The Hidden Cost of Chasing Clients for Documents

For most small and mid-sized accountancy firms, chasing clients for documents is quietly eating up their most valuable resource: time.

5 min read · For accountancy firms

Explore Client Onboarding

Every accountant knows the routine.

You send an engagement letter. You wait. You send a reminder. You wait. You call. You send another email. Eventually, maybe a week later, the signed letter appears in your inbox with a one-line apology.

Then you start the whole thing again for ID documents. And bank details. And the anti-money laundering questionnaire.

This is the chasing problem. And for most small and mid-sized accountancy firms, it’s quietly eating up the most valuable resource they have: time.

How much time are firms really losing?

Practice staff often spend a significant number of hours each week on administrative tasks, and a large chunk of that is pure follow-up. Chasing clients for documents. Sending reminders. Checking whether something was uploaded, signed, or returned.

For many firms, that adds up quickly. Hours that aren’t billable, aren’t strategic, and aren’t why anyone got into accountancy.

Why clients don’t respond (it’s not personal)

Here’s the thing most firms don’t consider: clients aren’t ignoring you on purpose.

They’re running businesses. They’re juggling their own inboxes. Your email landed between a supplier invoice and a dentist appointment. The attachment you needed got buried in a thread they’ve already archived.

When you rely on email to collect documents, you’re relying on your client to:

• Open the right email
• Find the right attachment
• Know what format you need
• Remember to actually send it back

That’s a lot of steps. And every extra step is another place the process breaks down.

The knock-on effects

Chasing isn’t just a time problem. It creates a cascade of other issues:

1. Onboarding bottlenecks. New clients get stuck in limbo. You can’t start work until you have what you need, so everything backs up. The client’s first experience of your firm? Waiting.
2. Staff frustration. Nobody trained for years to send reminder emails. When skilled staff spend their days chasing paperwork, morale drops. And in a tight recruitment market, that matters.
3. Client perception. Ironically, the more you chase, the less professional you look. Multiple follow-up emails can make even an excellent firm feel disorganised, even though the delay isn’t your fault.
4. Compliance risk. When documents arrive late, corners get cut. AML checks get backdated. Engagement letters get signed after work has already started. It’s not ideal, and it’s not what regulators want to see.
5. Compliance deadlines slip. When engagement letters aren’t signed promptly, AML checks can’t start. When AML checks are delayed, you can’t file. And when January comes around, you’ve got clients whose records you’re still waiting on, with the SA100 deadline weeks away. What started as a chasing problem becomes a compliance problem.

What “not chasing” actually looks like

The firms that have solved this aren’t working harder at follow-up. They’ve removed the need for it.

Instead of emailing documents back and forth, they give clients a single, secure place to upload everything, on their own time, from any device. Automated reminders go out on a schedule. The firm can see exactly what’s outstanding without asking anyone.

No more “just checking in” emails. No more “did you get my last message?” calls.

The client gets a clear list of what’s needed. The firm gets visibility without chasing. And onboarding that used to take weeks happens in days.