SpidNums vs Ignition: engagement letters inside practice management

What Ignition does well

This section comes first deliberately. Ignition is a serious product with real customers, and a comparison that pretends otherwise is not worth reading.

• Polished, well-designed proposals that genuinely improve close rates for firms selling advisory work.
• Payment automation tied to the engagement — signing and paying happen in one flow.
• A large library of engagement-letter templates, including Canadian-market templates.
• Best-in-class at the specific job of proposing, signing and collecting.

Where the fit differs

These are differences in model rather than claims about missing features. Where a capability is not listed for Ignition, that means we did not verify it — not that it is absent.

• Scope: Ignition is a dedicated proposals-and-payments product. In SpidNums, the engagement letter is one part of a practice platform that also holds the client record, the services, the tasks and the deadlines.
• Where the price comes from: SpidNums builds letter pricing from the client's assigned services or prior-year history, so the letter and the work stay in sync.
• Branding: SpidNums renders letters on the firm's own letterhead, signed on a no-login branded page.
• Pricing: SpidNums is one flat firm fee covering the whole platform.

Pricing

Ignition does not publish pricing we could verify, so this page does not state a number for it — ask the vendor for a current quote. SpidNums is a flat USD $1,200 per firm per year with every feature included, including white-label branding.

What SpidNums is, plainly

SpidNums is practice management for Canadian accounting firms: the client list, the services each client buys, the deadlines those services generate, the person who owns each one, and the engagement letter that defined the scope. It is not a general ledger, it does not prepare or transmit returns, and it does not calculate payroll — those stay in the tools your firm already files with.

The list below is the complete set of claims this site makes about the product. If a capability is not on it, we do not claim it.

• Multi-tenant white-label branding per firm — name, logo, colours, emails and letterhead
• Colour-coded SLA deadline dashboard ranked by proximity
• Aggregated reminders across tasks, service cadences and fiscal year-ends
• E-signed engagement letters with a public, no-login client portal
• Per-tenant Google Workspace integration
• Client portal
• Staff roles with confidential-client gating
• Canadian-hosted data (Supabase ca-central-1)
• Flat USD $1,200 per firm per year, all inclusive
• CSV/XLSX client import and export

Questions worth asking both vendors

Comparison grids converge because feature names converge. These six questions separate products that look identical on paper, and they are worth asking of Ignition and of SpidNums alike.

• How is a deadline generated — from a rule tied to the client's fiscal year-end and reporting period, or from a recurring task somebody configured by hand?
• When a client's filing cadence changes, is that one field or a rewrite of every future date?
• Whose brand does the client see on emails, on the portal and on a signed engagement letter — and on which plan does that become true?
• Where is client data hosted, and is tenant isolation enforced in the database or only in the application? Get the answer in writing.
• What is the total annual cost at three seats and at ten? Ask for the total, not the per-user figure.
• What comes across on migration, and what does not? Clients usually move; documents, notes and completed work usually do not.

Who should choose Ignition

A firm whose priority is selling advisory work — where the proposal is a sales document and payment collection matters as much as the signature — should use Ignition. It is better at that specific job than an engagement-letter feature inside a practice platform, and we do not process payments at all.

If that describes your firm, take the other product seriously. If it does not, the practice management overview covers what SpidNums does in full.

Switching

Firms sometimes run both: Ignition for new-business proposals with payment collection, SpidNums for the recurring engagement letters and the work that follows. Client lists import by CSV or XLSX.

SpidNums imports and exports clients as CSV or XLSX. There is no direct migration connector, so historical documents, notes and completed work do not come across automatically — plan the cutover around a period boundary rather than mid-season.