We Promised Clients They Won't Have To Repeat Themselves. Then We Worked Out How Often They Did.

In the second week of January last year, a client who runs a homeware business in Ontario and sells into the UK through Amazon asked what we still needed from him before his VAT quarter closed. A simple and reasonable question. But it took us until the following afternoon to answer him.

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.

So, we did something we never pictured ourselves doing. We went through the onboarding correspondence on 40 recent files and counted how often we had asked a client for a document or a detail we already held somewhere. It wasn’t a high number, but it was still enough to make us uncomfortable.

Why the Seams Cost Us More Than They Cost Most Practices

A firm with all its clients within an hour of the office can run on shared memory for a long time. Somebody pops in with their passport. Records arrive because you saw the client at something and mentioned it. The information you are missing is usually one conversation away.

Almost none of our clients can pop in. They are in North America, the Gulf, South and South East Asia, and across Europe. A director who needs identity verification cannot be asked to bring two forms of ID to our office on Thursday. An overseas seller with no UK address history will not come back clean on a straightforward electronic check, which means enhanced due diligence, which under our old process meant somebody had to notice and then remember to escalate it.

What We Did About It

We started using FigsFlow.

FigsFlow is a practice management software built around a single client record. The enquiry, the priced proposal, the engagement letter, the AML and due diligence file, the jobs, the statutory deadlines, the documents, the recorded time and the invoice are all the same record rather than five systems holding five partial copies of the same client. Our documents stay in our own Microsoft 365 tenant, in our own SharePoint and under our own retention policy.

The reason one record mattered more to us than it might to a practice with a local client base is that we cannot resolve anything quickly. A question asked at 5 o'clock in London is answered overnight at the earliest and often not until the following afternoon. Every gap in a specification, every missing detail, every ambiguity about who is doing what costs a full working day rather than a walk across the office. We had been absorbing that and calling it the cost of serving international clients.

FigsFlow brought an end to those delays.

Onboarding a Director Who Has Never Set Foot in the UK

Here is the kind of client that used to cost us a fortnight. A US-incorporated seller, one director resident outside the UK, UK VAT registration required from the first sale, a UK company being formed alongside it, and a person with significant control who holds the shares through another entity.

Under the old process, this would have been one of our slowest work, and almost all of the delay would have come from round trips. The passport arrived as a photograph attached to an email, which is not where a passport should live. The electronic identity check returned very little, because someone with no UK address history has almost no UK electronic footprint to check against. Somebody then had to read that result, conclude it warranted enhanced due diligence, and tell our MLRO, all of it over email, all of it a day apart. The engagement letter was assembled from the last similar letter we had sent, which meant it inherited whatever had been slightly wrong with that one. By the time the job was open, a fortnight had usually gone, and perhaps two days of that had been actual work.

FigsFlow removed the round trips entirely. The client verifies from their own phone, wherever in the world that phone is, so there is no email exchange to wait on and no scan of a passport sitting in a mailbox waiting to become a data breach. Where the check cannot satisfy itself, FigsFlow scores the case from coded rules rather than from somebody's sense of whether this one feels high risk, and routes it to our MLRO automatically. The MLRO still makes the decision. But what changes is that their reasoning is written to the client record at the moment they make it, instead of being reconstructed afterwards from a sent-items folder.

When the MLRO clears it and the engagement letter is signed, the company formation, the VAT registration and the first filing obligations open as jobs against the same record, already carrying the dates they were computed from. Nobody types the client's details a second time, and nobody emails anybody to say the file is ready.

Median time from first enquiry to the job being open, for that profile, went from around 14 working days to four.

The four days are not really the point though. As an Authorised Corporate Service Provider, we carry out identity verification for Companies House on our clients' behalf, which means our evidence has to stand up on its own terms and at volume, and verification status has to be tracked against each company's confirmation statement date rather than against a reminder somebody set in a calendar. FigsFlow holds that status on the record and against the date. When we were last asked to produce the risk rationale across a sample of files, it took under an hour.

Work That Is Already Built Before Anyone Starts It

The mechanism underneath all of this is dull, and it is the only part that really matters.

The record created at enquiry is the same record the work runs on. Nothing is retyped between the proposal, the engagement letter, the job and the invoice, which means there is no point in the process where the scope we agreed can diverge from the scope we deliver. That is the whole trick.

What it changes day to day is recurring work. A VAT stagger, a year-end, a confirmation statement date and a quarterly MTD update are held against each client and computed from that client's own dates. They are not rows in a schedule that somebody has to remember to roll forward each April. When a period opens, the job exists, and it exists carrying its client, its budget, the records it is still waiting on and the name of the person who will review it. Nobody arrives at a piece of work and has to establish what it is before they can begin it.

That sounds like a small thing. But it is the difference between a firm where the work appears and a firm where somebody has to think of the work first, and the second kind has a ceiling that arrives without warning, usually in January.

The record-chasing runs off the same record. Every request is tracked from sent through to reviewed, so the second reminder goes out because the client has not replied, not because nobody could tell whether they had. For clients we cannot simply telephone at a convenient hour, that distinction is most of the quarter.

It also means review is not a favour somebody does at the end. The reviewer is named when the job is created, and a job cannot close while anything underneath it is open. That sounds like bureaucracy and turns out to be the thing that stops a year-end being signed off on a Friday afternoon with one query still unresolved.

The Fee That Had Gone Underwater

We had a UK trading company on a fixed annual fee that we had not properly looked at in quite some time. Recorded time against that job put realisation at 54%. We were doing the work well and charging roughly half what it cost us.

Under the old arrangement, we would have discovered that in January, at the exact point in the year when nobody has the appetite for the conversation, and we would have carried it another 12 months. We found it in March, on a report that reads by service line off the same record the work was delivered against. We repriced at renewal with the evidence in front of us, rather than negotiating from instinct and then feeling faintly guilty about the number.

Across the firm, realisation moved from about 79% to about 91% and written-off time fell by almost 90%. We are not going to claim the software did that. The software made it visible in March instead of January. The partners did the rest.

The related change is that billing draws on the price frozen when the client accepted. Work outside that scope has to be varied and agreed rather than absorbed, which has ended the slow, polite drift where a client asks for one more thing 11 times across a year and none of it is ever billed because none of it was ever individually large enough to raise.

What Our Clients Noticed

They stopped being asked twice. Every request is now tracked from sent through to reviewed, so nobody asks again for a bank statement that arrived on Friday. Median time for a client to respond to a records request fell from around six days to two, and we think that is mostly because being asked twice quietly teaches people that the first ask was not serious.

They stopped receiving statutory deadlines. The portal shows them our target date, in plain English. Telling a client in Texas that his filing deadline is 31 January is a reliable way to receive his records on 28. The portal says, "in preparation,” "with your manager for review," "ready for your approval." There is no account for them to create, which has removed the single most common complaint we used to get from clients who already have too many logins.

And in June, we ran the same exercise we had run in January. Forty recent files, counting every time we had asked for something we already held. The number was four.

Conclusion

We have written about our own practice because it is the only one we can speak for. But any firm past a certain size is holding the same client in five places and paying for it in effort.

That cost stays invisible because it never appears anywhere you would look for it. It appears as a manager on leave, a question that takes a day and a half, a fixed fee nobody has examined in two years, and a client who is asked twice and is too polite to mention it.

So, count it. Take 40 recent files and count how many times you asked for something you already held. Whatever number comes back is what you are currently paying in order to change nothing.