The Client Chase: Why Your Firm Spends More Time Collecting Documents Than Doing Accounting

It was the second week of September, and Lisa’s firm was already drowning.

Not in tax work. Not in reconciliations. Not in the actual accounting that her team of six had trained for years to perform. They were drowning in emails. Specifically, the emails that said: “Hi [client name], just following up on our request for your bank statements, loan documents, and depreciation schedule. We sent this request on August 15th. And again on August 22nd. And again on September 1st. Could you please send these through at your earliest convenience?”

Lisa ran a mid-size bookkeeping and tax practice in suburban Melbourne. Two hundred and forty clients. Nothing enormous. But every quarter, and especially during tax season, her firm transformed from an accounting practice into a document collection agency. Three of her six staff members would spend the first two weeks of every engagement cycle doing nothing but chasing paperwork. Sending requests. Resending requests. Calling clients who had not responded. Fielding emails from clients who sent the wrong documents. Explaining for the fifth time that a bank statement screenshot from their phone was not the same as a CSV export from their banking portal.

One Tuesday in October, Lisa sat at her desk and tried to calculate how much this ritual was costing her. She pulled up her timesheets, filtered for “admin” and “client follow-up,” and felt her stomach drop. Across the team, her firm had logged 312 hours in the previous quarter on document-related follow-up. At the blended internal cost of $65 per hour for her staff, that was over $20,000 in a single quarter. Not revenue. Cost. Time that produced no billable output, advanced no deadlines, and contributed nothing to the work her clients were actually paying for.

This is not an unusual story. It is the normal operating condition of most small and mid-size accounting firms in Australia, the UK, and the US.

The Scale of the Problem

Those numbers deserve a moment of silence. Seven out of ten firms struggle with this. Not seven out of ten firms that lack technology. Seven out of ten firms, full stop. Firms on Karbon, firms on TaxDome, firms with client portals, firms with Dext receipt capture — the majority of the profession cannot get documents from clients without a protracted, manual, emotionally draining chase.

And the financial impact compounds faster than most partners realize.

That range covers a typical small to mid-size practice. For larger firms with a thousand or more clients, the numbers scale linearly. Double the clients, double the chase.

Why Clients Do Not Send Their Documents

I have worked with enough firms to know that most partners blame the client. “They’re disorganised.” “They don’t care about deadlines.” “They think we can just magically produce their tax return from thin air.”

Some of that is fair. But having sat on both sides of the table, I can tell you that a large portion of the problem is on the firm’s side. Not in intention, but in execution.

Here is what a typical document request looks like from the client’s perspective:

They receive an email — often a dense, multi-paragraph affair — listing twelve to fifteen items they need to provide. Some of the items are straightforward (bank statements). Some are confusing (depreciation schedule for fixed assets acquired prior to FY2024). Some are impossible for a non-accountant to locate without guidance (PAYG payment summaries from their accounting software versus the ATO portal).

The email arrives at a busy time. The client reads it, feels overwhelmed by the volume, decides to deal with it on the weekend, and then forgets. A week later, another email arrives. Same list. Same overwhelm. The cycle repeats until someone picks up the phone and walks the client through each item one at a time.

The fundamental design flaw is this: firms send document requests as a single batch, and then chase the entire batch as one unit. They do not track which individual items have been received. They do not send targeted reminders for specific missing documents. They do not provide clear instructions for how to obtain or export each item.

The Real Cost Is Not Just Admin Time

The direct cost of staff hours spent chasing documents is bad enough. But document collection delays create a cascade of secondary costs that are harder to quantify and far more damaging.

Deadline compression. When a client takes four weeks to send their documents instead of one, the actual accounting work gets compressed into a fraction of the available time. Your team does not have four weeks to complete the return. They have one week. Which means overtime, errors, and rushed reviews.

Bottleneck at review. When twenty clients all send their documents in the same week — typically the week before the deadline, after weeks of ignoring requests — the review queue backs up. Partners and senior staff become the bottleneck, and work stalls at the final stage.

Client dissatisfaction. This is the ironic one. Clients who took three weeks to send their bank statements will still complain that their tax return took too long. They do not perceive their own delay as the cause. They see a firm that is “slow” and “hard to work with.” Poor document collection processes directly drive negative client experiences, even when the client is the one who caused the delay.

Staff burnout. Nobody went into accounting to send follow-up emails. The team members assigned to document collection are typically your most junior staff, and the work is demoralising. It requires persistence, patience, and the ability to remain professional while chasing the same person for the sixth time about their missing mortgage statement. It is one of the primary reasons junior staff leave small firms.

