From Proposal to Kickoff in 24 Hours: Automating Engagement Letters and Renewals

I want to tell you about two firms. Same city. Same size. Same services offered. Radically different engagement letter processes.

Firm A — a five-person tax and advisory practice I audited last March — used Word templates. A partner would duplicate last year’s engagement letter, change the date and fee amount, convert to PDF, email it to the client, wait for them to print-sign-scan-return it, then manually enter the client into Karbon. Average turnaround from initial consultation to signed engagement: 11 days. During busy season, it stretched to three weeks. They lost four prospective clients in 2025 because the proposal took so long that the clients found another firm in the interim.

Firm B — same size, same city, three miles down the road — used Ignition. A partner finished a consultation call, selected the service package on their laptop, clicked send, and the client had a branded proposal with e-signature and payment authorization in their inbox before the call ended. Average turnaround from consultation to signed engagement with payment on file: 4 hours. Their fastest was 7 minutes. They didn’t lose a single prospect to a slow proposal process all year.

Same profession. Same client expectations. Same labor market. One firm treated engagement letters as administrative overhead. The other treated them as the first client experience touchpoint, and automated accordingly.

The Engagement Letter as Revenue Bottleneck

Here’s what most firm owners don’t realize: the engagement letter isn’t just a compliance document. It’s the transaction that converts a prospect into a paying client. Every day between “yes, I’d like to work with you” and “here’s my signed engagement letter” is a day where that prospect can change their mind, find another firm, or simply get distracted by other priorities and ghost you.

I’ve tracked this across dozens of firms. The correlation between proposal speed and close rate is striking. Firms that send engagement letters within 24 hours of the initial consultation close at 85-90%. Firms that take more than a week drop to 60-65%. At two weeks, it’s below 50%.

The reason is simple. A prospective client who just had a good consultation is emotionally ready to commit. They’ve identified their problem, they’ve met you, they trust you. That’s the moment to capture the commitment. Two weeks later, the urgency has faded, they’ve talked to their spouse who mentioned a friend’s accountant, and the emotional momentum is gone.

What Actually Happens During Those 11 Days

When I mapped Firm A’s engagement letter process step by step, I found thirteen discrete actions spanning three different people. This is not unusual — it’s what I see in most firms that haven’t automated:

1. Partner finishes consultation, makes notes on a legal pad
2. Partner emails admin with client details and requested services
3. Admin opens Word template, duplicates it, fills in client information
4. Admin guesses at correct service scope based on partner’s notes (often incomplete)
5. Admin emails draft to partner for review
6. Partner reviews, makes corrections to scope and pricing (sometimes two rounds)
7. Admin generates final PDF
8. Admin emails PDF to client with signing instructions
9. Client prints, signs, scans, and emails back (or doesn’t, for days)
10. Admin follows up via email when no response after 3 days
11. Admin follows up again at 7 days
12. Signed letter arrives; admin saves to client folder and enters client in Karbon
13. Admin sends welcome email and document request checklist

Thirteen steps. Three people involved. Multiple handoffs. And the process restarts from scratch for every single engagement — new clients, renewals, scope changes, everything.

Building the 24-Hour Engagement System

The transformation for Firm B wasn’t a massive technology overhaul. They spent one focused weekend building it, and the system has run with minor refinements ever since. Here’s what they built:

Step 1: Define Your Service Packages

Before you can automate proposals, you need to know what you’re proposing. This sounds obvious, but it’s where most firms stall. They’ve been pricing every engagement individually, based on the partner’s gut feel and whatever they charged last year plus a small increase.

The shift to fixed-fee packaging is the foundation of everything else. When 54% of firms are using fixed-fee billing and 80% are raising fees in 2026, now is the time to define clear packages.

Firm B built six standard packages: Individual Tax Preparation (three tiers based on complexity), Business Tax Preparation (two tiers), Monthly Bookkeeping (three tiers based on transaction volume), Quarterly Advisory, Annual Tax Planning, and Payroll Services. Each package had a defined scope with explicit inclusions and explicit exclusions.

That second part — explicit exclusions — is what prevents the $72,000 scope creep problem. When your engagement letter says “this package includes preparation of Form 1040 with Schedules A, B, C, and D” and also says “this package does not include amended returns, audit representation, or state returns beyond [Primary State],” there’s no ambiguity about what the client is paying for.

Step 2: Build Your Proposal Templates in Ignition

Ignition (or TaxDome, if you prefer an all-in-one practice management approach) is where the templates live. Each service package becomes a proposal template with:

• Service description and scope
• Fixed fee and billing frequency (monthly, quarterly, annual)
• Payment terms and method (ACH preferred, credit card accepted)
• Engagement terms and conditions
• E-signature fields
• Payment authorization capture

Building these templates takes half a day, maybe a full day if you have complex service offerings. But you build them once. Every proposal after that is selecting a template, confirming the client details, adjusting the fee if needed, and clicking send.

