Ignition makes it possible to link your services to your custom Job Templates in XPM, making job deployment and management so much easier.

Once set up, this will be fully automated - meaning you won't ever have to manually enter your tasks, milestones, and costs each time a proposal is accepted. Neat!

Let's start with some best practices around setting up your Job Templates in XPM.

One of the biggest problems you can face in XPM is having too many jobs to manage across your client base.

To address this, Ignition and Xero recommend having one XPM job per Ignition engagement where all service-workflows, invoices and timesheets for the engagement are managed as opposed to multiple recurring jobs throughout the year.

It's also important to ensure you:

For example, when creating a job template for a quarterly job such as a (BAS/VAT/GST in Australia) then the template should include 4 tasks for each quarter.

When creating a job template for Monthly Bookkeeping, then 12 tasks should be included in the template for each month of the year.

This will mean one singular Ignition engagement will create one corresponding job in XPM with all job templates included from the services within that engagement.

The tasks from these job templates will then combine and populate the task list on the XPM job to guide you on what your workflow is for that engagement in your day-to-day.

Let’s look into this in more detail.

The following steps will guide you through everything you need to know to correctly set up and link your XPM job templates to your Ignition services for your automated workflow deployment.

Once you have read these steps feel free to utilise the templates provided in this spreadsheet to guide you through structuring your Job Templates, Tasks, Costs & more.

Before you can create Job Templates in XPM you will first need to create the tasks that will be added to the templates for each respective service.

To set up tasks navigate to XPM's Business Menu → Settings → Tasks → Create Task

It is recommended to set up at least 1 job template for each Ignition service that you will be engaging your clients for.

To create a new job template, head to XPM's Business Menu → Settings → Job Settings → Job Templates and simply add/edit your job template to set up the required details.

Navigate to your Ignition Apps tab → Xero Practice Manager → click Sync to synchronise your new job templates into Ignition within approximately 30 minutes.

There are two ways to link your Job Templates to Ignition services

1. From the XPM App Drawer

Navigate to the XPM App Drawer under Apps → XPM to start linking your XPM job templates to their relevant Ignition services.

This can be done by clicking Work Templates under App Settings.

This gives you a complete list of all your services in Ignition services, next to each one you can search for and select the correct job template from XPM.

You can also link multiple job templates to a single service in Ignition - useful if you offer packages to your clients like in the example below!

Click Done, in order to save your changes.

Navigate to the Ignition Service Library under Library → Services → Apps to start linking your XPM job templates to their relevant Ignition services.

This can be done by clicking into the Ignition service name and using the Workflow Templates drop-down in the Apps tab to search for and select the correct job template from XPM.

Once you're done, click Save Service.

You can then start adding your services and create jobs within the proposal's Automation tab or your client’s Workflow tab at this point.

When multiple Ignition services are added into a proposal, all XPM job templates and their tasks will be combined into one XPM job.

Once the client has accepted your proposal, the job will be automatically deployed in XPM based on your deployment settings, along with all the tasks that need to be completed for the entire engagement.

When Ignition deploys a job it will automatically populate the following fields based on the job setup in Ignition;

In addition to this Ignition will also automatically populate the Task list on the XPM job based on the job templates that were linked to the Ignition services from that engagement.

You can then start entering time estimates, schedule the due date on each task and allocate staff to individual tasks using the Staff Allocation button to prepare the job.

If your practice manages multiple recurring XPM jobs throughout the year for different services rather than the recommended one job per engagement, please see this article for more information on how your job templates, jobs and engagements should be structured.

Tip: Check out this article about WIP Washup in Xero Practice Manager.