Onboarding a new tax client is the one job that starts with nothing behind it. Every other item in the mailbox rests on a prior year. Last year’s return says which forms to expect. The file says which entities exist. Eleven years of threads say who actually answers. A new client is a message from somebody the firm has never dealt with, and the first six weeks build, out of email, the record every other job in the practice takes for granted.
- Half of what you need in the first month is permissions, identity and decisions. None of that behaves like a bank statement.
- The item that decides when you can start sits with the firm the client is leaving. Everyone in that conversation answers to somebody else.
- Who the client is gets discovered over the first few weeks, usually from a signature block: the entities, the addresses, the person who can actually instruct you. A wrong guess there is a confidentiality event rather than a filing error.
- Nothing marks the end. The return goes out. Six things on the original list never arrived, and nobody asks for them again.
The only job with nothing behind it
Take any other recurring job in the practice. Notice how much of it is answered before anybody opens the mail.
You know the client owns two rentals, because you depreciated them last year. You know the brokerage statement is a consolidated one and lands in the second half of February, because that’s what happened the last four times. You know the wife handles the paperwork and the husband signs whatever she puts in front of him. You know they answer in about a week. You know the mileage log is the last thing to arrive, and that the K-1 from the partnership runs late. All of that is residue from having done the job before. It sits nowhere in particular, and it does an enormous amount of work.
Strip all of that out and you have onboarding.
With a new client, the firm holds no expectations at all, so the ordinary inbox judgments stop working. Their silence could be normal for them, or it could be a problem. A document could be missing, or it could be something that was never going to exist. The person replying might be the person who decides, or might be relaying. Their description of their own affairs is usually a little off, in the honest direction: people forget the small partnership, the state they moved out of, the account their mother set up.
That makes the first weeks different from everything else in the mailbox, in one specific way. Everywhere else, mail is an input to a job. Here, mail is also the raw material of the client file. What you find out in these six weeks becomes the baseline every later year gets read against. If it’s wrong, it stays wrong quietly, for a long time.
So onboarding is its own job, with its own list. It has its own contents, its own clock, and its own way of failing.
What the first message is already telling you
Onboarding starts before you’ve agreed to anything, and the first message is doing more work than most firms let it.
It lands in the general mailbox, or in a partner’s inbox because somebody passed the name along, and it sits among the vendor pitches and the newsletters. It’s usually short. Almost every inquiry carries the two facts that decide whether this is a client you want: why they’re leaving, and what state they’re in. They arrive by accident.
The tells are ordinary, and they’re worth reading for.
Somebody who leads with a notice has an open problem to settle first. Somebody who mentions a couple of unfiled years is describing several engagements, and only one of them has this year’s date on it. Somebody whose first paragraph is about their previous accountant, at length and with feeling, is telling you what that relationship was like from the other side. It’s worth a moment’s thought about whose account you’re hearing. Somebody who asks the fee before describing the work is telling you what will matter in year two. And an inquiry that arrives on the last day of March, from someone with a complicated year, is its own proposition, covered further down.
Any one of those decides nothing on its own. Together they turn the inquiry pile into a screening pile, which changes how it gets handled. These messages are waiting on a decision, and the decision goes better after one short reply with three or four questions in it, ahead of any quote. What did last year’s return include. Who prepared it. Are there entities, and are they current. Is anything open with a tax authority right now.
Four answers, and most bad engagements show up in them.
Declining deserves a sentence of its own, because firms are worse at it than they need to be. A prompt decline with no reasons attached is kinder than one that arrives three weeks later with them, and reasons invite negotiation about a decision you’ve already made. Where you can point them somewhere, do. Where you’re declining on capacity rather than fit, say so, because that’s a different message and they may be a good client in September.
One more thing lives in this stretch, and it causes trouble later. A great many new clients arrive through somebody: an attorney, a financial adviser, an existing client who put their name forward. That person is frequently on the original thread. Hit reply for the next six weeks and they stay on it, through the fee discussion, the prior-year returns and the first draft. Nobody means for that to happen. It happens because the thread was already open. The habit worth building is that the inquiry thread ends when the engagement begins. Thank the referrer in a message of their own, and start a fresh conversation with the client alone.
Two lists, and only one of them has a deadline
Once you’ve said yes, the mailbox carries two different jobs about the same person. They arrive interleaved, and they look identical.
