conversation with the client on the other side.
- Record every client meeting, and move in-person meetings online where you can.
- Clean up your service library so AI has the right services and prices to draw on.
- Test transcript-to-proposal on one new client and check every service and fee before it goes out.
- Require payment details on acceptance if your proposal tool supports it.
- Review last year’s agreements against recent meetings for out-of-scope work you haven’t proposed.
Shared by the speakers and in the session chat.
- Ben Walker's free prompts, course and workshop
The prompts from the session (code IGNITION, which the button applies for you), a free ChatGPT to Claude course, and a 1 December workshop on building your own email assistant. The service library clean-up prompt is prompt 6.
- Vinyl and Ignition integration
Shared by Ethan Cooney. He also said Ignition’s new proposal style is in Labs, under branded proposals.
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Ignition
The proposal, engagement and payments platform both speakers used throughout
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Ignition MCP
How Ben has Claude create and roll forward proposals without opening Ignition
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Claude
Ben's AI, connected to Ignition, Notion and email
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Notion
Where Inspire keeps its policies, pricing guides and menu of services
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Karbon
Inspire's practice and workflow management, used for onboarding tasks
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Vinyl
Ethan mentioned Ignition's integration for drafting proposals from meeting conversations
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Ben's starter prompts
Nine Ignition MCP prompts he shared; the service library clean-up is prompt six
About this session
For most firms, a new client means a quote, a proposal, an engagement letter, then a week of chasing signatures, ID and bank details. Each step is small. Together they eat hours per client, and the client feels every one of them.
In this session, Ethan Cooney walks through how AI fits into pricing and onboarding in 2026, shown live on screen from first quote to signed engagement.
You’ll see:
- How AI can help scope and price work, and where a person still makes the final call
- What the client sees at each step, and which follow-ups can run on their own
- Where firms tend to get stuck when they set it up
- What to measure in your own firm to know if it’s working
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Ethan Cooney
Sales & Partnerships Manager, APAC & EMEA, Ignition
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Ben Walker
Founder, Inspire Accountants
These notes leave out the detail. For the full session, watch the replay. What speakers said is shared for information, not as professional advice.