Based on the Tax Practitioners Board’s recommendations, it’s best practice to have a signed engagement agreement for each entity within a company group.

In this scenario, you would build an Ignition proposal that details the services that each individual entity will be receiving.

When accepted, each entity is invoiced and billed separately and will have workflow deployed under the respective entities' client file in XPM (if you have connected).

We do however understand that not everybody prefers to issue individual engagements for all entities within a company group. This article will outline how to build one single proposal for a group in Ignition and some of the considerations when doing so.

To find and use our provided group template with your clients:

Navigate to Templates → Proposals → Provided Templates → search for “Group Template: Multiple Entities” → click Use Template.

Once you're in the proposal template editor, start reviewing each step of the proposal before sending the template to your groups.

In particular we recommend reviewing the sections below:

1. General

Under the General step of the proposal, update the Proposal Name field to an appropriate name for the client group you will be sending the proposal to.

Then search & select the main billing entity of the client group to be the proposal’s signatory in the Client section.

2. Services

Update the first Project heading < Insert Group Name Here > to the name of the Client Group you will be engaging.

Then click into the Entities Included service to start to start updating the Service Description with a list of all entities and individuals that will be included in the engagement.

Copy the bullet pointed list of entities & individuals from the Service Description, scroll down and paste the list into the Service Terms section to ensure all entity and individual’s names are reflected in the Client Group’s Terms.

Remember to click Save when you are done..

Next, start updating the Project Names in the proposals with each of the relevant entity and individual’s names.

Use the drop-down arrow below to add additional projects as necessary for each entity/individual.

Once all Projects are added, click the + Add Service Type under each project to start adding the services, pricing and billing for each respective entity.

3. Review the remaining steps in the proposal editor before sending

Before sending the proposal to your client group or saving the provided template as your Custom Template make sure to review the Payments, Terms, Automation (if applicable) and Presentation steps of the proposal.

Project titles in the Services step of the proposal editor can be used as subheadings to provide structure and context to your proposal.

When creating a group proposal, you can customise the project headings to reference the various entities included in the agreement and bundle your services according to each project or entity they relate to.

When structuring a proposal for groups, we recommend using a project to highlight the name of the group and utilize an included service that lists all entities to be engaged under the group.

This will be captured in the final PDF signed by both parties.

The terms document will only populate the head entities' client name, so it's important to add the entities in either the service description of the included service or the service terms to make sure they're captured on the signed agreement.

If your group proposal requires multiple signatories to sign the agreement, you can now use our multi-signatory feature.

To add additional signatories to the proposal, they will need to be added as contacts under the client record your are building the proposal for.

You can nominate a primary contact who will be responsible for selecting a proposal option and adding a payment method before the proposal is then sent to all secondary signatories.

The Pro plan will allow up to 2 signatories and Pro+ or Scale plans can have a maximum of 10 signatories.

When engaging all entities under one group proposal in Ignition, be mindful that any workflows that deploy into XPM from that proposal will only deploy under the main entity’s client file that signed the engagement for the group.

This will mean that all timesheets, tasks, and invoices for the group will need to be managed under the main entity’s client file in XPM and tasks should be used to track the time separately for each entity in the group.

Creating a group proposal will mean that any invoices raised for that group from Ignition into Xero will be allocated as negative WIP to the group billing job in XPM and the washup process will be for the group as a whole.

Once the job has been deployed into XPM, you may need to add additional tasks for each entity to track time separately.

If you would prefer separate jobs for each entity for workflow tracking purposes, you can deploy these from the Automation tab of the proposal editor or the Workflow tab of each client entity if they are set up as separate Projects in Ignition.

Note that you can only have one billing job (i.e. flowing of the negative WIP invoices) per proposal regardless of if you set up the entities as separate Projects.

This means that if you want more than one billing job, you must use separate proposals for each entity and set them up with proposal level billing groupings to ensure all invoices are allocated to the correct entities.