From proposal to signed engagement letter

How a proposal becomes an accepted quote, a signed engagement letter, a client record and a draft invoice in Achekam, with people in charge throughout.

By Achekam · 11 October 2026 · 4 min read · For Accountants & audit firms in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya

The prospect has said yes. In too many practices, that is where the paperwork stops. Work begins on the strength of an e-mail, the engagement letter follows weeks later or not at all, and the fee in the letter, when it finally arrives, is not quite the fee in the quote. When a dispute comes, nobody can show what was agreed, and for audits and reviews the firm cannot show that terms were agreed before the work began, as ISA 210 and ISRE 2400 (Revised) expect.

The fix is a single, unbroken path from proposal to signed letter to first invoice, with a person deciding every price and a partner reviewing anything that touches assurance.

Here is that path in Achekam, step by step.

Fee lines priced by a person

Staff build a proposal or quotation under CRM & SALES > Proposals / Quotations. Its fee lines are priced by a person. VAT is charged at the standard rate for the firm's jurisdiction, and Achekam recalculates the total from the lines, so the total cannot drift from what the lines say.

The lines come from the firm's service catalogue, kept under CRM & SALES > Leads > Services & quotes. Prices in the catalogue stay blank until a person types them; the starter list Achekam adds carries no prices at all. Staff can save quotation templates, for example a standard package for a small company's annual statements and tax return, and start new quotations from them.

One limitation to know: the CRM board shows amounts in rand even for Nigerian or Kenyan firms, so a firm in Lagos or Nairobi should not read the currency on a board card as the currency of the quote.

AI drafts wording, never fees

AI can draft a proposal's sections, such as the firm's understanding of the client's needs or the approach to the work, and an engagement letter's clauses. It never drafts fees. A person reads the draft and saves it; nothing the AI writes becomes part of the document until then.

Two further checks apply before anything is sent. Achekam will not send a proposal or letter whose wording breaks the professional guardrails. And for audits and reviews, it will not send one before a partner has reviewed it. That keeps the description of assurance work, and of the responsibilities of management and the practitioner, in a partner's hands.

The client's "yes" is recorded, not signed

The client opens the proposal from a link and can accept or decline it. Acceptance is recorded with the client's name and the time. It is not an electronic signature, and Achekam does not treat it as one.

What acceptance does is raise the engagement letter for the client to sign. That is the right order: the proposal sets out what and how much; the letter sets out the terms on which the firm will do it, and it is the letter the firm needs signed.

The engagement letter for signature

Engagement letters are tracked under CRM & SALES > Engagement Letters / Contracts. The letter goes to the client to sign, and where a client prefers paper, the letter can be recorded as signed on paper instead.

For an audit, the letter should cover what ISA 210 requires, including management's responsibilities and the framework the statements are prepared under. For an independent review it should reflect ISRE 2400 (Revised), and for a compilation, ISRS 4410 (Revised). The IAASB's 2026 Handbook holds the complete text of all three: every International Standard on Auditing, ISA 210 among them, and the review and related services standards. The AI can draft clauses; the partner decides whether the letter does its job.

What a signed letter creates

When the engagement letter is signed, Achekam does three things:

1. It turns the lead into a client.
2. It activates a service for each quotation line that is mapped to one of the firm's services. Recurring lines go on a schedule and later appear under Retainers.
3. It drafts the invoice, but does not issue it.

A quotation line that was not mapped to a service is recorded as unmapped, so it will not quietly become a service or a recurring charge. And there is a gap to plan around: no screen yet shows everything a signed contract created, or lets staff retry a step that failed, although the server has routes for it. After each signature, someone should open the new client and confirm the services and the draft invoice are what the proposal said.

The draft invoice then waits for a person to issue it. It joins the firm's receivables ledger with its other invoices, receipts and credit notes, and the firm's client billing controls still apply; they can, for instance, require a second issuer for an invoice above an amount the firm sets. A first invoice that matches the signed letter line for line is the best start a new client relationship can have.

Who does what, start to finish

The draft invoice, and later the recurring fees, are covered in retainers and the billing run. Leads that received a fee-less proposal through the welcome pack reach this stage when a person prepares a priced quotation; see auto-replies and welcome packs.

Take your firm's most common engagement, build it once as a quotation template with a partner-approved letter behind it, and send the next prospect through the full path from link to signature.

General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.