The first is the firm’s own list. These are the things that have to be true before you can properly act for this client at all. Depending on where you practice and what your firm’s policy says, that’s some combination of a conflict check, whatever identity verification you’re required to perform, and an engagement letter that has come back signed. It also covers the authorization that lets you deal with the tax authority on their behalf, a decision about scope and fee, and the client’s acknowledgment of how you’ll handle their information.
The second is the work: last year’s return, this year’s documents, the books, the numbers, the filing.
The two lists behave in opposite ways. Confusing them is the most expensive mistake available in the first month.
The work list has a date on it that somebody else set, and it’s loud. A preparer opens the file, finds a document missing, and the job visibly stops. The firm’s own list runs on a clock only you keep, and it stays quiet. The tax software asks nothing about the conflict check. The return moves through every stage with the authorization still outstanding. Engagement letters, and the signature nobody chases makes this argument about the letter, and everything in it applies with more force to the whole acceptance list. The letter is one line of it, and the other lines have nobody chasing them either.
The practical consequence is the same one that piece reaches. Attention alone can’t hold a list nothing surfaces, so it has to be a gate. Which items are absolute, and which a partner may waive by name, is for your firm and your insurer to settle between them. The decision belongs above the preparer, who receives no signal at any point that anything is outstanding.
There’s one useful ordering rule inside the acceptance list, and it saves weeks. Two of its items are keys as well as obligations. The signed letter is what lets your people start. The tax authority authorization is what lets you go and get information yourself, instead of asking the client for it. Both take days or weeks to come back, and both stand on their own. So both go out on day one, ahead of the document pack, ahead of the questionnaire, ahead of anything you have to think about. Everything else in onboarding runs while those two are in flight.
Most of the pack is not documents
The onboarding pack is the longest list you’ll ever send a single client. It goes to the one person who has never sent you anything and has no habit of doing so.
That combination is worth sitting with. A returning client gets an organizer and knows the drill: same time of year, same shape, and they’ve done it eleven times. A new client gets a longer list, with unfamiliar words in it, from a firm they’ve known for two weeks, while they’re also canceling something with their old accountant. Firms put real care into the letter that welcomes a new client, then attach forty lines to it.
The first thing to see is that most of those lines ask for something other than a document. They fall into four kinds, and the kinds travel at wildly different speeds.
Some take sixty seconds on a phone. A signature. A photograph of an identity document. Confirming a date of birth, a dependent’s name, a bank account for the refund. Those get done on the sofa, right away, as long as they arrive on their own. Bundle them with something slower and they wait.
Some take an evening with their own records. Last year’s charitable receipts, the mileage, the closing balances, the list of assets bought during the year. That’s real work for the client, so it gets scheduled, which means postponed.
Some sit with somebody else entirely. Prior-year returns, the depreciation schedule, the accounting file, the payroll filings. However willing the client is, all they can do is ask, and they’re asking a firm they have just dismissed. That has a section of its own below, because it’s nearly always the long pole.
And some are decisions rather than deliveries. Which entity is which. Whether the side business is a business. Whether last year’s treatment of something should carry forward. Those arrive after a conversation, rather than because you asked. On a document list they’re the lines nobody answers.
Send all four as one attachment and the whole pack moves at the pace of the slowest. The engagement letter guide sets out why that’s a bad trade for the quick items. In onboarding it costs more, because there are four speeds rather than two, and because the fast items are the ones that free up your side.
So the pack goes out in order of who can act and how soon. Signature and authorization first, alone, with nothing else in the message. Then the ask to the outgoing accountant, which starts a clock somebody else keeps. Then the client’s own records, staged rather than dumped, with the two or three that release the most work named first. The decisions belong on a call: twenty minutes, and a call in the first two weeks with a new client is worth more than it will ever be worth again.
The craft of the individual ask stays the same when the client is new. Name a document the way their own paperwork names it. Keep a request short enough to be an errand rather than a project. Say what it blocks in one sentence. Ask for an expected date where the thing may not exist yet. All of that is managing client document requests, and it holds here. The one difference is that you don’t yet know which of it they’ll find hard, so asking for dates rather than assuming is worth most in a first year.
The list stays open for weeks, and both sides need to be looking at the same version of it. The machinery for that is one PBC list, twenty replies, and no version of the truth. An onboarding pack is that object, sent to a client who’s seeing one of yours for the first time.
The half of the file somebody else is holding
The single most common reason a new client’s first return runs late sits outside the client entirely. The previous accountant still has the file.
