The Onboarding Black Hole: Why New Clients Take Three Weeks Instead of Three Days

Let me walk you through a Tuesday I observed at a firm I was consulting with last year. It is a day that, with minor variations, repeats across every accounting practice I have ever worked with.

8:15 AM. Sarah, a senior accountant, opens her inbox. There is an email from Ignition: a new client, David Chen, has signed his engagement letter for monthly bookkeeping and annual tax compliance. Sarah smiles. New client. Good news.

8:20 AM. Sarah opens the engagement letter to check the scope. Monthly bookkeeping, quarterly BAS, annual tax return. She makes a mental note to set up the recurring jobs.

8:25 AM. Sarah opens Karbon and creates a new contact for David Chen. She types his name, email, phone number, ABN, entity type, and business address. All of this information was already in the Ignition proposal. She is retyping it.

8:40 AM. Sarah opens QuickBooks Online and creates a new company file for David’s business. She types his business name, ABN, address, and financial year end. Again, all of this was in the Ignition proposal. She is retyping it a second time.

8:55 AM. Sarah drafts a welcome email. She introduces herself, explains what will happen next, and asks David to provide bank feed access, his previous accountant’s details, prior year financial statements, and his ATO agent nomination. She copies this from a template in a Word document that lives on the shared drive, personalises it, and hits send.

9:10 AM. Sarah creates a task in Karbon to follow up on the document request in one week. She creates another task to set up bank feeds once access is granted. She creates a third task to review the chart of accounts once the QuickBooks file has historical data.

9:25 AM. Sarah turns to her actual client work. Seventy minutes have passed. She has not done any accounting. She has performed data entry across three systems and sent one email.

9:30 AM. She realises she forgot to send the AML verification request. She opens the AML template, fills in David’s details, and sends it. She creates another follow-up task in Karbon.

9:40 AM. She also forgot to schedule the welcome call. She opens Google Calendar, finds a slot next week, emails David to propose the time, and creates a calendar hold.

It is now 9:45 AM. One hour and thirty minutes since she opened the Ignition notification. She has created records in three systems, sent three emails, and created five tasks. None of this required her accounting expertise. None of it was billable. And David Chen, her new client, has received a welcome email that will be followed by silence until his documents arrive — which, based on this firm’s typical experience, will take two to three weeks.

Why This Matters More Than Firms Realise

The onboarding experience is a client’s first real interaction with your firm after the sales process. The proposal was polished. The meeting was professional. The engagement letter through Ignition was slick and modern. And then… silence. Followed by a document request. Followed by more silence. Followed by another document request because the first one was incomplete. Followed by a confused email from the client asking what is happening with their file.

The gap between the promise of the sales experience and the reality of the onboarding experience is where client relationships start to erode. And in a profession where acquiring a new client costs five to ten times more than retaining an existing one, a broken onboarding process is not just inefficient. It is expensive.

That cost includes the direct staff time, but not the harder-to-measure impacts: the clients who leave within the first year because the experience felt disorganised, the referrals that do not happen because the client was not impressed enough to recommend you, and the staff frustration of repeating the same twenty-three-step manual process for every new client.

The Twenty-Three Steps Nobody Wrote Down

Here is what I find when I audit onboarding at accounting firms: nobody has a complete, documented onboarding process. Everyone has pieces. There is a template email somewhere. There is a vague checklist in Karbon. There is a “new client” folder on the shared drive with some forms in it.

But the full end-to-end process — from signed engagement letter to first piece of billable work — typically involves twenty to thirty discrete steps spread across four to six different systems. And the sequence lives in the heads of the two or three people who do it regularly.

When I map these steps with firms, the list usually looks something like this:

1. Receive signed engagement in Ignition
2. Create contact in practice management (Karbon/TaxDome)
3. Create entity in accounting software (QuickBooks/Xero)
4. Send AML/KYC verification request
5. Receive and verify AML documents
6. Send welcome email with document request
7. Request previous accountant’s details
8. Send agent nomination form to client
9. Lodge agent nomination with tax authority
10. Request prior year financial statements and tax returns
11. Request bank feed access or credentials
12. Follow up on outstanding documents (repeat as needed)
13. Set up bank feeds in accounting software
14. Import historical transactions
15. Review and clean up chart of accounts
16. Assign primary accountant and bookkeeper
17. Schedule welcome call
18. Conduct welcome call
19. Create recurring jobs (monthly bookkeeping, quarterly BAS, annual tax)
20. Set up reporting schedule
21. Configure notification preferences
22. Send “onboarding complete” confirmation to client
23. Begin first engagement

Each step takes five to fifteen minutes. But the elapsed time from step 1 to step 23 is typically two to four weeks — not because the work takes that long, but because items get forgotten, documents arrive slowly, handoffs between team members stall, and nobody has a clear view of where each new client sits in the process.

A Day in the Automated Onboarding World

Let me replay Sarah’s Tuesday, but with an automated onboarding workflow in place.

