If you do not wish to follow our recommended best practice of one XPM job for one Ignition client, or if you have a specific business need to use multiple XPM jobs, please use this article as a guide.

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.

Click here to learn how to set up your XPM Job Templates & link Job Templates to Ignition Services following our best practice recommendations on utilising an Annual Job Template structure.

If the best practice structure above doesn’t suit your practice’s workflow management needs, continue reading to find out how to best manage multiple recurring jobs with Ignition.

The way your practice will manage multiple recurring XPM jobs with Ignition will depend on whether your practice currently records timesheets in XPM and whether you utilise the WIP wash-up process to report on recoverability and efficiency on your client jobs.

Read the relevant paragraph below for your practice based on whether you are reporting on WIP in XPM, to find out the best way to structure your Ignition engagements and workflows.

When practices aren’t recording timesheets in XPM there aren’t any limitations to how many jobs can be deployed and managed from a single Ignition engagement.

This means if you prefer to manage a separate job for different services within the same Ignition engagement then you can create a new workflow for each job from within Ignition’s proposal automation tab following the steps below.

To set up your XPM jobs from Ignition, navigate to the Automation step of the client’s proposal, then select either a Client or Proposal billing group.

If your practice isn’t recording timesheets in XPM, we recommend the Client billing grouping.

When using a client billing grouping all Xero invoices generated for the client will be populated with a unique reference number i.e. CLI-XXXX.

This will mean that any client invoices that share a billing date will combine onto one invoice as they share a common reference number which reduces the number of invoices generated and transactions for the client (see this article for more information on billing groupings).

Once Build Workflow is selected, you can then start setting up your Job settings on each of your XPM workflows (see this article for more information on Ignition’s XPM job settings).

To add additional workflows simply click the + Add Workflow button on the left-hand side of the Automation tab each time you would like to create and set-up a new XPM job from the proposal.

Each new workflow (XPM job) can independently have its own job and deployment settings so your practice is able to continue managing your workflow in a consistent way.

Once all jobs are created and set up from the Automation tab, proceed through the remaining steps of the proposal before sending the proposal to the client directly from the Send step.

Once your proposal is accepted by the client, each XPM workflow will deploy into XPM automatically based on the deployment settings you defined in the Automation tab and workflows can be managed from Ignition under the client’s Workflow tab throughout the year (see this article for more details on the client’s Workflow tab).

If your practice typically manages multiple recurring jobs for different services to report on WIP, read this section to understand how your XPM workflows will need to be set up with Ignition.

When managing multiple recurring jobs in XPM for a single client it is important to ensure that the invoices from the client’s services allocate to the respective XPM job with the relevant timesheet for that service.

This is so that the WIP wash-up process can be completed at a job level to understand the profitability of your different jobs.

When Ignition is automatically creating your client invoices in Xero, the invoices (i.e. negative WIP) from a single Ignition engagement can only be mapped and allocated to one XPM job per engagement.

This means in order to have the invoices (negative WIP) allocate to their respective XPM jobs, we will need to create a separate Ignition engagement per XPM job to avoid completing a multi-job WIP wash-up process at the end of the year which can be a time consuming process.

See the image below for an example of this 1 Ignition engagement per XPM Job structure.

In the following example we will walk through setting up your Ignition proposals & XPM jobs following this one job per engagement structure using a proposal containing a one-off Annual Tax Compliance job and a recurring Quarterly BAS job.

Click Create New Proposal and start adding your Annual Tax & Compliance services into the Services step of the proposal, followed by setting up the billing rule & pricing for each service.

Then continue through the Payments and Terms step of the proposal.

Under the Automation tab of the proposal ensure Proposal is selected under the Group related billing by menu to ensure that only invoices from your Annual Tax & Compliance services are linking to the correlating Annual Tax Compliance job in XPM.

The Proposal billing grouping will mean that the Xero invoices from this proposal will have a reference number that is unique to this proposal.

You can find these proposal numbers in the Summary tab under a client record.

When the Annual Tax Compliance job deploys from this proposal, the XPM Client Order No. will also be set from the Ignition proposal’s reference (e.g. PROP-0040) which instructs Xero to assign and match the correct invoices to the XPM job.

See this article for more information on billing groupings.

Next, ensure to set your Workflow Structure to One workflow per proposal and click Build Workflow to start setting up your Annual Tax Compliance XPM job.

You can then start working through the Job settings, add in the relevant Tax & Compliance job templates and use the Recurrence settings to define how frequently you would like the job to deploy in XPM (see this article for more information on job settings).

Under the Automation tab, ensure the Proposal Billing Group is set to be the Proposal billing job before moving forward as this setting will ensure the unique proposal reference number is populated as the Client Order Number on the deployed job for invoice allocation.

Finally, finalise the proposal settings under the Presentation step and send the proposal through to the client for signing & accepting.

Next, to create your Quarterly BAS proposal, repeat Steps 1 to 4 above making sure to tailor the Services included, Job Settings & Recurrence Settings to your Quarterly BAS engagements before sending to the client to accept & sign.