Royalwise sells several different things to several different kinds of buyer, each with its own pricing and payment rhythm: annual, quarterly, and monthly. Alicia uses Anchor across all of it, not as a billing tool but as the layer that sets the terms of each engagement before any money moves.
"We were looking for a solution that really understood professional services as a category, so accounting, HR, consulting. We found that the invoicing tool and ability to communicate on the platform was really a good fit for our industry.”
Alicia Katz Pollock, CEO, Royalwise
Royalwise did not have a billing problem so much as a terms problem. With training packages, bookkeeping engagements, a white-label portal, and an incubator all selling at once, Alicia was managing clients on annual, quarterly, and monthly schedules at the same time, and the hard part was never sending the charge. It was setting and tracking what each client had actually agreed to.
Before Anchor, that ran through QuickBooks Payments and recurring sales receipts. Alicia collected each client's card or bank details herself, first by writing them down on paper, later by accepting emailed PDFs. Neither method was secure, and neither put the client in control of their own information. Tracking which terms applied to which client meant navigating a folder system and opening individual files to find the agreement, then cross-referencing it against the billing schedule by hand.
The limits showed most clearly when clients asked to pay her hands-on training course over time. The course runs $2,000, and building payment plans for it inside QuickBooks was, in Alicia's words, “really cumbersome.” QuickBooks had no clean way to tie a signed agreement to a payment schedule, so there was nothing binding the client to the plan they had verbally agreed to.
There was also no way to hand pricing decisions to the client. Whatever the tier, QuickBooks presented a number and waited for a reaction. As Alicia put it, clients “would just hear your price and then go, that's too much for me.” The tool could execute a charge, but it could not present a client with structured choices, capture their selection, and turn that into a signed, self-running agreement. That gap is what sent her looking.
Why Anchor
What QuickBooks could not do, Anchor was built to do: start the financial relationship at the signed agreement rather than the invoice. For Royalwise, that reframing mattered more than any single feature, because Alicia's whole problem was upstream of billing. She needed to set terms, capture a client's choice, and get a signature before any charge existed.
Anchor closed the specific gaps QuickBooks left open. Payment plans could now be written into a signed agreement, so the guarantee in writing Alicia wanted came standard rather than being something she had to cobble together. Card fees, which QuickBooks made her absorb because it had no mechanism to pass them on, could be moved to the client. And instead of collecting payment details on paper or by PDF, clients entered their own information securely as part of signing.
"The personal relationships I developed with the team actually built the trust. I've been able to get to know the people, and that went a long way for me going into full adoption of Anchor.”
Alicia Katz Pollock, CEO, Royalwise
The decision itself came down to trust as much as capability. Alicia had known Anchor for years through the accounting conference circuit, and had built real relationships with the team along the way.
The contrast with her prior setup is the point worth drawing out for another firm owner: QuickBooks recurring invoices can move money, but they cannot present a client with tiered choices, bind a payment plan to a signature, or pass processing costs to the payer. Those are not billing features. They are agreement features, and they only exist in a tool that begins where Anchor begins.
Implementation
Alicia did not adopt Anchor for one workflow. She built several, which is the clearest evidence of how much of the setup is hers to control rather than the platform's to dictate.
"The vast majority of my clients go for the middle tier. I intentionally make the low level less desirable and the upper tier extra expensive. My middle tier takes the least amount of work for me to manage, so it has the most bang for the buck. ”
Alicia Katz Pollock, CEO, Royalwise
The pattern across all of them is tiered packages. For the white-label training portal, Royalwise built three service levels: a DIY option, a limited-support tier, and full-service implementation. When a firm licenses the portal, it picks the level that fits and signs up, with no negotiation, because everything included at each tier is spelled out on the proposal. She applied the same structure inside the bookkeeping incubator, creating three packages for clients who agreed to participate as case studies: routine file maintenance at the base, quarterly meetings in the middle, and monthly meetings at the top. The tier design is deliberate, and this is the part most firm owners miss. Alicia engineers the packages so the choice steers clients where she wants them.
The result is that the package that is easiest for her to deliver is also the one clients pick on their own. She is not upselling anyone. She is letting the structure do the work, and clients feel like they chose it, because they did.
For the training course, Anchor supplied the piece QuickBooks never could: a signed agreement that documented the payment schedule before any work began, which is what made offering payment plans viable in the first place.
"The fact that they're making the choice, and they're not just accepting your terms, they're choosing their own terms, is gold in onboarding and developing that customer relationship.”
Alicia Katz Pollock, CEO, Royalwise
The clearest result is revenue that would not exist without Anchor. Because Alicia could tie a signed agreement to a payment schedule, she began offering payment plans on her $2,000 training course, and that opened the door to students who could not pay in full upfront. Over three years, that is about a dozen students who enrolled on a plan and, in her words, would not have signed up otherwise.
At $2,000 each, a dozen students represents roughly $24,000 in course revenue over three years that Royalwise would not have captured without a way to structure and guarantee payment over time. This is not revenue that shifted or sped up. It is net-new, and it traces directly to a capability QuickBooks did not have.
"All the people who opted for the payment plan wouldn't have signed up otherwise. That's people I get to train that otherwise would have fallen through the cracks.”
Alicia Katz Pollock, CEO, Royalwise
The second result is margin, engineered through packaging. With clients self-selecting from three tiers, the vast majority choose the middle option, which Alicia designed to be her lowest-effort, highest-margin package. The effect is that her most profitable service to deliver is also her most popular, without a sales conversation to get there. Client choice and firm margin point in the same direction by design.
The third result is cost. Moving card payments onto Anchor's flat $5-per-payment model, and passing processing fees to clients rather than absorbing them, saves Royalwise a confirmed $12,000 a year in merchant fees. It sits alongside a quieter operational gain: agreements now live in one place she can scroll through rather than a folder system she has to dig through, and clients enter their own payment details securely as part of signing.
Conclusion
Royalwise runs several distinct businesses under one roof, and Anchor's value there was not that it billed clients. It was that it let Alicia set the terms of every engagement before any money moved, then run those terms on their own.
That shift shows up in the numbers that matter most to a firm owner. Payment plans built on signed agreements brought in roughly $24,000 in course revenue over three years that would not have existed otherwise. Tiered packages steer the majority of clients into the option that is most profitable for Royalwise to deliver, without a single upsell conversation. And moving payments onto Anchor's flat-fee model saves the firm $12,000 a year in processing costs. Each of those traces back to the same source: an agreement that carries the pricing, the choice, and the commitment, and executes on all three.
For a firm owner weighing the switch, the lesson from Royalwise is less about automation than about control. The client chooses, the terms are set in writing, and the economics are decided at signing rather than negotiated later.
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