The 9 Best Proposal Software Solutions for Accountants

Winning new clients for your accounting or bookkeeping firm often feels like a job of its own. You spend hours customizing proposals, triple-checking pricing, and legal terms, and making sure everything looks professional—only to lose out to another competitor for reasons best known to the client. The back-and-forth emails, version revisions, and manual input eat up valuable time that you could have spent on billable work.

This is where accounting proposal software comes in. Instead of starting from scratch every time, a proposal tool helps you generate professional documents quickly. This optimizes your sales process, improves client conversion rates, and saves you valuable time.

In this article, we’ll explore nine of the best proposal software for accountants.

Why Accountants Need Proposal Software

Accountants often have a love-hate relationship with proposals. Potential clients often request them, but it’s also time-consuming and can take too much effort. Proposal software helps resolve most, if not all of these frustrations. Some of the reasons you need this software include:

Time-Consuming Manual Proposal Creation

Creating accounting proposals manually takes too much time, but proposal tools offer pre-built templates and auto-fill features that speed up the entire process. In a few minutes, you can generate a polished, professional-looking proposal tailored to a client’s needs.

Inconsistent Branding and Messaging

When creating proposals manually, it’s easy to make formatting mistakes or overlook important details, especially if you have multiple team members creating proposals for your firm. A good proposal should reflect a firm’s professionalism, with uniform formatting, logos, fonts, and tone of voice.

Proposal software ensures that every proposal aligns with your firm’s branding by offering customizable templates, standardized content, and pre-approved messaging. This not only enhances your firm’s credibility but also helps build trust with prospective clients.

Difficulty Tracking Proposal Status

Usually, once you send a proposal, you’re left wondering if the client has opened it, read it, or is simply ignoring it. Without knowing exactly the status of your proposal, you’ll be unable to follow up or engage them at the right time.

Proposal software solves this by providing real-time tracking, showing when a client has opened, viewed, or signed the proposal. This allows you to follow up strategically, increasing your chances of closing deals faster.

Lack of E-Signature Capabilities

Waiting for clients to print, sign, scan, and return a proposal can create unnecessary delays in closing deals. Proposal software often has built-in e-signature functionality that eliminates this friction, allowing clients to review and sign documents instantly from any device.

This not only hastens the approval process but also enhances the client experience by making it more convenient and professional.

E-signatures are equally as legally binding as wet signatures, only more convenient and efficient.

Difficulty in Presenting Pricing Options Clearly

Many manual proposals look disorganized and haphazard, thus confusing the client and reflecting poorly on the firm.

Proposal software helps accountants present pricing in a structured, professional manner, whether through interactive pricing tables, tiered service packages, or optional add-ons.

This ensures that clients can easily understand their options, reducing back-and-forth questions and making it easier for them to choose the best service package for their needs.

Potential for Errors and Omissions

It’s not unusual to make errors like missing a decimal point or omitting a point in your service description when creating proposals manually. This can confuse the client or cause misunderstandings with them to the point you lose the business.

However, a proposal software reduces the risk of errors by automating calculations, standardizing proposal templates, and ensuring all required information is included before sending.

Key Features to Look for in Proposal Software for Accountants

With so many options available, how do you know which one is right for your firm? Here are the key features to look for when evaluating proposal software.

Ease of Use

If a tool is complicated or requires a steep learning curve, it defeats the purpose of saving time. Good proposal software should be intuitive, with a clean interface and simple navigation. Look for features like drag-and-drop editing, pre-built templates, and easy customization options.

The goal is to create professional proposals quickly—without spending hours figuring out the software. A smooth user experience means your team can adopt the tool easily and start seeing results right away.

Template Creation

Your proposal software should let you build reusable templates with pre-filled sections for services, pricing, and terms. This ensures consistency across all proposals while cutting down on repetitive work. Bonus points if the software lets you customize templates to match your branding. This lets every proposal look polished and professional right out of the gate.

E-Signatures

Look out for software with e-signature functionality—either built-in or integration. This allows clients to review and sign proposals instantly from any device without printing, scanning, or emailing back and forth.

Invoicing & Payment Processing

Proposal software for accountants should have invoicing and payment processing features, allowing clients to accept the proposal and make a payment in one seamless step. This eliminates the need for separate billing software and speeds up cash flow.

Automated Follow-Ups and Notifications

Manually checking in on proposal statuses and sending follow-up emails can be a tedious task. That’s why your proposal software should have automated follow-ups to take this task off your hands. It should also notify you when a client views, comments on, or signs a proposal, so you can follow up at the right time.

