A client sends a year of records eleven days before a deadline. The firm has forty other clients doing the same thing. Everybody works late, the work is rushed, and any planning that might have saved the client money is impossible because the year is long over.
Next year the same client will do the same thing, because nothing about the experience taught them otherwise.
Why clients leave it late
It is unpleasant, it is not urgent until it is, and nothing in the year prompts them. There is no malice in it and no amount of irritation changes it.
What it costs the firm
Compressed months, overtime, rushed work, less checking, no capacity for new clients in the busiest period and a team that dreads a fixed part of the calendar every year.
What it costs the client
Advice that arrives too late to be acted on, no opportunity to plan, higher fees where catch up work is needed and the risk of missing something entirely.
Publish the calendar
Which deadlines apply to which kind of client, how the dates are derived and what falls due when. Most clients genuinely do not know and have never seen it laid out.
Send reminders on a schedule
Months ahead, not weeks. A prompt in the quiet season is what moves the work, and it is entirely automatable, which is the mechanism behind late filing and penalty enquiries from worried clients arriving less often.
Set an internal deadline
Earlier than the real one, published to clients as the date you need records by. It creates the buffer that makes good work possible.
Price the lateness
A discount for early submission or a supplement for records arriving in the final weeks. It is the only mechanism that reliably changes behaviour and clients accept it when it is published in advance.
Tell clients what early actually buys them
Time to plan, advice that can still be acted on, a smaller fee and a document they can actually discuss. Clients respond to benefit rather than to deadline pressure.
Make submitting easy
A single route, a checklist and a way to send things as they arise rather than in one annual heap. Friction is a large part of why clients delay.
Chase in a way that works
Specific, personal and about what is missing rather than a general reminder. A list of three outstanding items gets a response and a general prompt does not.
Answer the deadline question at any hour
Clients wonder at midnight and never ring to ask, which is the value of publishing it clearly, as in first year trading questions new companies ask.
Show clients what the quiet months are for
Most clients assume an accountant is only useful around a deadline and have no idea what a conversation in the middle of the year would even cover. Naming two or three things worth discussing while there is still time to act on them turns an empty period into the part of the relationship clients value most.
Handle the anxious late client kindly
Somebody arriving late is usually embarrassed rather than careless, and how they are treated decides whether they stay, which is the tone in switching accountants and the questions new clients ask.
Getting started
Publish the calendar, set an internal deadline and send scheduled reminders, building the page with the AI FAQ generator, then answer deadline questions at any hour and ask suppliers the questions in AI chatbot security questions to ask a vendor. SpideyChat for accountants answers from your published pages. Try SpideyChat on your own site, or read about reminders on the features page.