Step 3: Connect Proposal to Onboarding

This is the step most firms skip, and it’s where the real time savings compound. When a client signs the engagement letter in Ignition, that event should trigger everything that follows:

• Client record created in Karbon (or TaxDome) with service type, fee, and start date
• Welcome email sent automatically with login credentials for the client portal
• Document request checklist sent based on the service type (tax return docs, bookkeeping access credentials, payroll information)
• First recurring payment scheduled
• Work item created in the practice management workflow with the appropriate deadline

Step 4: Automate Annual Renewals

Renewals are where engagement letter automation pays its largest dividends. A firm with 200 clients needs to renew 200 engagement letters every year. If each renewal takes 30 minutes of staff time (which is fast for a manual process), that’s 100 hours — two and a half weeks of a full-time person’s work, just on renewals.

With automation, the system triggers 60 days before each engagement expires. It generates a renewal proposal using the existing template with the updated fee (you set the increase percentage at the beginning of renewal season). The renewal goes to the client with a clear message: “Your engagement is renewing for the upcoming year. Here’s your updated scope and fee. Sign to continue.”

Clients who’ve been with your firm for years sign these in minutes. They don’t need to print-scan-return. They click a button on their phone. The ones who don’t sign within a week get an automatic follow-up. The ones who still haven’t signed after two weeks get flagged for a partner call — maybe they’re unhappy, maybe they’re shopping around, and either way you want to know before they quietly leave.

The Scope Creep Connection

I cannot discuss engagement letters without addressing scope creep, because the engagement letter is your primary defense against it. Every firm I’ve consulted with that struggles with scope creep has the same root cause: vague engagement letters that don’t define boundaries.

When your engagement letter says “tax preparation services,” you’ve defined nothing. Does that include a phone call in July when the client wants to discuss estimated payments? Does it include reviewing the letter from the IRS about a missing K-1? Does it include preparing an extension? Does it include the fifteen back-and-forth emails about whether they should sell their rental property?

With standardized packages and explicit scope boundaries, these questions answer themselves. The engagement letter says what’s included. Anything not listed is either a separate engagement or an add-on that triggers a scope change proposal.

Ignition makes scope changes almost frictionless. Partner identifies out-of-scope work, selects the add-on service, sends a one-click proposal to the client, client approves and signs. The additional fee starts billing immediately. No awkward conversation about “well, this wasn’t really included…” Instead, it’s a professional, documented process.

Clients who feel engaged and informed are 90% more willing to pay premium rates. That willingness extends to scope additions — when the relationship is transparent and well-managed, clients don’t resent additional fees. They appreciate knowing exactly what they’re paying for.

The Before and After

Let me close with Firm A’s transformation, because they eventually implemented the same system. After watching Firm B’s approach during an industry peer group meeting, Firm A’s managing partner called me and said, “We need that.”

We spent two Saturdays building it. Day one: defined service packages, built Ignition templates, configured e-signature and payment capture. Day two: connected Ignition to Karbon onboarding workflows, set up renewal automation, and trained the team.

The results over the following six months:

Proposal turnaround dropped from 11 days to same-day. The longest gap between consultation and sent proposal was 6 hours — and that was only because the partner had back-to-back meetings.

Close rate went from 72% to 91%. The increase came entirely from prospects who would have drifted away during the old 11-day gap.

Renewal completion went from a six-week annual project (admin manually generating and tracking 180 renewals) to a two-hour oversight task (reviewing the automated renewal dashboard and making personal calls to the 8-10 clients who hadn’t signed).

Time to first payment dropped from an average of 47 days (first invoice sent after engagement started, net 30 terms, payment received mid-cycle) to 0 days. Payment authorization was captured at signing, and the first charge processed automatically.

Getting Started This Week

If you’re ready to stop treating engagement letters as paperwork, here’s your implementation sequence:

This week: List every service your firm provides. Group them into packages with three tiers each. Define what’s included and — just as importantly — what’s explicitly excluded. This is strategy work, not technology work, and it’s the foundation everything else builds on.

Next week: Set up Ignition (or TaxDome’s proposal feature). Build your templates. Send your first automated proposal to the next prospect who calls.

Week three: Connect the signed engagement to your practice management onboarding workflow. This is the step where minutes of setup save hundreds of hours over the year.

Week four: Configure renewal automation for all existing clients. Set expiration dates, choose your fee increase percentage, and let the system manage the renewal cycle that used to consume your admin team for six weeks every year.

Twenty-four hours from consultation to signed engagement isn’t a stretch goal. It’s the standard that the best-run firms have already established. The technology exists, the templates are straightforward to build, and the return on investment shows up in your first month. The only question is whether you’ll keep spending 45 minutes per engagement letter, or whether you’ll spend one weekend building a system that handles it in five.