The deadline and workflow system beside your practice software

Ask what is due this month and everyone opens the same screen, usually called Jobs.

A typical business running one of these has 15 to 80 staff in one to three offices, 1,500 to 6,000 clients (limited companies, sole traders, landlords and partnerships), partners and managers reviewing the work, and a practice manager who owns the system. Through January, 150 to 400 emails, uploads and envelopes of records can arrive in a day, beside a few hundred client emails and a few new clients a week. Built in 2006 or in 2020, it does the same job.

Practices this size almost always buy their tax, accounts production and practice software, and that stays. This page is about the piece built beside it: the practice's own client, deadline and workflow database, its onboarding and anti-money-laundering records, the chasers, and sometimes a records portal.

From each client's services and year end it works out the deadlines: accounts to Companies House nine months after the year end, corporation tax paid nine months and a day after the period, the company tax return twelve months after it, self assessment online by 31 January, VAT returns a month and seven days after each period, plus the confirmation statement and payroll. Each deadline becomes a job that moves from records requested through chased, received, in progress, review and sent for approval to filed. It also prints engagement letters, holds the client due diligence the Money Laundering Regulations 2017 require, sends the chasers and shows the workload by person.

The practice's own rules:

• Records are requested three months before the deadline, chased at six weeks and at four, and the chasers stop once the records are logged in.
• No client is taken on until the ID for each director and owner and the risk assessment are recorded.
• A job over the fee the partners set, or any partnership return, goes to partner review before approval.
• A job cannot be marked filed without its submission reference.
• A Making Tax Digital for Income Tax client gets update deadlines on 7 August, 7 November, 7 February and 7 May, then the final declaration.

Built somewhere between 2004 and 2012, usually by the practice manager, a partner who was good with computers, or the contractor who already looked after the network. A Microsoft Access database holds the clients and the jobs, an Excel deadline workbook sits beside it with a tab for each month, and the chaser letters come out of a Word mail merge run from a query saved long ago. Where the client list outgrew one Access file, the tables went into SQL Server, and some practices keep each client's folder in a SharePoint library. It lives on the office server and opens on every desk.

The partner who built it now has a client list of their own and has not opened the design view in years. So each new service arrives as a column in the workbook rather than a table in the database, and the workbook has become the list people check first. From home or the second office, the Access file opens over a remote session or not at all.

The same system built between 2016 and 2022, as a client portal and workflow board from an agency or a freelancer in PHP, React, Angular or Node or .NET Core, or put together in Zoho Creator or Power Apps by someone in the practice. In other offices it is a chain of Zapier or Make automations joining the onboarding form, the email account and the practice software. From the office the chasing seems to run itself: clients upload statements to the portal, jobs move across a board, and reminders go out without anyone opening Word.

The chasing is what strands it. When the onboarding form gains a field, or the practice software changes what it sends, one step in the chain stops, and records requests stop going out with no error shown anywhere. Nobody notices until a client is late for a deadline they were never asked about. The board was drawn around one return a year per service, so the Making Tax Digital quarters have nowhere to sit, and the freelancer who could add them has taken other work. Since 2023 a few practices have started again in an AI app builder and stalled before the deadline rules worked.

Every client's deadlines worked out in advance, the chasing done on time, and the due diligence on file before the first job opens.

Nobody can carry a few thousand clients' year in their head. Enter the year end and the services once, and every date for that client follows, year after year, with the job opened and the first records request sent in good time. When a client rings to ask whether the return has gone in, the answer is on the screen with its submission reference.

The workload view is what the partners watch from November to January. It shows who has forty jobs waiting in review and who has four, so work moves before late filing penalties land on clients.

And when the anti-money-laundering supervisor asks to see the due diligence on any client, the ID, the risk assessment and their dates are already on file.

It has lasted because it follows the practice's own way of working.

Systems like this seldom stop working. The rules around them move on instead.

Making Tax Digital multiplied the deadlines. From 6 April 2026, sole traders and landlords with qualifying income over £50,000 send quarterly updates, and the threshold falls to £30,000 from April 2027 and £20,000 from April 2028. Each such client now has four update deadlines and a final declaration where there was one return, and neither the Access database nor the agency's board can hold them, so the quarters live in a spreadsheet beside the system.

