The How to series · Post 5
How to stop chasing clients for records every Monday
For UK accountants and bookkeepers who start Monday with a chase email: what the records chase costs, and how to put it on a rhythm that doesn't depend on memory.
It's 9am on Monday. The same email goes out: can you send the bank statements and the invoice list over, still waiting on them. No reply, so the chase goes again on Wednesday. By Friday someone builds the file from whatever they can find, and two clients still haven't sent anything.
That's the loop: chasing clients for records. The chase is the visible cost. The invisible one is what sits still while you wait: the return that can't be finished, the fee that can't be billed until the file is complete.
The maths (a sketch, not a client figure)
Say six clients a week owe records:
- 10 minutes to chase each, and 10 more to log who was chased = 2 hours a week
- × £30 an hour = £60 a week
- × 46 working weeks = £2,760 a year, spent pressing send.
That's only the typing. The bigger cost is the week the work waits: a return that can't be filed until the records land. A firmer tone doesn't end that. A rhythm does.
Score it: the three checks
- Hours. 4. An hour or two most weeks, more at quarter end, and it lands on the same person every time.
- Repeat. 5. Every chase is the same ask: which records, from whom, by when. The whole rhythm fits on one page.
- Risk-if-wrong. 4. A reminder that slips once is an email sent an hour later, and the log shows it happened.
Verdict: three checks at 4 or more. Hand it over.
Try one thing this week (free)
Pick the one record type that's always late. Write the exact ask once: which records, from whom, by when. Send it Monday morning, and log each chase: who, when, which attempt. By Friday, count how many came back without a second email. That count, times 46 weeks, is the size of the loop you're running by memory.
Where a person stays
The reminder is drafted by the machine and approved by a person before it goes, and every chase is logged so nobody gets three identical nudges in a week. The stubborn ones still get you: the phone call, the fee conversation, the judgement about a client who's struggling. Software prepares. A person decides.
FAQ
They're already getting a chase on Friday, which lands sharper because it's late and fed up. A polite, regular, well-written ask reads better than that. The tone is approved before anything sends, so it stays your voice.
The chase is the same either way: a dated ask, an approval, a log. The records arrive by post or as photos. The rhythm doesn't care how they travel, and the log marks them received all the same.
Then it stops being a chase and becomes a conversation. The log tells you it's got there: three asks, six weeks, nothing back. You ring, with dates in front of you, and you decide the next move. That call was always yours.
Any fixed day works. The point isn't the day, it's that the ask happens the same way every week whether or not anyone remembered. Pick a day and keep it. The exceptions can come to you.
Then the follow-up is precise instead of exasperated: these three came in, these three didn't. The log makes the fifth email read like a list, not a nag.