8:15 AM. Sarah opens her inbox. There is a notification: David Chen signed his engagement letter in Ignition at 9:47 PM last night. Since then, the following has happened automatically:

• David’s contact record was created in Karbon with all details from the Ignition proposal
• His company was created in QuickBooks Online with his ABN, entity type, and financial year
• A welcome email was sent at 8:00 AM this morning, introducing the firm and outlining what will happen next
• An AML verification request was sent with a simple form for David to complete
• A document request was sent asking for his previous accountant’s details and prior year tax return
• A welcome call was scheduled for Thursday at 10:00 AM (the first available slot in Sarah’s calendar that matched David’s indicated availability)
• An onboarding checklist was created in Karbon with all twenty-three steps, assigned to Sarah, with deadlines based on the engagement start date

8:20 AM. Sarah opens the onboarding dashboard. She sees David Chen’s file. Three items are already marked as complete (entity creation, welcome email, AML request sent). Two items are pending client response (AML documents and prior accountant details). The next action on Sarah is to review the welcome call agenda, which is pre-populated with standard items plus notes specific to David’s engagement scope.

8:25 AM. Sarah spends five minutes reviewing the auto-generated welcome call agenda, adding one personal note about a question David asked during their initial meeting.

8:30 AM. Sarah moves on to her billable client work. Total onboarding time for this new client: fifteen minutes. Down from ninety.

The Messy Middle: Dealing With Books That Are Never Clean

Every accountant reading this knows the unstated truth of client onboarding: new clients almost never arrive with clean books. The previous accountant may have used a different software platform. The client may have been doing their own bookkeeping in a spreadsheet. Bank reconciliations may be months behind. The chart of accounts may be a disaster of duplicate categories and miscoded transactions.

This cleanup work is not part of the onboarding checklist. It is the actual first engagement, and it is almost always larger than expected. The onboarding process needs to account for this reality by building in a discovery phase: before you commit to a timeline for the first deliverable, you need to assess the state of the books and set expectations with the client about what cleanup will be required.

Automated onboarding handles this by including a “books assessment” step that triggers after bank feeds are connected and historical data is imported. The system flags common issues — unreconciled transactions beyond a threshold, duplicate accounts, missing periods — and generates a summary that the accountant reviews before the welcome call. This way, the welcome call becomes a substantive conversation about what the client needs, not a surprised discovery that their books are six months behind.

Building the Onboarding Machine

The Client Experience Difference

I want to be direct about why this matters beyond internal efficiency. The accounting profession has a client experience problem. Not because accountants are bad at relationships — most are excellent — but because the operational infrastructure behind those relationships is fragile.

A client’s perception of your firm is shaped more by the administrative experience than the technical work. They cannot evaluate whether their tax return was optimally structured. They can absolutely evaluate whether you responded quickly, communicated clearly, made the process easy, and respected their time.

The firms I work with that have the highest client retention rates are not necessarily the best technical accountants. They are the ones whose clients never have to wonder what is happening with their file. Every email is timely. Every request is clear. Every milestone is communicated. And none of that happens because a staff member is spending hours crafting bespoke communications. It happens because the process is designed to deliver that experience automatically.

Consider the difference from David Chen’s perspective:

Scenario A (manual onboarding): Signs engagement letter Tuesday night. Hears nothing Wednesday. Receives a dense email Thursday afternoon listing twelve things he needs to provide. Does not understand three of the items. Responds asking for clarification. Does not hear back until Monday because his accountant was busy with other clients. Two weeks later, still has not connected bank feeds because the instructions were unclear. Starting to wonder if he made the right choice.

Scenario B (automated onboarding): Signs engagement letter Tuesday night. Receives a warm welcome email Wednesday morning at 8 AM. The email names his assigned accountant, Sarah, and says she will call Thursday to walk through everything. A separate email asks for two simple documents with clear instructions. A third email explains exactly how to connect his bank feeds with step-by-step screenshots for his specific bank. By Friday, three of five items are submitted. The welcome call happened on Thursday, and David felt like the firm had everything under control. He tells his business partner to move their company accounts over too.

Same firm. Same people. Same technical capability. Completely different client experience. The only difference is whether the process between the engagement letter and the first piece of work was designed or improvised.

Measuring Onboarding Health

Once your onboarding is automated, you can measure it. And what gets measured can be improved.

The metrics that matter:

Time to first billable work. From signed engagement to the first hour billed. This is your headline number. Best-in-class firms hit five business days. Most firms are at fifteen to twenty.

Document collection elapsed time. How long from initial request to all documents received. This tells you whether your requests are clear and your reminders are working.

Drop-off rate. What percentage of signed engagements never convert to active clients. If this number is above 5%, your onboarding is losing people.

Onboarding NPS. Ask every new client, thirty days after their welcome call, how they would rate the onboarding experience. One question. Zero to ten scale. Track it over time.

These are not vanity metrics. Each one connects directly to revenue. Faster onboarding means earlier billing. Lower drop-off means more of your business development effort converts to revenue. Higher NPS means more referrals and longer client tenure.

The onboarding black hole is not inevitable. It exists because most firms treat onboarding as an admin task rather than a client experience. The firms that redesign it — treating it as a systematic, automated process that delivers a consistent experience regardless of which team member handles it — find that their newest clients become their happiest clients. And happy new clients are the ones who stay for a decade and refer three more.