What Automation Actually Looks Like Here

I am not talking about replacing your client portal. If you are on TaxDome and clients upload through the portal, that is fine. If you use Dext for receipt capture, keep using it. The problem is not the submission mechanism. It is the request, tracking, and follow-up workflow surrounding it.

Here is the approach I have seen work across firms ranging from solo practitioners to twenty-person practices:

Stage 1: Triggered, personalised initial requests. When a job moves to a specific stage in your workflow tool — “Awaiting Client Documents” in Karbon, for example — the client automatically receives an email. Not a generic template. A personalised message that addresses them by name, references the specific engagement (FY2025 individual tax return), and lists only the documents relevant to their situation. A client with investment properties gets a different list than a client with a simple salary-and-deductions return.

Stage 2: Per-item tracking. As documents arrive — via email attachment, portal upload, or Dext — the system marks individual items as received. The outstanding list shrinks. The next reminder only mentions what is still missing, not the full original list.

Stage 3: Graduated escalation. Three days after the initial request with no response: a brief, friendly reminder. Seven days: a slightly more direct follow-up that mentions the deadline. Fourteen days: the client’s file gets flagged for a phone call from their assigned accountant. Twenty-one days: the partner receives a notification.

Stage 4: Completion and handoff. When the last item is received, the assigned team member gets an instant notification. The job moves to the next workflow stage. No one had to check a spreadsheet or manually update a status.

Building the Request Templates That Actually Get Responses

The content of your document request matters far more than the delivery mechanism. I have seen firms cut their average collection time in half just by rewriting their request emails. Here are the patterns that work:

Be specific about the source. Do not say “bank statements.” Say “a PDF export of your NAB Business Account (BSB 083-XXX) transactions for 1 July 2024 to 30 June 2025. You can download this from NAB Internet Banking under Accounts > Transaction History > Export.” When clients know exactly where to find the document and in what format, response rates jump dramatically.

Send fewer items per request. A list of fifteen items triggers avoidance. A list of three items feels manageable. Split your request into batches. Send the first three items immediately. When those arrive, send the next three. Clients complete small tasks. They abandon large ones.

Include the deadline and the consequence. “We need these by 15 October so we can lodge your return before the 31 October deadline” is more effective than “please send at your earliest convenience.” Clients need to understand what happens if they do not respond: late lodgement, potential penalties, or a delayed refund.

Make replying effortless. “You can reply to this email with the documents attached, or upload them to your portal” is better than instructions that require the client to log into a separate system, navigate to a specific page, and follow a multi-step upload process.

The Firms That Get This Right

The firms I have seen effectively solve document collection share a few traits. They do not treat it as an admin problem to be delegated to junior staff. They treat it as a process design problem that affects every engagement, every deadline, and every client relationship.

They measure it. They know their average collection time by client segment, by engagement type, and by time of year. They know which clients will respond in two days and which will take three weeks. They plan their capacity around those realities instead of pretending every client will respond on time.

They automate the repetitive parts — the requests, the reminders, the tracking, the notifications — so that human effort is reserved for the clients who genuinely need a phone call or a conversation. Their senior staff are not writing follow-up emails. They are doing accounting.

And their clients are happier. Not because the firm stopped asking for documents, but because the requests are clearer, the process is less confusing, and the reminders feel helpful rather than nagging.

The Math on Reclaiming Those Hours

Take a firm with 300 clients. In a manual process, assume an average of 20 minutes of total follow-up time per client per engagement cycle: initial request, one or two reminders, checking if documents arrived, updating the status, notifying the team. That is 100 hours per cycle. At two major cycles per year (tax season and BAS/quarterly), that is 200 hours annually.

With an automated workflow, the firm’s involvement drops to an average of 5 minutes per client: reviewing the automated status dashboard, making phone calls to the 15% of clients who are genuinely unresponsive, and handling edge cases. That is 25 hours per cycle, 50 hours per year.

The savings: 150 hours per year. At a blended cost of $65 per hour, that is $9,750 in direct cost recovery. But the real value is in what those 150 hours become — billable work, capacity for new clients, earlier completion of returns, and staff who are not burned out from an endless chase that has nothing to do with accounting.

For larger firms, the numbers scale proportionally. A firm with 800 clients recovering 150 hours becomes 400 hours. That is ten full working weeks returned to productive work.

The document chase is not an inevitable part of running an accounting practice. It is a process failure that has been normalised because every firm suffers from it. The firms that break the cycle do not work harder at chasing. They redesign the chase so that most of it happens without a person in the loop — and the humans only step in when a human is genuinely required.