Ignition Virtual Assistant: a VA who runs your proposals, renewals and failed payments

Nobody searches “ignition virtual assistant” in February. You search it in the weeks before renewal season, when you realise that the platform you bought to automate engagements has quietly become another job: sixty renewals to prepare, a pipeline column full of proposals nobody signed, and a failed payments list you have been meaning to open since the last BAS.

Ignition (you may still call it Practice Ignition; the Sydney-founded company dropped the “Practice” in 2021) does what it promises. Proposals, engagement letters, recurring billing and payment collection in one place, wired into Xero. What it does not do is operate itself. The renewals do not decide their own price increase, the unsigned proposals do not ring the client, and the disbursements do not reconcile themselves. That operating layer is the job a VA takes.

The daily rhythm a VA runs in your Ignition

Morning starts in the pipeline. Ignition shows every proposal by state, and the column that matters is Awaiting Acceptance. Your VA works it like a debtors ledger: clients who have viewed the proposal but not signed get a short personal nudge on top of Ignition’s automatic reminders, clients who have never opened it get flagged for a phone call, and anything genuinely dead gets marked Lost with a reason. The result is a pipeline you can trust at a glance, instead of a column padded with proposals from March that everyone knows are not happening.

Then the payments screen. This is the quiet leak in most Ignition accounts. A client accepts an engagement, skips the payment details step in the client portal, and the recurring billing you thought you had set up never actually starts. Or a direct debit fails on an expired card and the platform notifies you, once, into an inbox with 200 other things in it. Your VA checks this screen every day: chases clients to complete payment setup, follows up failed payments and retries them once the client has fixed their details, and escalates the repeat offenders to you with the history attached. Firms are routinely surprised by what this one habit recovers.

New work gets drafted from your service library. When you win a client or scope a job, you send the VA a line or two and they build the proposal: right services, right billing type on each line (fixed monthly, upfront, on completion, or an instant bill for one-off work), correct engagement letter terms attached, saved as a draft. You approve, it sends, the acceptance flows through to Xero as an invoice without anyone retyping anything. The drafting is not hard; it is the fact that it now happens the same day you scoped the work, instead of the following Tuesday, that changes your conversion rate.

In between sits the small upkeep that keeps everything else working. Contacts and signatories go stale faster than anyone admits: the office manager who signed the 2024 engagement left in March, and the renewal addressed to her will sit unopened forever. Your VA keeps Ignition’s client records current, email addresses, signatories, entity names after a restructure, so proposals and payment requests land in front of the person who can actually sign them. And when you flag a piece of out-of-scope work, an instant bill goes out the same afternoon through the payment details Ignition already holds, instead of joining the pile of things you meant to invoice at some point.

Weekly, there is a renewals block, and once a year it becomes the main event. Ignition’s bulk renewal tooling can roll a whole book of engagements over, but somebody has to prepare the run: apply the price uplift you decided on, check that each client’s services still match what you actually do for them (they drift, every year), stagger the sends so replies arrive at a rate you can answer, and then track the round as acceptances land. Ignition publishes an annual pricing benchmark for Australian tax and compliance work precisely because so many firms underprice and under-review; the benchmark tells you what to charge, your VA makes sure the increase actually reaches every engagement letter instead of the twenty clients you got to before you ran out of evenings.

Monthly, reconciliation. Ignition collects client payments and disburses them to your bank in lump sums, net of processing fees, while the invoices it created in Xero sit there at gross. Matching one to the other, allocating the fees, and keeping the clearing account clean is exactly the kind of repetitive, rule-based work that should never touch a partner’s timesheet. Your VA does it on a fixed day with a fixed checklist, and month end stops involving a mystery balance.

The honest bit

Some things Ignition will not do, whoever is driving it.

