For years, Succeeding Small managed proposals, contracts, and payment collection through HoneyBook. The platform handled the basics, but as the agency scaled, its limitations became harder to ignore, particularly around payment processing costs, financial reporting, and the manual effort required every time a client's scope changed.
"Having scope changes auto-approved inside Anchor's contract is one of the features we love most. Previously, we would have had to resend a whole new invoice for the client to sign. Now we set a time window, the change goes through automatically, and we can ramp up work as fast as possible.”
Madeleine Costa, Owner, Succeeding Small
HoneyBook charged a credit card processing fee on every transaction, and the agency had no way to pass that cost to clients. Because most of Succeeding Small's clients are small business owners who preferred paying by credit card, the fees were unavoidable. When the team tried disabling credit cards in HoneyBook, the response was immediate: clients pushed back, saying credit card was their only option. The fees had to be absorbed, and as the agency's revenue grew, so did the cost.
A second problem was financial visibility. When HoneyBook issued invoices, the service line data did not map correctly into QuickBooks. Instead of clean revenue-by-service reporting, the data arrived as notes or unstructured text in QBO. The agency worked with an operations consultant to try to fix the mapping, but there was no solution within HoneyBook's architecture. If Succeeding Small wanted to know how much revenue came from SEO versus web design in a given period, someone had to pull the data manually.
Scope changes created a third friction point. When the agency upsold a client, changed a service tier, or updated pricing across the book, clients had to manually approve a new invoice or re-sign a contract. Small business owners, busy running their own companies, rarely did this quickly. The team would follow up repeatedly, waiting for approval before work could ramp up or revenue could be recognized.
Why Anchor
The introduction to Anchor came through the agency's own bookkeeper. When Madeleine received a proposal from her bookkeeper, she noticed immediately that the entire experience lived in one place: the proposal, the contract signature, and payment setup all happened in a single flow. She asked what tool her bookkeeper was using. The answer was Anchor.
Two things stood out during evaluation. First, Anchor allows firms to pass credit card processing fees to clients while giving clients the option to pay via free ACH instead. That meant the agency could stop absorbing a cost that had grown to more than $20,000 a year without taking credit cards away from clients who wanted them. Second, Anchor's scope change workflow handled approvals automatically. When a contract amendment is made, Anchor can be set to auto-approve after a defined time window, eliminating the manual follow-up cycle entirely.
"I saw her invoicing software, and I'm thinking, this is so cool. I can do the proposal, I can sign the contract, and I can pay all in one.”
Madeleine Costa, Owner, Succeeding Small
Implementation
Succeeding Small migrated from HoneyBook to Anchor and moved their client base onto the new billing system. The transition introduced Anchor's pre-approved payment model: when a client signs a proposal, they connect a payment method at that moment, so future invoices collect automatically without requiring the client to take any action.
The service list feature in Anchor became a significant operational improvement. In HoneyBook, service names, descriptions, and pricing had to be updated invoice by invoice. In Anchor, the agency maintains a centralized service catalog. Updates to pricing or service descriptions apply across the board, and those services map cleanly into QuickBooks, producing the revenue-by-service visibility the team had been trying to build for years.
Maddy FitzHenry, who manages Anchor day to day, noted that the reporting capabilities alone were a step change from what HoneyBook offered. The platform allows the team to see all clients on a given service, distinguish between clients on automatic versus manual billing, and understand why a payment failed, with specific failure codes for things like expired cards or insufficient funds. That visibility allows the team to follow up with clients precisely rather than chasing blindly.
The most immediate result was financial. By passing credit card processing fees to clients while giving them a free ACH option, Succeeding Small recovered $20,000+ in annual revenue that had previously been absorbed as a fixed cost of doing business. According to the firm, not a single client has pushed back on the arrangement, and no new client has asked for an exception.
"Anchor has saved us money and made us more money. Passing the credit card processing fees to clients was the biggest part of that, but it's also just a consistent platform. Clients pay on schedule, scope changes go through automatically, and we don't have to chase anything.”
Madeleine Costa, Owner, Succeeding Small
Scope changes, which previously required repeated follow-up before clients would approve, are now handled through Anchor's auto-approval feature. When a contract is amended, a seven-day window is set, and the change is approved automatically if the client does not act. Work can ramp up immediately without the team waiting on a client response.
The agency now has clean revenue-by-service data in QuickBooks, something that was not achievable through HoneyBook despite significant effort to fix the integration. Madeleine plans to use this data to inform hiring decisions, specifically to evaluate how much revenue each service line generates relative to the labor and cost it requires.
The consistency Madeleine describes extends to how the team thinks about getting paid overall. Autopay is now the default. Clients pay on a predictable schedule. Scope additions flow through without manual intervention. The agency gets started on new work faster and collects revenue without the delays that were a routine part of running HoneyBook.
To learn more about Succeeding Small, visit www.succeedingsmall.co
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