62% of Your Clients Have Had Miscommunications With Your Firm

I want to share something that will be uncomfortable for most firm owners to hear. Your clients are not as happy as you think they are. Not because your technical work is bad — it is probably excellent. But because the experience of being your client is confusing, inconsistent, and often silent at the moments when they need to hear from you most.

I know this because I have sat in the rooms where firm owners learn it for the first time. The usual sequence goes: the firm loses two or three good clients in a quarter. The principal says “I don’t understand — we never had any complaints.” And that sentence right there — “we never had any complaints” — is the most dangerous assumption in professional services.

Clients who are frustrated by poor communication rarely complain. They leave. And when they leave, they tell you it is about price, because that is the socially acceptable reason to fire your accountant. The real reason is that they never felt informed, they spent too long chasing answers, and every interaction felt like an unpleasant amount of effort.

The Numbers Behind the Silence

Let me be direct about what those numbers mean. If your firm has 100 clients, approximately 62 of them have experienced five or more miscommunications with your team during a single engagement. That does not mean five total across the whole relationship — five per engagement. Per tax return. Per BAS quarter. Per annual compliance job.

And 78% of those clients are telling researchers — not you, but researchers — that the communication experience alone could be enough to make them switch.

The cost of acquiring a new accounting client ranges from $1,000 to $3,000 depending on your market. The annual fee for a typical small business compliance client sits between $3,000 and $8,000. When you factor in the multi-year relationship and the referral network that client represents, losing one client to preventable communication failures costs your firm somewhere between $8,000 and $15,000 in present value.

Multiply that by the clients you are losing silently each year. Most firms I work with undercount their churn by 30-50% because they attribute departures to “price sensitivity” or “they went to a bigger firm.” The exit interviews, when firms bother to conduct them, tell a different story.

The Compliance Dimension You Are Ignoring

This is not just a client satisfaction issue. It is a professional obligations issue.

Every professional accounting body — CPA Australia, CA ANZ, the AICPA, the ICAEW — includes client communication standards in their codes of professional conduct. The obligation is not merely to do competent work. It is to keep the client informed about the progress of their engagement, to set clear expectations about timelines and deliverables, and to ensure that the client understands what is happening with their financial affairs.

When a client says “my accountant’s requests were unclear” — that is a professional standards issue. When a client says “communications were inconsistent with prior discussions” — that is a compliance risk. Regulatory bodies investigating client complaints will look at the firm’s communication records. If those records show sporadic, unstructured, inconsistent contact, the firm’s position weakens considerably regardless of how good the technical work was.

Where Communication Breaks Down

I have audited the client communication workflows of over thirty accounting firms. The breakdown points are remarkably consistent across firms of all sizes.

The Handoff Gap

In most firms, different team members handle different stages of an engagement. A junior bookkeeper does the data entry. A senior reviews the work. The manager signs off. The partner delivers the result. At each handoff, there is a risk that the client hears nothing. The junior finishes their work and passes it to the senior. The senior takes two days to review it. During those two days, the client has no idea what is happening. They send an email asking for an update. That email goes to the junior, who says “it’s with the senior.” The client now has to follow up again when the senior is done.

This is not a people problem. It is a systems problem. No tool in the standard accounting stack — not Karbon, not TaxDome, not Xero — automatically notifies the client when their work moves from one stage to the next.

The Document Chase Spiral

A bookkeeper sends an email: “Hi, could you please send through your March bank statements?” The client doesn’t respond for three days. The bookkeeper sends another email. The client responds with two of the four statements. The bookkeeper sends a third email asking for the remaining two. The client sends one. A fourth email follows.

By this point, there are four separate email threads about the same request. Neither party can easily tell what has been provided and what is outstanding. The client feels nagged. The bookkeeper feels frustrated. And the engagement is a week behind because of a communication failure that should have been resolved in a single exchange.

The Black Hole

This is the most damaging pattern. The firm receives documents, begins work, and goes silent for two to three weeks. The client hears nothing until they receive a finished product — or worse, another request for something else. During the silence, the client assumes one of two things: either the firm has forgotten about them, or there is a problem that nobody wants to discuss.

Neither assumption is accurate, but both damage the relationship. The firm was doing the work. They just never told the client.

The Tool Landscape: What Each Platform Actually Does

Karbon

Karbon’s automators can send emails when tasks are completed, and its client tasks feature lets you assign to-dos directly to clients. This is useful for document collection, but the emails are template-driven and lack context. A Karbon automator email says “Task XYZ has been completed” — it does not say “We’ve finished reconciling your March accounts. Revenue was up 12% on February. Your management reports are attached, and we’ll be in touch next week about your quarterly BAS.”

Karbon’s strength is internal workflow. Its client-facing communication is functional but impersonal.