It is not a practice manager. There are no jobs, no deadlines, no workflow. A signed engagement in Ignition sets no deadlines and manages no work. If you have connected Xero Practice Manager or Karbon, the integration can push a job or work item across the moment a proposal is accepted, but someone has to build and maintain that mapping, and the work itself still lives in the practice manager. Firms sometimes buy Ignition expecting a practice manager and are disappointed. A VA can carry the handoff either way: keeping the integration mappings current if you use them, or setting the job up in the practice manager the same day if you do not.

Renewals automate the mechanics, not the decision. Auto-renew exists, and with AutoPricing Ignition can even apply a set percentage uplift to renewals on its own, but somebody still has to choose that number and switch it on, or clients roll over at last year’s price forever. The uplift percentage, and the harder judgement about which clients get a different number, is a human call that belongs to you. What the VA removes is the reason firms skip the increase: the three days of clerical work between deciding it and sending it.

Out-of-scope work does not bill itself. Ignition gives you instant bills and engagement variations, which are excellent, but someone has to notice the scope creep first and someone has to raise the bill. The VA can raise it in minutes once you say the word; the noticing usually still starts with you or your team.

The Xero connection has a wrinkle worth knowing. Ignition raises its own invoices in Xero and collects against them, and it can also sync recent unpaid invoices your team raised directly in Xero into its collections screen and take payment on those, but only if the sync is switched on and someone actually works the Outstanding list. If half your billing still happens straight out of Xero, that half stays on whatever chasing rhythm it has today, which is one more reason the VA’s invoice chasing lane should cover both sides, not just the Ignition one.

And a client who has ignored all three of Ignition’s automatic reminders is not going to sign because a fourth one arrives. At that point the platform has done its job and a human has to do theirs. The VA’s chasing cadence exists exactly for this gap: the personal email, the call list, the weekly holdout summary, so silent proposals get a person, not another template.

What stays with you

Ignition sits inside a regulated profession, so the line is worth drawing plainly. Your VA does the operational work: drafting, sending on approval, chasing, reconciling. What they never own is anything that requires your judgement or your registration.

The scope of every engagement is yours. The wording of your engagement letter terms, which carry professional body and Tax Practitioners Board weight, is yours (the VA attaches your approved terms, they do not edit them). Pricing is yours: the renewal uplift, the quote on a new engagement, the call on whether a fee conversation has quietly become a scope negotiation. Anything that is tax agent or BAS agent work stays with the registered humans in your firm, full stop. And Ignition itself backs the money side: whatever seat the VA holds, the bank account collections pay out to cannot be changed from inside the platform. Only the account’s principal user can change it, through Ignition support.

Early on, every proposal goes out with your approval. Most owners keep that gate permanently for new engagements and relax it for routine renewals once trust is earned. That pace is yours to set.

What it costs and where to start

Ignition administration sits on the admin tier, $12-17 AUD an hour excl GST. Most firms run it inside a 10-15 hour week (roughly $500-1,100 a month) where Ignition shares the VA with inbox, onboarding and general practice admin; renewal season is when the hours concentrate. Placement takes 7-10 business days, and your VA spends 5-7 days supervised inside your Ignition and Xero before anything goes out solo. A $500 refundable deposit credits against your first month, there is a 30-day recalibrate-or-replace guarantee, and no lock-in beyond 14 days notice. We have made 87+ Australian placements since 2024, and firm owners are one of our largest client groups.

The first fortnight is deliberately narrow. Week one is watching and doing under supervision: the pipeline pass, the payments screen, one or two proposal drafts you check line by line before they go anywhere. By week two the VA is running the daily rhythm and you are approving rather than checking. Renewal season is the one exception to the gentle start: if you are signing up in the two months before yours, say so on the call, and the ramp gets built around preparing the renewal run rather than around a quiet week.

If you want the wider view of what a VA does inside a firm, the accounting firms page covers it, and the bookkeeping firms page does the same for bookkeepers. The proposal side of the role lives on the quote preparation task page, and the VA cost guide has the full pricing picture. Otherwise, book a discovery call with Jenn and bring your renewal list.