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For accountants and bookkeepers
Stop chasing clients for the same six documents.
The work is not the problem. Getting the records out of clients is the problem.
Ask most accountants and bookkeepers where their year actually goes and very few of them say the accounts. The technical work is the part they trained for and the part they are quick at. What eats the practice is everything that happens before the work can start: asking a client for six documents, receiving four, chasing the other two, receiving a photograph of a photograph of a P60, and asking again.
January is the sharpest version of this, but it is not confined to January. Quarterly VAT, payroll cutoffs, confirmation statements, corporation tax filings and the steady drip of client questions all run on deadlines that are not negotiable, held together by a mixture of practice software, spreadsheets and the memory of whoever has been there longest. When somebody is off ill, the gaps show immediately.
There is also a client experience problem hiding inside the admin problem. Clients do not enjoy being chased any more than you enjoy chasing them. They send things late because it is fiddly, because they are not sure exactly what you want, and because email is a bad container for a list of tasks. Make the giving easy and a surprising amount of the chasing simply stops being necessary.
Sound familiar?
- January spent chasing records by email
- Client documents arriving as photos of photos
- Deadline tracking spread across spreadsheets and memory
- Onboarding a new client taking a week of back and forth
What we do about it
- A portal where clients upload once and get chased automatically
- Documents read and sorted on arrival
- One deadline board for the whole practice
- Onboarding that collects identification, authority and records without a single email
A day that probably looks like yours
Nothing here is a disaster. That is rather the point: this is an ordinary day, and the cost is spread so thinly that nobody ever adds it up.
- 08:30Nineteen client emails overnight, four of them with documents attached.Attachments get saved by hand into folders, and two land in the wrong client's file.
- 10:00A client sends a photograph of a bank statement taken at an angle in poor light.Somebody types the figures out by hand, and typing figures by hand makes errors.
- 11:45Chasing the same three clients for the same records for the third week running.An hour of a senior person's day spent writing emails that will not be answered.
- 14:00A new client needs onboarding: identification checks, authority, engagement letter.A week of back and forth before any chargeable work can begin.
- 16:15Someone asks whether a particular filing has actually gone in.Three people check three different places before anybody can answer confidently.
- 18:50The real work finally starts, after everyone else has gone home.The technical work happens when you are tired, which is when reviews get missed.
A client portal is mostly about removing the excuse
Most late records are not defiance. They are friction. A client opens your email on a phone, sees a list of six things, has two of them to hand, cannot deal with the rest right now, and closes it intending to come back. They do not come back, because nothing reminds them and the email has moved down the screen.
A portal turns that into a visible list with ticks against it. The client can see what they have given you and what is still outstanding, upload from a phone camera in a few seconds, and get a nudge automatically when something is still missing. The chasing continues to happen, it just stops being done by a person who has better things to do.
It also fixes the filing at the same time. Documents arrive against the right client and the right job because that is where they were uploaded, rather than being dragged out of an inbox by hand. That single change removes a whole category of small errors that are tedious to find later.
Documents that read themselves on the way in
A large amount of practice time goes on turning documents into figures. Bank statements, invoices, receipts, payslips and P60s arrive as PDFs and photographs, and somebody keys them in. It is not difficult work, which is exactly why it is so expensive to have qualified people doing it.
Document processing takes that first pass. Content is read on arrival, sorted by type and client, and the figures pulled out for a human to check rather than to type. The person stays in the loop, because the review is where the value is, but they are correcting rather than transcribing. Document processing is published at £800 to £1,500 a month.
The honest caveat is that quality of input still matters. A crumpled receipt photographed in a dark pub will always need a person. What changes is the proportion: the routine ninety percent stops consuming your team, so the awkward remainder gets the attention it actually deserves.
One deadline board instead of four half systems
Most practices track deadlines in more than one place. Some sit in the practice software, some in a spreadsheet a partner maintains, some in a shared calendar, and a few live only in somebody's head. It works, until two of them disagree or the person holding the mental copy is off for a fortnight.
One board that everybody works from, showing every client, every obligation, its status and who owns it, is the least glamorous improvement available to a practice and usually the most calming. The value is not really the software. It is that a partner can answer, in ten seconds and with confidence, whether a thing has been filed.
It also gives you a fair view of workload. Knowing in October that January will be heavy is only useful if you can see which clients are already late and which reliably deliver in week one. That is the difference between planning the peak and simply surviving it.
Security, because you hold the most sensitive data in town
An accountancy practice holds identification documents, bank details, payroll data and the full financial picture of dozens or hundreds of local businesses. That makes it an appealing target, and the attacks that succeed are usually dull rather than clever: a convincing email asking someone to change bank details, a reused password on a mailbox, or an account belonging to someone who left last year and was never shut off.