This item deserves to be treated as its own small project, because it behaves differently from everything else you’re waiting for. The holder has no relationship with you, no obligation to you, and occasionally an unpaid invoice and a bruised feeling. The client is the only party with standing, and the client is embarrassed about the whole thing. The material takes weeks. And the material decides whether the return you prepare is right.
Ask for it on the day the engagement letter goes out, weeks before anybody opens the file.
Name what you’re asking for precisely. A request for “last year’s return” gets you a PDF of the return, which is the least useful thing in the folder. The return tells you what was filed. The working material behind it tells you what the numbers were built on, and that’s what you actually need:
- the depreciation and amortization schedules, with cost, date placed in service, method and accumulated depreciation for every asset
- carryforwards of every kind, which means net operating losses, capital losses, charitable contributions, passive activity losses and unused credits, at both federal and state level
- basis in any partnership or S corporation interest, the item most often missing and the hardest to reconstruct
- the elections that were made and are still binding
- estimated payments made, and any overpayment applied forward
- for a business, the closing trial balance, the chart of accounts, the fixed asset register and the accounting file itself
Two practical notes about the request. It goes from the client, because the client is the one the outgoing firm has a duty to. And it gets answered far more often when it’s specific. A firm that receives a list of eight named items produces them. A firm that receives “please send everything” produces a PDF and a delay.
Now the part that changes your planning, which is what you do while the file stays where it is.
Some of it you can get yourself, and this is why the authorization went out on day one. With the client’s authorization on file, you obtain transcripts from the tax authority directly, and they cover more than firms expect: what was reported about the client by third parties, what was actually filed, and what was paid and when. That answers a surprising share of the return. Wage and income information fills in across the spring rather than arriving complete in February, so it’s a better fallback in June than in March. That’s another argument for getting the authorization in early.
Transcripts stop short of the material that matters most: depreciation detail, basis, and the reasoning behind an election. Those come from the outgoing firm, or get reconstructed from whatever the client has, or get estimated and documented as estimated.
That last option is a real one, and it works best as a decision made in advance. Choose the date. If the file is still outstanding on that day, you reconstruct. Write down what you reconstructed and how. Tell the client in writing what happened and what it may cost to correct later. Skip the writing-down step and two years on there’s a depreciation schedule nobody can explain. The note costs five minutes at the time, and it’s the only thing that answers the question later.
Set that date early, and put it on the client’s calendar as well as your own. A client who knows on day three that the deadline for their old accountant is the end of February will make a phone call in February. A client who first hears about it in April makes the same phone call, three weeks too late, and remembers it as your delay.
Who the client turns out to be
Everywhere else in a practice, the client is a settled fact: a named entity or household with known addresses and a known signer. During onboarding, all of that is still being settled, and the mailbox is where it gets decided, largely by accident.
Watch how the facts actually arrive. The inquiry comes from a personal address. The engagement letter comes back signed under a name slightly different from the one on the inquiry, because the legal name carries a middle initial and the email leaves it off. The bookkeeper appears in week two, from a domain you haven’t seen. The spouse writes once, from an address nobody recorded, about the dependent care question. And in week four a message mentions the LLC, which nobody had told you about, because to the client it’s obviously part of the same thing.
The firm’s record of who this client is gets assembled out of those fragments. Left alone, the assembly is a signature block copied into a contact card.
Three facts are worth establishing deliberately, because the mail carries them unreliably.
The legal identity, in full, with entity type. The registered name, rather than the trading name or the name on the email. This one is boring, and it’s the one that produces the filing that has to be amended.
Every entity in the picture, including the dormant one. Ask directly and ask twice, in different words, because clients keep quiet about entities they think of as inactive, and an inactive entity is still a filing obligation. “Do you have any other entities” gets you a no. “Is there anything with its own bank account or its own tax number” gets you the answer, because it asks about the world rather than about tax vocabulary.
Who can actually instruct you, and who can only receive. In a household, the person who does the paperwork and the person who signs are frequently two people, and the second one has read none of your correspondence. In a business, the controller answers everything and may or may not be able to commit the entity. That distinction has consequences for the engagement letter, which the letter guide covers. Here it does something else: authorizing somebody to receive their employer’s tax information is not the same as authorizing them to make decisions, and email flattens the two.