TaxDome

TaxDome takes a different approach: the client portal. Clients log in to see the status of their engagements, upload documents, sign letters, and pay invoices. For firms that can get their clients to adopt the portal, it solves many of the communication gaps.

The challenge is adoption. Not every client wants another login. Not every client will check a portal. And when a client ignores the portal, TaxDome doesn’t have a robust fallback mechanism to reach them where they already are — their email inbox.

Gmail

Gmail is where your clients actually live. They check their email dozens of times a day. They respond to emails. They do not check client portals. The most effective client communication systems I have seen use Gmail as the delivery channel, not a portal, because it meets the client where they already are.

The problem with Gmail alone is that it has no awareness of your workflow. It does not know that a client’s BAS is in review. It does not know that three documents are still outstanding. It does not know that the engagement is due in five days. Gmail is a pipe, not a brain.

Building the Communication Layer

The solution is not choosing between Karbon, TaxDome, and Gmail. It is connecting them so that the right message reaches the right client at the right time through the right channel.

Here is what that looks like in practice.

Trigger-based updates. When a task status changes in Karbon — from “In Progress” to “In Review,” from “In Review” to “Complete” — an email is sent to the client via Gmail. The email is not a status code. It is a human-readable message: “Hi David, your February bookkeeping is now with our senior accountant for review. We expect to have your management reports to you by Wednesday. No action needed from you right now.”

Consolidated document requests. Instead of five separate emails asking for five documents, the client receives one email listing everything outstanding. “We need the following to complete your March books: (1) Bank statement for ANZ business account — March, (2) Receipt for $3,200 payment to ABC Supplies on March 14, (3) Confirmation of whether the $1,500 transfer to your personal account was a drawing or a loan repayment.” Follow-up emails reference only the items not yet provided.

Proactive issue notification. When a bookkeeper identifies a problem — a bank feed discrepancy, an unexplained large transaction, a potential GST issue — the client is notified within 24 hours. Not with accounting jargon, but with plain language: “We noticed a $5,000 payment to a new supplier we haven’t seen before. Could you let us know what this was for so we can code it correctly?”

Engagement summaries. When work is complete, the client receives a structured summary. Not just the deliverable, but context: what was done, what the key numbers mean, any issues that were identified and resolved, and the date of the next engagement touchpoint. The client finishes the interaction knowing exactly what happened and what happens next.

The Audit Trail Benefit

There is a secondary benefit to structured communication that firm owners rarely consider until they need it: the audit trail.

When a client disputes a fee, claims they were not informed about an issue, or alleges that the firm missed a deadline, the first question from your professional indemnity insurer or the regulatory body is: “What did you communicate to the client, and when?”

If your communication is scattered across Gmail threads, Karbon comments, and verbal conversations, reconstructing the timeline is painful and often incomplete. If every client touchpoint is logged, timestamped, and stored against the engagement record, you have a complete defensive record.

This matters more than most firm owners realize. Professional indemnity claims in accounting are rising, and the firms with documented communication workflows consistently achieve better outcomes than those relying on “I’m pretty sure we told them about that.”

What Changes When You Fix This

The firms I have helped implement structured communication report three consistent outcomes.

First, client queries drop by 50-70%. When clients receive proactive updates, they stop sending “just checking in” emails. The volume of inbound communication decreases dramatically because the client already knows where things stand.

Second, document collection accelerates. Consolidated, specific requests with escalation timelines get faster responses than scattered, vague emails. Clients report that they prefer the clarity — they know exactly what is needed and can handle it in one sitting instead of responding to a drip of individual requests.

Third — and this is the one that surprises firm owners — staff morale improves. The most demoralising part of a bookkeeper’s job is not the bookkeeping. It is the chasing. The follow-up emails. The status queries from clients who haven’t heard from the firm in two weeks. The uncomfortable phone calls when a deadline is approaching and the client still hasn’t provided documents. When automation handles the routine communication, your team’s interactions with clients become substantive rather than administrative. They discuss financial strategy, not missing receipts.

Starting Without Overwhelm

You do not need to automate every client touchpoint on day one. Start with the two that have the highest impact on client perception:

1. The progress update — send one email when work moves from “in progress” to “in review” and another when it moves from “in review” to “complete.” Two emails per engagement that eliminate the black hole.

2. The consolidated document request — replace scattered individual emails with a single list of everything outstanding. Follow up once with only the remaining items.

These two changes address the most common complaints: “I didn’t know what was happening” and “the requests were confusing.” They can be implemented in an afternoon, and they will change how your clients experience your firm within the first month.

The rest — engagement summaries, issue notifications, escalation workflows, audit trail logging — can follow once the foundation is in place. But even without the rest, those two automations address the core problem: clients who feel informed stay. Clients who feel ignored leave. And right now, most of your clients feel ignored during the exact moments when your team is working hardest on their behalf.