A chartered accountant: 1,400 client documents collected via portal, not chase
A chartered accountancy practice in Harrogate was chasing clients for documents by email, phone, and occasional stern letter. The audit team called January "the chase".
The reading
A four-partner chartered accountancy practice in Harrogate, serving around 420 business clients and 1,100 personal tax clients. Eighteen staff, including seven qualified accountants and two trainees. The partners had, between them, over a hundred years in practice.
The document collection cycle for year-end work ran from early January to late April. The firm sent requests, chased responses, received half of what was asked for, chased again, and eventually got the rest. The chase was managed in a shared mailbox and three spreadsheets. The audit team called January "the chase" and had been doing so for at least a decade.
The managing partner's view was that the chase was a tax on the firm. He was correct.
The chase as the business
The partners had tried, twice, to introduce client portals. Both had failed, for different reasons. The first portal had been clumsy; clients would not use it. The second had been competent but had required clients to remember a login, which they would not. The firm had reverted to email both times.
The underlying issue was that the partners had assumed the client would adapt to the portal. The clients had, correctly, declined to.
- 1,520 clients, 3-month annual chase cycle
- Document requests sent by email, replied to with varying diligence
- Two previous portal attempts abandoned
- Approximately 1,100 chase emails sent per week in January
- No central view of what was outstanding per client
What we built
We built a portal, with a specific design choice: no login. Each client received a unique link, by email or SMS, that opened directly to their own request list. Documents could be dragged in, photographed from a phone, or forwarded to a per-client email address. The firm's staff saw a dashboard of what was outstanding across the client book.
The technical detail worth recording: the per-client email address was the breakthrough. A client who received a bank statement by email could forward it, unchanged, to the firm's address, and the system would route it to their file. Clients did this without being asked. The portal became optional for anyone who preferred email, which turned out to be most of them.
Stack: a Rails application, Postgres, S3 for document storage, Mailgun for inbound email routing, Twilio for SMS reminders.
The numbers at ninety days
| What | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| January chase emails sent | ~4,400/month | 600/month |
| Document completion by end of February | 32% | 71% |
| Client complaints about chasing | 24/season | 3/season |
| Staff hours on the chase | 180/week peak | 45/week peak |
| Firm visibility of outstanding items | Partial | Live |
The portal that did not require a portal
The partners' earlier attempts had failed because they had asked the clients to behave differently. The successful version asked the clients to behave as they already did, and the firm absorbed the difference.
That is almost always the correct direction of adaptation. The firm's systems should change; the clients should not have to. The one-week training test applied to a new trainee in month three: she managed her own portfolio of chase cases on day two, because the dashboard made the state of each client obvious.