Add the office manager to a thread about the owner’s personal return, or reply to both spouses on a matter one of them raised privately, and that’s a confidentiality problem rather than an administrative slip. It happens most often in the first month, while the firm is still forming a picture of who belongs to what. The general question of what a practice owes each of those parties is set out in client confidentiality in an accounting practice. The timing is what belongs here: the risk concentrates at onboarding, and it peaks in exactly the weeks when the firm is trying hardest to be responsive.
The same weeks are the one window where a client learns how you work. Email management for accountants makes the case that clients reply to whoever wrote to them last, that this is sensible of them, and that an arrangement should hold up regardless. That holds. A new client comes with a clean slate, though, so one or two conventions offered in week one stick, where the same conventions offered in year three slide off.
Use the window sparingly, because the size of the ask decides whether it holds. Two rules survive. Where documents should go, and who to write to with a question. A page of instructions about mailbox etiquette goes unread, and quietly teaches the client that your messages can be skimmed.
One more thing to catch while it’s cheap. Somewhere in the first two weeks you’ll find that the work is a little different from the description: a second rental, a partnership interest, a state you hadn’t counted on. The letter is days old at that point and the fee is still unbilled, so the conversation is a straightforward one about scope. Six weeks later, with the work half done, it’s a much worse conversation. The engagement letter guide covers what to do when scope moves after signature. The onboarding-specific point is the timing: the discrepancy nearly always surfaces in the first three weeks, so it’s worth going looking for.
The client who arrives in March
New clients arrive in clusters rather than evenly through the year. People become dissatisfied with their accountant immediately after a bad filing season, and they discover a problem when a notice lands or a deadline approaches. So a real share of onboarding happens in the weeks when the firm has least room for it.
The March inquiry is a decision you get to make calmly, with the arithmetic in front of you before you reply.
Onboarding has a floor made of calendar time, and effort doesn’t compress it. The letter goes out and comes back. The authorization gets signed and processed. The request to the outgoing accountant goes from the client, and comes back from a firm that’s also in season. All three run on their own clocks, whatever pace your people keep. Add them up honestly and the earliest realistic date a preparer can open the file is often three or four weeks out. In March, that’s after the deadline.
Which is the answer, and it’s better said on day one than discovered on the eighth of April.
An extension is the ordinary and correct outcome for a client onboarded in the last few weeks of a season. Told that in the first conversation, a client hears a plan. Told it three weeks later, the same client hears an excuse. Told it two days before the deadline, they hear an emergency. What an extension does and does not buy, and what has to be said in the message that offers one, is extensions, and the second season nobody plans for. What belongs here is the timing: the sentence is much cheaper in the first reply than in any later one, and a new client judges the whole relationship on how early they were told.
Two things follow from that.
The estimate is the hard part. A client whose file you have never seen still owes what they owe by the original date, so you’re being asked to estimate a liability from material you don’t yet hold. That reality shapes the March pack. The items you need for an estimate come first, ahead of the items you need for the return, and they make a much shorter list: last year’s return, the year’s income sources, and what has already been paid will usually do it.
And capacity is a separate question from fit. Inbox zero during busy season makes the case for deciding in advance what waits, and a new client in March is the clearest example there is of work you can deliberately place after the deadline. A firm that decides in December that new clients arriving after a certain date get onboarded for an extension rather than for April keeps every one of them. It makes the same decision earlier, in writing, while it can still be explained calmly instead of apologized for.
Nobody says when onboarding is over
Onboarding has an obvious beginning and no ending at all, and the missing ending costs more than anything else in this piece.
Here’s the shape of it. The pack went out with twenty-two items. Fourteen came back in the first two weeks. Five more arrived over the following month, two of them wrong and corrected later. Three stayed out: the basis figure the old accountant never sent, a set of receipts the client couldn’t find, and the depreciation detail for a small asset that got worked around. The return was prepared, reviewed and filed. Everybody was relieved, and the file closed.
Nobody asks for those three things again. Next January the client is an ordinary client. The organizer goes out, the year runs normally, and the gap is now simply part of the history. It surfaces three years later, when the asset is sold and the basis has to be defended.
So onboarding needs a closing act. It’s a short one.
When the first return goes out, take the original list and reconcile it. What was asked, what arrived, what stayed out. Against each item that stayed out, one line saying what was done instead: obtained from transcripts, reconstructed from the client’s records, estimated on this basis, worked around and immaterial. That note goes in the permanent file rather than in the year’s folder. Its readers are next year’s preparer, a successor firm, and whoever eventually asks how a number got there.
It costs perhaps twenty minutes, and it’s the difference between a known gap and a silent one.
