The How to series · Post 19
The engagement letter chase
For UK accountancy practices with a small team: the letter your work depends on is the one nobody chases properly, and it costs about 40 minutes of chasing every time.
It's 4pm on a Tuesday. A year end is well underway. The engagement letter sent three weeks ago is still unsigned, and nobody is sure whether the day 7 nudge went out or whether that was the resend.
The work can't wait for the paperwork, so it doesn't. The client isn't being difficult either. The letter is item 40 in an inbox that refills itself daily.
That's the loop this post is about: the engagement letter chase. Letter sent, nothing back, a nudge, "can you resend it?", resend, repeat, until someone gives up and phones.
The maths (a sketch, not a client figure)
A letter that needs chasing usually needs it four times across its life: the original send, a day 7 nudge, a day 14 resend, and the phone call that finally lands it. At 10 minutes a touch, that's 40 minutes of chase per letter.
A practice sending about 25 letters a quarter is sending roughly 2 a week:
- 2 letters a week × 40 minutes of chase = 80 minutes a week
- × £35 an hour (swap in your own rate) = about £47 a week
- × 46 working weeks = about £2,100 a year
That's just the hours. The cost that should worry you more doesn't appear in a timesheet: work starting before terms are signed is a compliance gap, and it's the reason this loop is worth more than the minutes suggest.
Score it: the three checks
The same three checks we use everywhere:
- Hours. How much of the week it eats (0 to 5)
- Repeat. Could a new starter follow it from one page? (0 to 5)
- Risk-if-wrong. If it slips once, how bad? (0 to 5. High means the rules are obvious and a slip is recoverable)
The letter chase scores Hours 2 (80 minutes a week, landing on whoever is least spare), Repeat 5 (the whole cadence fits on one page: day 7 reminder, day 14 resend with the letter attached), Risk-if-wrong 4 (a plainly worded reminder is safe and anything sensitive is caught at approval. The unsigned-letter risk shrinks as soon as the cadence runs at all).
Two checks at 4 or more: start narrow. One step: a day 7 reminder on every letter that goes out, drafted and approved before sending.
Try one thing this week (free)
List the engagement letters sent in the last month that came back unsigned. Take the two oldest and send a two-line reminder by hand today: the letter attached again and one plain sentence about why it matters, nothing else. Count replies on Friday. If two nudges pull back two letters that three weeks of waiting didn't, you've measured the loop in one afternoon.
Where a person stays
The day 7 reminder and the day 14 resend are drafted by software and approved by a person, every time. Engagement letters are compliance documents, and compliance stays approval-only in everything we build: no exceptions, ever. The phone call and the fee conversation stay human, as does anything the client might take the wrong way. Software runs the timetable. People keep the relationship and the judgement.
FAQ
Mostly they're just busy. The letter has no deadline attached and sits behind dozens of other things in a full inbox. The fix isn't a firmer letter. It's a nudge that arrives before their attention moves on.
Practices do, and the gap grows quietly every time: work delivered with terms unsigned, nothing to point at if the relationship turns. The honest fix is making the letter easy to sign and hard to forget, which is what a cadence does.
Not when it's worded plainly: the letter again and one line on why it's needed, plus an offer to answer any questions. A person approves the wording, and the machine never invents a new tone.
Then part of the cadence exists, which is good. What usually stays manual is the resend with the right document attached, and the letters that fall out of the system entirely. The loop is the bit between the reminder and the signature.
Whoever owns the client, every time. Software prepares the draft and a person decides. Nothing sends unchecked. With compliance documents that's not a preference. It's the whole design.