Case Study
Case Study
From the archive
- 01
We Promised Clients They Won't Have To Repeat Themselves. Then We Worked Out How Often They Did.
Not because the answer was hard. Because it was in five places. Part of it was in a deadline spreadsheet, part in a shared mailbox, part in a folder of scans named by whoever had scanned them, part in a separate AML portal, and the last part was in the head of a manager who was on leave.
- 02
Where does your practice software keep the client files? Our IT consultant's eleven questions before we bought FigsFlow.
Our IT is handled externally and our audit work makes document retention non-negotiable. The same consultant has killed two previous software purchases at this firm. This review took two hours.
- 03
We counted every human touch on one set of limited company accounts. It was 41. It is now 12.
There was a spreadsheet with fourteen tabs. One person maintained it every Monday morning for eleven years. It was entirely accurate, and it was the single largest operational risk in this firm.
- 04
Bookkeeping was recovering 54p in the pound. Here is our full service-line table and all nineteen repricing decisions.
Firm-wide recovery looked like 76%, which we could live with. Broken down by service line it turned out the average was concealing both ends of the distribution.
- 05
Proposal and Engagement Letter Software, Tested in the Real World
Care home groups are the most awkward thing we price. Multiple entities, partial exemption on VAT, heavy payroll, CQC reporting support, and a fee that has historically been arrived at by a partner opening last year's proposal for a comparable client and adjusting it by feel.
- 06
Nobody at Crane & Partners Keeps a Deadline List Any More
There is a card index in our loft. It was in genuine use until the mid-90s, and it contains, on stiff buff cards in at least four different hands, the year ends of clients who have been dead for thirty years. We keep it because it is the honest ancestor of everything that came after it – a spreadsheet, then a better sp