Every spring, accounting firms up and down the country send the same email. A blanket information request. A proforma. A polite note asking clients to fill it in and send everything back.
And every spring, a good chunk of clients quietly ignore it.
Nobody says it out loud, but the annual information mailer might be the most disregarded email in the profession.
Roshan Patel, Tax Senior at Lawrence Grant, leads a team of four getting client tax returns filed with HMRC on time.
“So before Glasscubes, our tax filing software had a mail merge function in there. So what we used to do is come around May time we used to send out a mailer to all of our clients with a blanket information request proforma and ask our clients to fill that in and amply return that schedule of information with their tax return information for that year.”
Sensible on paper. But that’s where the trouble starts.
When the request looks like spam
The problem, as Roshan puts it, is that “a lot of the times clients felt that these information requests were quite spammy and tend to disregard the information.”
Here’s the uncomfortable bit. A one-size-fits-all request, sent to everyone at once, looks a lot like the marketing emails clients have trained themselves to delete.
Other clients went the opposite way:
“…you used to have clients that send information in dribs and drabs. So, one email they’ll send one month and another email they’ll send another month. But this often made it hard to keep track of what information a client’s given.”
Then there’s the question of whose inbox it lands in:
“…you know one email might be sent to a certain individual and another will be sent to another one of my colleagues, and then amalgamating that information becomes a lot more difficult, and a lot more of a tedious task.”
A bank statement in one inbox. A P60 in another. Dividend vouchers in a third. Somebody has to stitch it all together before 31 January.
The case for doing nothing
Then there’s the hesitation every firm feels before switching.
“Well, I think one of the biggest concerns was that our current software might not be the best, but it’s one of those, if it’s not broken don’t fix it situations.”
There was a more specific worry too, one any firm that chases clients will recognise:
“One of the issues that we were a bit worried about is that clients might complain, saying that, you know, we are constantly emailing them with too many request reminders for information.”
Chasing is a balancing act. Too little and nothing arrives. Too much and the relationship frays.
Some clients still push back on reminders. The difference now is the fix:
“What this now allows us to do is, if a client is complaining, saying that you’re sending me too many reminders, we can just click one button and that’s it. The reminders are stopped completely.”
What actually changed
“Well, I’d say it’s been a massive step in the right direction. Glasscubes has allowed us to contact our clients in a much more smoother and efficient way.”
“Here each client has their own portal, where they can upload information as much as they want. So, collating that information, at least when it comes to doing tax returns, has become much, much more straightforward.”
One place per client. No more rebuilding a tax return from five different inboxes.
The verdict
“I mean Glasscubes I would definitely rate a 10 out of 10. I’d highly recommend it to people in the same industry as me.”
And with January approaching, his message to smaller firms is well timed:
“Within our industry, we’ve only got a couple of months left until our most important deadline, the 31st of January. A software like this being implemented into small and medium practises will greatly help them push themselves towards that 31st of January deadline.”
Perhaps clients were never ignoring their accountant. They were ignoring the mailer.