Two more things belong in the same twenty minutes, and both of them save you paying for the same knowledge twice.
Write down what you learned about how this client works. How long they take. Which of the two addresses actually answers. That the bookkeeper is the useful one and the owner leaves everything unopened. That the brokerage statement was late because the account is held somewhere slow. Managing client document requests makes the case for recording that as a property of the client, rather than rediscovering it every season. Year one is when all of it is learned, and the only year in which writing it down costs nothing, because you’re already thinking about it.
And decide explicitly that they’re an ordinary client now. That sounds like ceremony, and it does real work. Until somebody says it, a new client stays in a special mode: partners answer personally within the hour, everything is checked twice, and the ordinary process half applies. That mode is expensive, and it’s also a promise. The service level a client experiences in their first six weeks is the one they’ll hold you to in their fourth March, and the gentlest way to manage that is to have been ordinary a little sooner. Where a firm publishes response times, that’s a topic of its own. Here it’s enough to notice that onboarding sets an expectation whether or not anybody meant to.
Where Point fits in a first six weeks
All of the above works without software, and firms have onboarded clients well with a paper checklist and a good habit for a very long time. What a tool changes is where the effort sits: the noticing, the holding of what you’re owed, and the first version of the words. The acceptance decision, the list and the judgment about what a client actually needs stay exactly where they are.
Start with the honest limitation, because it’s specific to this piece. Point reads your mail and gets more useful the more of it Point has seen, and a brand-new client is the one relationship Point knows nothing about either. In the first two weeks the automatic part is at its thinnest. Telling Point who this is helps right away. The people you deal with get sorted out, duplicate contacts merged and the ones who matter marked, so a couple writing from two addresses reads as one relationship from the start. Marking a new client on the day they sign is a ten-second job that pays for itself through the burst.
Through that burst the ordinary machinery does most of the lifting. Messages are weighed on how much they matter and how soon rather than on arrival, so on a March morning the reply carrying the signed letter sits above the newsletter. The weighing is set out in how triage decides what needs you. Every thread carries its summary in a line, which matters more during onboarding than at any other time. A first month is one long, branching conversation with a stranger, and the subject line stopped describing it in week one.
Three capabilities fit this job in particular.
What you’re owed is held for you, away from the sent folder. A request you send becomes an open loop with the date you chose against it, and it comes back to you on that day. Where the answer has already arrived, the loop marks itself as probably settled and waits for your agreement. Across a pack of twenty-two items in four speeds, that’s the bookkeeping this job is mostly made of.
A standing request covers the wait you can only sit through. Ask in plain words to be told when the prior-year file arrives. You hear once, on the morning it lands, in place of three weeks of checking on a firm that has no reason to write to you.
And attachments gather into one list, each of them still tied to the thread it came in on. That’s the difference between knowing that a new client sent twenty files from four addresses and being able to find the one you need. An attachment can also be asked a question directly, and the answer comes back pointing at the part of the file it was taken from. Against a sixty-page prior-year return that is precisely the shape of the work: what method was used on the van, what the carryforward was, whether the election is in there.
Search reads for meaning rather than exact words, so what the client said about the rentals in their very first email turns up in the week you discover there are three of them. Replies come back already drafted in your voice, so the receipt naming what arrived and what is still out is an edit rather than a composition. And Point runs the scheduling back-and-forth itself. That’s what the twenty-minute call in the first two weeks actually needs, since that call is the item most often lost to a thread about calendars.
How far Point goes is a per-action-type setting, and out of the box each one sits at review. The work is prepared, then held until you look at it. The dial covers that properly. Onboarding is a reasonable place to raise the acknowledgment of a delivery. Anything going to the outgoing accountant, and anything touching scope and fee, wants somebody reading it first. Every action Point takes lands in a log, timed and in sequence, and most of them can be taken back from the entry itself. A message sitting on somebody else’s server is the exception, and that one is out of reach for every mail product.
Connecting is a sign-in to the Gmail or Microsoft 365 mailbox the practice already runs, so the address on your website, and everything already in it, stays where it is.
The acceptance list is the firm’s, and it stays that way. Point doesn’t know that this person has become a client. Point can’t run a conflict check, and holds no view on whether the identity verification was done. The gate that stops a preparer opening a file stays with the firm. What should have been in the pack is yours to know, and so is the entity nobody mentioned. Those are the parts of onboarding that are the actual work. Everything Point does is set out on the benefits page, and Point for accountants puts it in the setting of a firm. Before any of that comes the question of whether a tool belongs near a client’s tax affairs in the first place, which has its own full treatment in is it safe to use AI with client financial data.
