How Automated Accounting Services Consolidated Two Firms and Saved $2,000+ a Year

01 · The Challenge

Running two separate accounting entities on Ignition meant paying for two separate subscriptions. There was no way to toggle between the two firms in a single login. Every billing task required switching contexts, and the monthly cost reflected that duplication. Beyond the subscription fees, Monique also noticed that processing times had slowed, meaning money was arriving later than expected.

“I demoed it and had some really good conversations. I was hoping for at least as good an experience and I actually had a better experience.”
Monique Swansen, CEO, Automated Accounting Services

She describes the interface over time as having grown reactively: features were added along the way without a unified design logic, making navigation less intuitive than it once felt. The dashboard was largely fixed, and getting to specific data points required knowing where to look rather than having it surface naturally.

For a firm owner managing recurring clients across two entities, those small inefficiencies added up. They did not make Ignition unworkable, but they made the prospect of a better alternative worth evaluating seriously.

02 · The SolutionWhy Anchor

Monique first heard about Anchor through a trusted peer who had been using the platform and spoke well of it. A peer recommendation from someone whose opinion she trusted was enough to prompt a demo. That demo, combined with strong customer service during the evaluation process, gave her the confidence to act.

The core draw was practical: one login with the ability to toggle between her two firms, and a pricing model that did not require paying twice for the same functionality. She was not looking to find a dramatically different product. She wanted at least the same experience at a better price, with the operational simplicity of managing both firms in one place.

“I was hoping for at least as good an experience. As it turns out, I liked it even better.”
‍Monique Swansen, CEO, Automated Accounting Services

The cleaner interface mattered too. Unlike a platform that had grown by accretion, Anchor felt designed with the full workflow in mind from the start. The service library was easier to navigate. The three-option proposal format was more flexible and faster to customize for individual clients. The activity feed made it easy to see at a glance whether a client had opened a proposal, something that had required more digging before.

Implementation

Monique had a large service library built up over a decade of practice. Before migrating, she used the transition as an opportunity to clean up services she knew she would not carry forward. The ones she was less certain about, she brought in and tidied up later. The import process was straightforward.

The main communication task was notifying existing clients that billing would now come from a different platform. Because white-label email addresses were not yet available when she made the switch, she sent clients a heads-up explaining the change. No engagements were delayed, no clients pushed back, and payments cleared as expected throughout the migration.

She also connected Anchor to her existing automation stack. Via Zapier, a signed proposal now triggers a Slack notification and automatically sets up the new client in Double with all selected services mapped to the appropriate onboarding template. The integration reduced manual handoff steps and brought greater consistency to the onboarding process across both firms.

“Everything got paid out as expected. It was pretty seamless.” Monique Swansen, CEO, Automated Accounting Services

03 · The ResultsDirect Savings

The most direct and measurable outcome was cost savings. By consolidating two Ignition subscriptions into a single Anchor account, and with lower processing fees on top of that, Monique estimates the firm saves $2,000 or more per year. She also began receiving payments faster after the switch, as Anchor’s processing times were meaningfully shorter than what she had experienced toward the end of her time on Ignition.

Beyond the financials, the day-to-day experience of running proposals and managing recurring billing improved in ways that compound over time. Amending an existing client engagement, previously a process that required creating a new agreement from scratch, is now handled by editing the live agreement directly. Changes to services or pricing are picked up automatically in the next billing cycle. Project-based work that once required manual milestone billing now runs with far less intervention.

Most recently, Monique enabled the annual auto price increase feature across repriced clients. She anticipates that routine price adjustments will now happen without requiring a dedicated conversation or process, reducing one more category of recurring administrative work.

The automation stack she built around Anchor has also improved onboarding consistency across both firms. When a client signs, a Slack message confirms the event, and Double receives all the information it needs to initialize the right onboarding workflow automatically. Standardization that previously depended on manual steps now happens without anyone having to remember to do it.