“I Never Looked Back”: Why This Firm Left Ignition After a Decade

For most firm owners, a decade on the same billing platform is a reason to stay put. For Monique Swansen, it was starting to cost her twice.

Running two accounting firms meant running two separate Ignition subscriptions, each with its own login and its own bill. In 2023, the two subscriptions alone came to $2,546, before a dollar of payment processing. Everything lived in two places. To work across both firms, she logged in and out of separate accounts, and she maintained two service libraries that had each grown deep and a little unwieldy over ten years of use.

Monique was not unhappy with Ignition. It had served her well since 2014, when it first moved her off Word and PDF engagement letters. But the interface had aged. Features had been added over the years rather than designed in from the start, so the layout felt disjointed, and getting to the right information took more clicks than it should have. What had once felt cutting edge now felt like a platform she had outgrown.

“I demoed Anchor 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

Why Anchor

Monique had heard about Anchor before she seriously looked at it, but what moved her was a conversation with someone she trusted. A peer she respected was experimenting with the platform at the time, and a good word from someone in her circle carried weight. After a decade on Ignition, Monique was not going to switch on a hunch. As she put it, it would have been devastating to move and have it not work out.

So she demoed Anchor and had what she called some really good conversations with the team. Three things made the case.

The first was consolidation. Anchor let her log in once and toggle between both firms, running everything from one place instead of two separate accounts. The two service libraries could be merged. One login, one platform, one bill.

The second was cost. Anchor charges a flat fee per payment with no subscription, so consolidating two subscriptions into a no-subscription model meant she stopped paying for two of something she could run as one.

The third was the interface. Where Ignition had grown disjointed over years of added features, Anchor felt designed. The layout was more intuitive, the reporting was better, and small things mattered: she could glance at the activity log and tell immediately whether a client had actually opened a proposal. As a newer platform, she felt, it had the benefit of more thought going into how everything fit together up front, rather than being built reactively as the product grew.

Monique's expectation going in was modest. She hoped for an experience at least as good as what she had. What she got, in her words, was better.

Implementation

The part Monique worried about most turned out to be the easy part. Ten years on Ignition had left her with a deep service library covering every scenario her firms had encountered. Her main concern going in was whether all of it would survive the move. It did. She cleaned up the library a little beforehand, retiring services she knew she no longer needed, and brought the rest over without difficulty. What she wasn't sure she'd use, she carried across anyway, knowing Anchor made it easy to tidy up later.

Moving her clients was just as smooth. She updated everyone's payment method ahead of time, then had each client e-sign off on their existing engagement. That was the extent of it. Nobody fell off. Nothing got delayed. Every client signed, and payments went out as expected. After more than a decade of client relationships built on Ignition, the transition cost her no disruption and no lost revenue.

The full switch ran on her timeline, not a scramble. She started writing new engagements in Anchor in July 2023, then converted her existing book by January 2024. Onboarding new clients got simpler on the other side: a signed proposal now triggers a Slack notification and maps the client's agreed services straight into her onboarding workflow through her existing Zapier and Double setup, so nothing has to be re-entered by hand.

The switch paid for itself, and then some. In 2023, Monique's last full year on Ignition, running billing across her two firms cost $5,500: $2,546 in subscriptions plus $2,954 in payment processing. On Anchor, with no subscription to pay, her all-in cost fell to $3,037 in 2024 and $2,526 in 2025. That is a 45% reduction in the first year and 54% by the second, a total software cost cut of nearly $3,000 a year against her old baseline.

The savings came from eliminating duplication. Two Ignition subscriptions became one Anchor account with no subscription fee at all, removing $2,546 in annual cost that had done nothing but let her run two firms as two logins. Processing costs stayed roughly flat, because that is a function of how much she collects, not which platform she collects on. The win was structural: she stopped paying twice.

The gains extended past the invoice. Consolidating both firms into one login ended the switching between separate accounts. Change orders, once a matter of building a whole new engagement, now take a quick edit that flows straight into recurring billing. Renewals and milestone billing that used to need manual attention now largely run themselves. And having recently set up Anchor's automatic annual price increase, Monique has removed the awkward yearly repricing conversation from her calendar entirely, with increases built into the agreement to take effect on their own.