01
The starting point
A four-person practice handling year-end accounts and self-assessment for around 180 clients. Every year the run-up to filing turned into a manual chase. Fee earners, people on roughly £120 an hour of billable advisory time, spent evenings tracking who still owed which bank statements, invoices, receipts and payroll records, then sending one-off chasing emails. There was no single view of who was outstanding, the same clients got chased repeatedly, and a handful slipped through entirely and were dealt with in a deadline panic. Across four fee earners, the firm was losing about 24 hours a week during the 12-week crunch: close to £26,000 of billable capacity a year.
02
What was done
A live document checklist per client
One place showing exactly what each client has sent and what is still owed.
A scheduled, personalised reminder sequence
It escalates as the deadline approaches and stops the moment a document arrives.
Automatic logging and a real-time dashboard
Who is complete, who is outstanding, and days to deadline, visible at a glance.
Humans kept where judgement is worth paying for
A fee earner reviews any flagged complex or sensitive case before escalation, partner sign-off stays on anything non-standard, and “this client needs a phone call, not another email” is surfaced to a person, never decided by the system.
What was deliberately not automated
The partner-led conversations on complex or contentious returns, and the long-standing clients who expect a personal call. Where the relationship and the judgement are the service, an automated nudge does not save time. It erodes the trust the firm spent years building. A chase reminder is a task; a conversation about a complex return is judgement.
03
The result
- Firm-wide chasing fell from 24 to 6 hours a week, about 4.5 hours back per fee earner, redirected into billable advisory work.
- On-time client submissions rose from 62% to 88%, and the time from request to receipt dropped from 21 days to 9.
- Clients slipping past the filing deadline fell from 14 to 3, out of 180.
- An estimated £15,500 of billable fee-earner time was recovered across the cycle.
The chase used to own January. Now I open one dashboard and I can see exactly where every client is, and my team's doing actual accounting again instead of sending the same email for the fourth time. The part I didn't expect was that it told us which clients still needed a real conversation, rather than just nagging everyone.
04
Why it matters to your firm
Halcroft chose this workflow because document chase is the highest-leverage fit: universal pain, easy to measure, low regulatory risk, and buildable in three weeks. The firm is now scoping a second build from the same audit.
Written up by Halcroft Consulting Ltd. Figures supplied by Halcroft.