For accountancy practices
AI for accountants
Your busiest month for enquiries is the month you have least capacity to answer them. That is a solvable problem.
Book a CallAccountancy practice has an unusual shape. Demand is not spread evenly across the year — it stacks into the weeks before 31 January, again before the corporation tax and Companies House deadlines, and increasingly around Making Tax Digital quarterly submissions. The prospective clients who find you in that window are often the most valuable ones you will see all year, because a business changing accountant in January has usually just been let down by the last one.
The difficulty is that this is precisely when nobody in the practice can pick up the phone. Enquiries arrive while your team is heads-down in returns, sit in an inbox for three days, and are answered after the prospect has already instructed someone else. The work we do for accountancy practices is aimed squarely at that gap: capturing, qualifying, and booking the enquiry without a partner having to stop what they are doing.
What actually breaks in a practice
January enquiries arrive when you have no capacity
Self-assessment season generates both your highest enquiry volume and your lowest availability to respond. An automated intake that answers immediately, asks the qualifying questions a partner would ask, and offers a booking slot in February converts enquiries you would otherwise have lost — without pulling anyone off returns.
Chasing records is a job nobody wants
Most practices lose more hours to requesting, re-requesting, and reconciling client paperwork than to the accounting itself. Automated record requests that escalate on a schedule, reference the specific documents outstanding, and stop the moment something is uploaded remove a task that is pure friction and generates no fee.
Making Tax Digital multiplies client touchpoints
MTD for Income Tax turns an annual conversation into a quarterly one. For a practice with several hundred clients, that is a step change in routine communication volume — reminders, submission confirmations, queries — and it is almost entirely templated work that does not need a qualified person to send it.
Onboarding stalls on AML checks
New client onboarding under the Money Laundering Regulations means identity verification, source-of-funds questions, and risk assessment before any work starts. Practices routinely lose a signed client in the gap between saying yes and completing checks, because the process is manual, sequential, and easy to leave sitting on someone's desk.
What we build for accountancy practices
A website that answers the pricing question
Prospective clients comparing practices want to know what a limited company return costs before they call. Sites that hide it behind a contact form lose the enquiry to one that does not. We build clear service and fee structures, named team members with their qualifications, and a booking flow on every page.
Enquiry qualification that mirrors your triage
Sole trader or limited company, turnover band, VAT registered, current software, whether they have an incumbent accountant and why they are leaving. These are the questions that determine whether an enquiry is worth a partner's time, and they can all be asked and answered before the first call.
Automated record collection
Scheduled requests tied to your deadline calendar, escalating reminders that reference exactly what is outstanding, and automatic cessation when documents arrive. It integrates with the practice management and bookkeeping stack you already run rather than replacing it.
Onboarding that runs itself to the AML gate
Engagement letter, identity documents, and the information required for your risk assessment collected in sequence, with the practice notified only when a step needs a qualified judgement. The compliance decisions stay with you; the administration around them does not.
Fits the stack you already run
We build around Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, and FreeAgent, and connect to practice management tools rather than asking you to move. Migrating a practice's software mid-year is a bad idea and we will say so.
Where the regulators sit
Accountancy practices in the UK are supervised for anti-money-laundering purposes either by a professional body — ICAEW, ACCA, AAT, CIOT among others — or by HMRC directly. Any automation touching client onboarding has to leave the risk assessment and the customer due diligence decisions with a qualified person. What it can do is gather the information, sequence the steps, and evidence that the process was followed.
We do not build anything that gives tax advice, makes a suitability judgement, or completes a submission autonomously. Automation belongs on the administration around the work, not the work itself. If a proposal for your practice ever appears to blur that line, it is the wrong proposal.
Common questions
Will this replace my practice management software?
No, and we would advise against any supplier who suggests otherwise. We integrate with what you already run — practice management, bookkeeping, and your document portal. Replacing core practice systems mid-year creates risk around deadlines and record continuity that is very hard to justify. The automation layer sits alongside your stack and talks to it.
Can it handle the January volume without embarrassing us?
The qualification flow is built from your own triage questions and answers only within that scope. It does not attempt to answer technical tax questions, and when an enquiry falls outside what it can handle it says so plainly and routes to a person. The failure mode we design for is escalating too readily rather than guessing, because a wrong tax answer in public is a professional problem, not just a lost lead.
How does this work with our AML obligations?
The automation collects identity documentation and the information feeding your risk assessment, and it sequences the onboarding so nothing starts before the checks are complete. It does not make the risk decision or sign anything off. Your supervisory body expects a qualified person to reach those conclusions, and the system is built to produce a clear record that the process was followed rather than to shortcut it.
We are a two-partner practice. Is this proportionate?
Smaller practices often see the sharper benefit, because there is no administrative team absorbing the overflow — the partners are the overflow. The relevant question is how many hours a month go on record chasing and first-response enquiry handling, and whether recovering those hours is worth more than the build. For most small practices the record chasing alone justifies it.
What happens when Making Tax Digital thresholds change?
The client communication sequences are configuration rather than code, so changing which clients receive which reminders as thresholds phase in is an adjustment rather than a rebuild. We would rather you were able to change that yourself than have to raise a ticket with us every time HMRC moves a date.
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