Status Report Dashboard

Another feature to look for is a status report dashboard. Keeping track of multiple proposals is difficult but this dashboard gives you a clear, real-time view of where each proposal stands so you easily stay on top of your pipeline without digging through emails.

The best dashboards also provide insights on proposal performance, so you can see what’s working and refine your approach to win more clients.

Integrations

Your accounting proposal software should work seamlessly with the other tools you already use. Look for integrations with Gmail or Outlook, software like QuickBooks, SmartVault, Zapier (to connect with even more tools), etc.

These integrations help streamline your workflow by syncing client data, automating invoicing, and keeping everything organized in one place. The fewer manual steps you have to take, the more time you save.

The 9 Best Accounting Proposal Software

Below are 9 of the best proposal software on the market.

1. Financial Cents

accounting proposal software a snapshot of Financial Cents homepage

Financial Cents is an all-in-one accounting practice management software that helps accountants, bookkeepers, and CPAs manage all aspects of their firms from workflow to internal collaboration to client management, including proposal creation and management.

With our tool, you do not need a separate app for creating proposals. This saves you additional costs, reduces time spent on manual work and juggling multiple apps, as well as having everything centralized in one place.

Key Features

Proposal and engagement letter creation: Financial Cents makes it easy to create polished, professional proposals and legally binding engagement letters in just a few steps. The platform guides you through key sections, including:
- Introduction: Personalize your proposal with the client’s name, company reminders, custom intro videos, and messages.
- Services: Clearly define the scope of work, including recurring and one-time projects.
- Payment: Offer multiple payment options, such as ACH or credit card, or require clients to enter their payment details before accepting the proposal.
- Engagement Letter & Terms: Ensure legal protection by including an engagement letter with clear terms of service.

If you’re unsure how to phrase any part of your proposal, Financial Cents’ AI assistant can help you craft professional, compelling content in seconds.

Optional add-on: Want to increase revenue? With optional add-ons, you can present additional services within your proposal. Simply check a box while building your service list:

optional services add-on for proposals

Clients will have the choice to accept and pay for the extra services when they approve the proposal:

client view for add-ons

Proposal packages: Financial Cents gives you the flexibility to upsell clients by offering different pricing and service packages within a single proposal. Each package can have its own set of services, and add-ons, making it easier for clients to choose the option that best fits their needs.

adding proposal packages

When the client is viewing the proposal, they will have the option to select which package they want to purchase and make payment when accepting the proposal:

client view for proposal packages

Automates invoicing: Once the client accepts the proposal, Financial Cents will generate the invoice based on the agreed-upon services and terms and send it to the client and QuickBooks Online. You can also set the proposal to collect the client’s payment information when they sign the proposal so you don’t have to chase them down to pay. You can also set up when you want payment reminders to be sent to your client. No more creating invoices manually and checking in on the client
E-signature: With Financial Cents, clients can review and sign proposals electronically in just a few clicks. This speeds up the approval process, minimizes back-and-forth, and makes it more convenient for both parties.
Tracking proposal status and client activity: Stay on top of every proposal with real-time tracking. Financial Cents provides a clear overview of each proposal’s status, whether it’s pending, accepted, or declined. You can also see:

✔️ When the client viewed, signed, or accepted the proposal

✔️ Which services they selected, including any add-ons

✔️ Who signed the document and their IP address for verification

With Financial Cents, you don’t just send proposals; you manage the entire process seamlessly, from proposal creation to client payment and project execution.

Pricing

Financial Cents has four pricing tiers:

Solo plan: $19/month
Team plan: $49/month
Scale plan: $69/month
Enterprise: Custom pricing. Please contact sales for a quote.

Note: You get access to our proposal and invoicing feature with any Financial Cents subscription. However, some features like add-ons and proposal packages are only available on the scale plan, meaning you have to be on the scale plan to access them.

Free Trial

Financial Cents offers a free 14-day trial to test out the tool.

Pros & Cons

Pros	Cons
Offers all you need to manage your firm. No need for additional tools	No mobile app
Unlimited number of clients
Automatic invoicing and payment
The proposal feature is available on all tiers
Easy to use
AI integration to brainstorm when stuck and need help writing proposals

Discover how Financial Cents can help you turnaround proposals faster, onboard and manage clients by Starting a Free Trial.

2. Ignition

proposal software for accountants - Ignition

Ignition automates agreements, proposals, billing, payment collection, and workflows for service-based businesses. They help reduce manual and administrative tasks, so businesses can be more efficient and scale.