The defences that matter most are equally unglamorous. Multi factor authentication on every mailbox, a proper process for leavers, backups of the practice data that have actually been tested by restoring something, and staff who have seen a realistic phishing attempt in training rather than only in the wild. Cyber Essentials certification is published at £1,800 to £2,500 and covers most of that ground in a form clients and insurers recognise.
It is worth saying plainly that a great deal of this costs very little. Turning on multi factor authentication is free. Testing a restore costs an afternoon. We would rather tell you which of the things you already pay for is enough than sell you a layer you do not need.
Real examples
Illustrative cases drawn from the kind of work we do. Tap one to see what happened and what could have been done. We do not name clients without their permission.
The January that was really a December problem
The case
A three partner practice sends its self assessment requests in November. By Christmas, roughly half the clients have sent something and almost none have sent everything. January becomes a month of chasing emails, weekend working and a genuine risk of late filing for a handful of clients who go quiet entirely. The technical work is fine. The gathering is what breaks people.
What could have been done
A portal where each client sees a checklist of exactly what is outstanding and can upload from a phone, with automatic reminders escalating gently as the deadline gets closer. The chasing still happens, but nobody in the practice has to do it, and the practice can see in early December who is genuinely at risk.
The bank details that were not the client's
The case
An email arrives from what looks like a client, saying their bank details have changed and asking for a refund to be redirected. The tone and signature are right because the sender has been reading a compromised mailbox for a fortnight. Nobody at the practice does anything obviously careless. The request simply looks entirely normal.
What could have been done
Multi factor authentication on every mailbox so the original compromise is far harder, plus a standing rule that a change of bank details is always confirmed by ringing a number already on file rather than one in the email. Phishing simulation training makes that rule feel routine instead of rude.
The onboarding that took a fortnight
The case
A promising new client agrees to move practices in the second week of the month. Identification checks, the engagement letter, authority to act and a request for prior year records all go out by email, one at a time as each previous step comes back. Two weeks pass before any chargeable work can start, and the client, who was enthusiastic on the phone, has begun to wonder whether the move was worth the bother.
What could have been done
One onboarding flow that collects identification, signs the engagement letter electronically and requests prior year records in a single guided sequence. It usually completes in a day or two, chargeable work starts sooner, and the client's first experience of the practice is that you are organised.
What accountants and bookkeepers usually ask us for
Document processing
Invoices, delivery notes, timesheets and forms read automatically and filed where they belong, with a person checking the edge cases.
£800 to £1,500/month
Cyber security and Cyber Essentials
Certification, hardening, monitoring and staff training. The paperwork your customers and insurers keep asking for, and the protection underneath it that actually keeps you trading.
£3,000 to £6,000
IT support and managed service
A named engineer who knows your setup, agreed response times in writing, and no ticket queue purgatory.
£55 to £150/user/month
Custom CRM and business systems
The system you actually need rather than the one you can rent. Built around your process, integrated with what you already use.
£20,000 to £40,000
Website design and build
Fast, accessible sites that load in under two seconds and read well on a phone. Built to be edited by you, not held hostage by us.
£4,000 to £8,000
Common questions
What sort of budget does a small practice need for this?
Document processing is published at £800 to £1,500 a month, bookkeeping support at £600 to £1,200 a month, IT support at £55 to £150 per user each month and Cyber Essentials certification at £1,800 to £2,500. Most practices should start with whichever single thing costs them the most hours, usually the gathering and the keying in, rather than buying everything at once.
How long does it take, and can we avoid doing it in January?
Yes, and you should. A portal and the document handling are usually a matter of a few weeks including getting your own document checklists right, which is the part that needs your input. We would rather start in spring or early summer so the first real test is a quiet VAT quarter rather than the busiest month of your year.
Do we own the client data and the portal?
Yes. Client records and documents are yours, exportable in full, and the portal sits on your own domain in your branding. Given what you hold on behalf of your clients, being able to move it elsewhere without a fight is a basic requirement rather than a favour.
Will it work with our practice software and with Xero or QuickBooks?
Usually, and that connection is worth checking properly before anything is signed. Xero, QuickBooks and Sage connect well. Practice management systems vary, and a few older ones have very limited options, in which case we will tell you what is genuinely possible rather than describe a workaround as an integration.
Some of our team are not confident with new systems. How is that handled?
By changing one thing at a time and letting people keep working the way they know until the new way is obviously easier. In practice the portal is the easiest sell, because it removes the job everybody in the office least wants to do. We train on your real client files rather than a demonstration and stay available while the first cycle runs.
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