Accountancy & bookkeeping

Accountancy and bookkeeping practices run on clients, deadlines, and clear workflows. In the UK, firms juggle compliance, advisory, and year-end spikes. When intake is scattered and handover between partners, managers, and juniors is informal, work slips and everyone burns unnecessary hours on chase-up.

The operational reality in this sector

Practices take on new clients via referrals, web enquiries, and sometimes leads from accountants' networks or introducers. Work gets allocated by partner or manager—often by who's free or who knows the client. Deadlines live in practice management software, spreadsheets, or someone's head. Handover between onboarding, compliance, and advisory can be ad hoc: emails, meetings, and "can you pick this up?" Older firms especially run on spreadsheets and shared drives alongside one or two core systems. The result is visibility gaps, duplicated effort, and last-minute rushes.

Common friction we see

• New client enquiries land in multiple inboxes; no single view of pipeline or capacity.
• Work allocation is reactive—"who's got capacity?"—with no clear ownership or SLA.
• Handover between onboarding, compliance, and advisory relies on memory and chase-up.
• Deadlines and status live across practice software, spreadsheets, and email; reconciliation is manual.
• Partners and managers spend too much time on triage and status checks instead of client work.
• Peak season exposes weak workflows; same bottlenecks every year.

What this looks like in practice

A mid-sized firm has a website form and a shared enquiries inbox. New leads get forwarded to a partner or manager, who decides whether to take them on. Onboarding details are sent by email; someone manually creates the client in the practice system and assigns work. Progress is tracked in spreadsheets and weekly meetings. When it gets busy, enquiries sit, handovers slip, and the team works late to meet deadlines. Nobody has a single view of what's in flight.

How we typically approach this

We start with discovery: we map how clients come in, how work is allocated, and how it moves from onboarding through compliance and advisory. We design clear workflows—intake, assignment, handover, deadlines—and implement them in your existing tools or in a thin layer we build. We integrate forms, inbox, and practice management where it helps. We avoid big-bang change; we phase delivery so you can adapt. Training and handover ensure your team can run it.

What changes after implementation

• One place for client enquiries and pipeline; clear ownership and response times.
• Work allocated consistently with visible capacity and deadlines.
• Clear handover between onboarding, compliance, and advisory; less chase-up.
• Single view of what's in progress and what's at risk.
• Less time on triage and status, more on client work.

Tools we commonly work with

We work with what you use: practice management (e.g. IRIS, CCH, Xero Practice Manager), Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and CRM or intake tools. We connect intake, workflows, and handover so you're not rekeying or hunting across systems.

A short example from the field

Illustrative example. A regional practice had enquiries from the website, referrals, and a shared inbox. Allocation was done in partner meetings; handover to managers and juniors was mostly verbal. We mapped the flow, built a simple intake and assignment workflow, and wired it into their practice management system. Partners could see pipeline and capacity; managers had a clear list of owned work and handover points. Triage time dropped and fewer jobs slipped past deadline.

FAQs

We're regulated. How do you handle compliance and data?
We work within your security and compliance boundaries. We don't store client data unnecessarily. We'll agree what goes where before we build anything.

We use practice management software already. Do we need to change?
Often no. We integrate with what you have. The gap we fill is usually intake, workflow, and handover—making sure work lands in the right place and nothing drops between systems.

What about peak season?
We design workflows and visibility so you can see capacity and bottlenecks. We can phase implementation around your busy periods.

Next step

If your practice is drowning in intake and handover chaos, we can help you centralise workflows and get a clear view of pipeline and capacity. View our services or see how we work.