Ask most firm owners this question and you’ll get a pause before the answer.
Then you may get a rather vague response of: “Well, the AML stuff is on the compliance drive, engagement letters are in the practice management system and I think Sarah’s got a spreadsheet with the risk ratings.”
That pause is the problem. Not because anyone’s being careless, but because the process grew organically.
A partner joined, brought their own way of doing things and then a new hire got shown “how we do it” by whoever trained them that week.
Fast forward a few years and the firm has four or five versions of the truth running in parallel in different systems and everyone’s just hoping they line up just enough to onboard a client.
Usually, they do, but it’s the times they don’t that cost you.
The errors nobody notices until it’s too late
Any of these sound familiar?
- A client’s risk rating gets updated in one place but not the other.
- An ID check gets logged in an email thread that the reviewing partner never sees.
- Someone sends the old version of an engagement letter because that’s the one saved to their desktop.
None of these are dramatic failures on their own but they add up and pile on the frustration for you and the client as you onboard them.
Work you’re doing twice without meaning to
Every time information gets typed into a second system because the first one “doesn’t talk to” the second, that’s time your team isn’t spending on clients.
Onboarder’s whole point is that client and engagement data gets entered once and then it’s just there — in the engagement letter, the compliance record or wherever it needs to show up next.
Being ready for a regulator’s review, not scrambling for one
If your AML records, engagement terms and risk assessments already sit in one place, a review from the ICAEW or ACCA stops being a fire drill.
You’re not pulling documents from six different people the week before, as the records already built, because it’s been built the whole time.
This issues is only going to become more important to fix as the accountancy profession transition its AML compliance over to the much stricter FCA regime in the next few years.
Actually knowing what’s happening across the firm
This one matters more the bigger you get. When every partner’s onboarding runs through the same system, you can see where things are stuck, who’s overloaded and where the risk actually sits, rather than finding out three weeks later in a partner meeting.
None of this is about more process for its own sake. It’s about the firm running on one version of events instead of several, so the people in it can stop double-checking each other and get on with the work.
That’s what our new platform Onboarder is for. It helps small to medium-sized practices deliver a better client onboarding experience and provides a single source of truth.
If you want to give it a try, sign up now.