How Solving the Books Cut New Client Onboarding Time by 90% with Anchor

01 · The Challenge

Amanda started the firm around the same time Anchor was becoming available to the market, which means she has built her billing and client onboarding process on Anchor from the beginning. Over time, as her pricing philosophy and service model evolved through involvement in professional communities like Woodard, she integrated Anchor more deeply into how she scopes, prices, and onboards new clients.

Before Amanda had a fully built-out proposal workflow, bringing on a new client was a slow, manual process. Each lead required her to think through scope and pricing from scratch, draft a proposal, and communicate terms before any work could begin. She estimates the full process, from first contact to signed agreement, consumed 10 or more hours per client engagement.

The pricing piece was particularly time-consuming. Without established templates or packages, she had to recalculate fees for each prospect individually. And with billing disconnected from agreements, invoicing each month was another task she had to manage manually, alongside keeping her books reconciled in QuickBooks.

She also found that the patchwork approach common in the market, piecing together cheaper standalone tools for proposals, invoicing, and payments, created more complexity than it solved. Tools that did not integrate cleanly with each other and with her accounting software meant that her team became the connection layer between systems.

"I tried to piece all these things together, find all the cheaper options, keep them separate. It ends up being the same cost and then it's a nightmare.”
Amanda Timcoe, Owner, Solving the Books

02 · The SolutionWhy Anchor

Amanda researched several options before committing to Anchor, including GoProposal and other tools common in the bookkeeping community. Her evaluation criteria were straightforward: she wanted something that handled proposals, agreements, and billing in one place, connected cleanly with QuickBooks Online, and did not require her to manage multiple subscriptions just to cover the basics.

The pricing model also factored into her decision. At roughly $5 per client per month with no monthly platform fee, Anchor was easy to justify, particularly once she saw how much time it freed up. She also valued that Anchor integrates with a growing ecosystem of practice management tools, which aligned with her philosophy of choosing purpose-built software that does its core job well and connects with everything else.

"Pick the thing that does what you need very well. You guys are willing to be connected with all the other things, and that makes everything easier.”
Amanda Timcoe, Owner, Solving the Books

Implementation

Because Amanda came to Anchor early in her firm's growth, implementation was less a migration and more a buildout. She invested time upfront creating proposal templates and service packages, structuring her tiers and add-ons so that onboarding a new client required only minor adjustments to an existing template rather than starting from scratch each time.

She also connected Anchor with Double, the practice intelligence tool she uses for client data and team visibility, which allowed her proposal and billing information to flow into a broader view of scope, workload, and service delivery. The QBO reconciliation sync meant that once a client was onboarded and paying, the financial records stayed clean without manual intervention.

The initial investment in building out templates has compounded over time. As her service model has evolved, she can update the terms or pricing in her templates and apply those changes across engagements. When a client recently requested to add payroll, Amanda was able to send a proposal with the relevant options in the time it took to select a template and make a few adjustments.

03 · The ResultsDirect Saving

The most significant operational change has been in new client onboarding. What previously required 10 or more hours per engagement now takes approximately one hour, based on Amanda's own assessment. That represents a reduction of roughly 9 hours per new client, driven primarily by having proposal templates, package structures, and automated payment setup ready to deploy rather than built from scratch each time.

On a week-to-week basis, Amanda estimates she saves approximately 5 hours on billing and admin tasks, based on her own assessment of time previously spent creating invoices, managing payment follow-up, and reconciling QuickBooks manually. With Anchor, once a client signs, invoices generate and payment collects automatically. Reconciliation syncs without any action from Amanda or her team.

A third measurable outcome came from enabling automatic annual price increases through Anchor. Amanda applies a 3% annual increase to recurring clients, set up directly in the agreement. Because the increase runs automatically at renewal, she does not need to initiate a separate conversation or renegotiate each year. She attributes approximately 3% of her recurring revenue base to this feature.

"Once they sign the contract, it takes care of itself. I don't have to do anything. It goes right into QuickBooks and then it matches. I've never had one problem or glitch. I get paid when I expect to.”
Amanda Timcoe, Owner, Solving the Books

Beyond the metrics, Amanda describes two qualitative shifts that matter to how she runs the business. First, the professional presentation of Anchor's proposals and client portal has reinforced her firm's credibility with prospects. Second, the dashboard gives her real-time visibility into who has paid, what is being processed, and when she expects to receive funds, replacing the uncertainty that came with managing billing manually.