Accounting, Tax & Bookkeeping// topic
Client document intake, chasing and portals
In short
How a firm actually gets records out of clients: secure upload, request lists, automated chasing, and a status view the whole engagement team can trust.
8 pages
diagnostics
- Clients answer the first document reminder and ignore every one after itReminder decay is a content and addressing fault rather than a frequency fault, and one split of your own send data tells you which of the two you have.diagnostic11 min
- Clients start the records upload and abandon it halfway throughA half-finished upload is a measurable event with a named drop point, not evidence that the client could not be bothered. Here is how to find which step killed the session.diagnostic10 min
- Receipts sent over chat arrive with no client, no period and no contextChat capture is not the problem — chat attribution is. The image arrives fine; the client, the entity and the period do not, and no amount of extraction recovers them.diagnostic10 min
- Records emailed to a staff member never reach the engagement folderThe client sent it, a preparer is still chasing it, and the file is sitting in a reply thread in someone's inbox. The reconciliation that sizes the leak, and the capture rule that closes it.diagnostic10 min
- The outstanding-items board says complete while the preparer waitsThe board is not lying. It is answering a narrower question than the one the preparer is asking, because received, legible, complete and accepted were collapsed into one checkbox.diagnostic10 min
definitions
- Professional clearance: the letter, and the records that have to moveThe clearance letter asks one question and takes 10 minutes. The data handover behind it decides whether the incoming firm can open a period, and it is where a change of accountant actually fails.definition6 min
- The prepared-by-client list is a data structure, not a spreadsheetPBC stands for prepared by client. The useful definition is structural: a list of request items, each carrying nine fields, one of which is a state machine.definition6 min
- What a client due-diligence record has to contain before work startsDue diligence is usually written about as a compliance narrative. The deliverable is a record: 10 fields, each with evidence attached, a refresh clock and a named approver.definition6 min
Other topics in Accounting, Tax & Bookkeeping
See allExtraction and classification of source documentsTurning invoices, bank statements, receipts and tax forms into structured, confidence-scored data a reviewer can check against the original page.10 pagesReconciliation, coding and month-end closeRules-first transaction coding, matching logic, and an exception queue that surfaces only what a human genuinely has to decide.3 pagesLedger and practice-stack integrationsWiring a build into QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, Sage and practice management — sync design, controlled write-back, rate limits, and what the APIs will not let you do.1 pageBuild vs buy and vendor integration riskWhen an off-the-shelf AI accounting tool is the right answer, when it is not, and the integration and lock-in risk carried either way.1 page
Working on something in this space?
Tell us where you are in a sentence or two. We'll tell you honestly whether we're the right team, and what a sensible first slice of the work looks like.
Start the conversation