Common questions
What should we ask a new tax client for first?
Two things, on the first day, in a message containing nothing else: the engagement letter for signature, and the authorization that lets you deal with the tax authority on their behalf. Both are quick for the client. Both take real calendar time to come back. Both are keys rather than inputs. The letter is what lets your people start. The authorization is what lets you obtain information yourself instead of asking. Everything else in onboarding proceeds while those two are in flight, and every week they’re delayed is a week added to the end. The document pack, the questionnaire and the conversation about scope all come afterwards.
The previous accountant will not send the file. What can we do?
Keep the request with the client, because they’re the party the outgoing firm owes a duty to, and make it specific rather than general. A named list of eight items gets produced far more often than a request for everything. In parallel, use the authorization you obtained on day one to get what you can directly. Transcripts tell you what was reported about the client, what was filed and what was paid, which covers a useful share of a straightforward return. The third-party information fills in across the spring rather than arriving complete in February. Depreciation detail, basis and the reasoning behind an election come from somewhere else. For those, set a date in advance at which you stop waiting and reconstruct, tell the client in writing what you reconstructed and how, and keep that note in the permanent file.
Should we take on a new client in March?
Often yes, provided you and they agree on the same day what taking them on means. Onboarding has a floor made of calendar time: the letter out and back, the authorization processed, and a request answered by a firm that’s also in season. Add it up and the file frequently can’t be opened before the deadline, which makes an extension the ordinary outcome rather than a failure. Said in the first reply, that’s a plan. Said in April, it’s an excuse. Deciding the cut-off in December, as part of what the firm has already agreed will wait, is what makes the conversation calm. Extensions covers what one does and does not buy.
How long should onboarding a new client take?
Measure it from signature to the day a preparer can open the file. For most firms the honest answer is three to six weeks, and very little of it is your own work. The long items are all waits: a signature, an authorization, and a file held by somebody with no reason to hurry. The way to shorten it is to start those three on day one and to keep them out of the same message as anything slow. A firm that sends the letter, the authorization and a forty-line document pack in one message has converted three fast items into one slow one.
Is it safe to ask a new client to email us their identity documents and tax numbers?
That’s a decision about your firm’s own obligations and your data-protection duties, and it’s worth settling before a client asks you about it. What the mailbox contributes is only this: onboarding is the point in the relationship where the most sensitive material moves in the shortest time, from someone who will do whatever is easiest. Whatever channel you offer in week one is the channel they’ll use for the next decade. Client confidentiality in an accounting practice works through what a practice owes here, and if you’re weighing what any tool should be allowed to see, the questions to put to a vendor is the list to send first.
Would client onboarding software fix this?
It fixes more of onboarding than a portal fixes of chasing, which is worth saying plainly. A structured intake collects the identity details, the entity information and the signatures in one pass, keeps them somewhere better than an attachment, and gives you a completion state a mailbox can’t produce. Three parts stay hard. The outgoing accountant replies in their own time. The second question that reveals the entity nobody mentioned is still yours to ask. And the conversation, where scope, fee and the decisions actually get settled, stays in your mail whatever else you buy. Treat it as a better container for the collectable half, and keep the waiting, the chasing and the judgment where you can see them.
The short version
Onboarding is the only job in a practice with no prior year behind it, so the mailbox carries the work and builds the client record every later year gets read against. Read the inquiry as a screening item, because why they’re leaving and what state they’re in are usually both in it. End that thread before the referrer sees the fee. Keep the acceptance list separate from the work list. It has no external deadline and nothing surfaces it, so it has to be a gate rather than a habit. Send the signature and the authorization on day one, alone, because they’re keys and they take calendar time. Get the request to the outgoing accountant moving the same week, ask for the working material rather than the return, and choose in advance the date you’ll stop waiting and reconstruct. Establish the legal identity, every entity and who can actually instruct you, deliberately rather than from a signature block. Take the March client on an extension agreed in the first reply. Then close the thing. Reconcile the original list. Write one line against every item that never arrived. Record what you learned about how this client works. And let them become an ordinary client before your first-month service level becomes a promise. The rest of this collection takes the jobs that come round every year. If the question underneath is which tool a firm should be running, that one is settled in AI email for accountants.