Directors now verify their identity. Companies House identity verification became mandatory for directors and people with significant control from 18 November 2025, existing directors verifying at their company's next confirmation statement. The onboarding and deadline records were not built to show who has verified or when each is due, so the practice manager keeps that list by hand.

The server's software ran out of updates. SQL Server 2016 updates ended in July 2026, SharePoint Server 2016 and 2019 left support on 14 July 2026, and Windows 10 support ended in October 2025. That server holds ID documents for thousands of people.

One person can change it. In the older system that is the partner who built it; in the newer one, a freelancer or the login the automations run under, set up by someone who has since left. A new service or rule waits for them.

The same clients, deadlines and jobs, in a browser, with every date worked out and every chaser accounted for.

Deadlines from the services, quarters included. Each client's dates follow from the year end and the services, the four Making Tax Digital updates and the final declaration among them, with the 2027 and 2028 thresholds kept as a setting. The quarters spreadsheet can be deleted.

Chasers the office can see. Every records request and reminder is logged against its job with the date it went, and a request that failed to send shows on the board that morning.

The board from anywhere. The jobs, the review queue and the workload by person open in a browser in either office, at home or on a phone, with one login each.

An onboarding file that answers the supervisor. The ID, the risk assessment and each director's Companies House identity verification sit against the client with their dates, ready to show for any client on request.

Records sent straight to the job. Clients upload statements and receipts against the job that asked for them.

Off the unsupported server. The data on a database that still gets updates, a backup restored on purpose, and the ID documents held as the data protection file says.

The rules in settings. The chaser intervals, the partner review threshold and the rule that a filed job needs its reference are written down with the practice manager and kept where they can change them.

Neither the Access database nor the portal is switched off for any of this. Each piece is added beside it, on the same client records.

The sorting, matching and typing between a client sending something and a person working on it, never the tax.

Records sorted against the checklist. Bank statements, receipts, spreadsheets and phone photos arrive, and someone opens each, finds its job and ticks it off. AI does that first pass, marks what the checklist is still waiting for and drafts the chaser for a person to send. At 150 to 400 items a day through January and a minute and a half saved on each, that comes to between about four and ten hours a day across the admin team.

Client emails put on the right job. Most of the few hundred a day ask whether records arrived or what is owed. AI matches each to its client and job and drafts the reply from the job's status for a person to send. Take 200 of them a day at a minute saved on each: that works out at over three hours a day for whoever watches the shared inbox.

The onboarding file read in. A new client's passport, proof of address and Companies House details are read into the file for a person to check against the documents. At four new clients a week, with half an hour's typing on each becoming five minutes of checking, that adds up to over an hour and a half a week, and the risk rating stays a person's to set.

Questions answered from the records. "Which Making Tax Digital clients have not sent this quarter's records?" "Which jobs are waiting on partner review?" AI answers from the job records and lists every client behind the answer, so the manager opens those jobs rather than trusting a count. Filtering the workbook against the job list for 250 Making Tax Digital clients, at half a minute each, comes to about two hours a week before 7 August or 31 January.

Not worth doing: AI preparing or submitting a tax return, or deciding a client's risk rating. The return is prepared in the bought tax software by someone who answers for it, and the risk rating is the practice's judgement to defend when the supervisor asks.

Each of these reads from or writes to the client and job records, so none starts before the first stage makes them safe to change. The assessment maps where AI would pay back on the practice's own records.

Safe to change first, then the deadlines, then the rest, with the old system running beside every stage.

1. Stabilise. The Access file with its queries and mail merge templates, or the agency's code and every step of the automation chain, found and matched to what the office uses; the database on a version that still gets updates; a backup restored on purpose; a test copy that treats the ID documents as personal data. This goes first because nobody changes the deadline calendar without a copy to try it on, and the July 2026 dates are already behind it.
2. The deadline calendar. Each client's dates, Making Tax Digital quarters included, worked out from the existing data and run beside the workbook until the practice manager stops opening it.
3. The jobs board in a browser. The stages, the review queue and the logged chasers, on the same client records.
4. The onboarding file, the records upload, the workload view. Each a stage, each priced on its own.
5. Retire the old system once nothing depends on it. The last piece to go is usually the chaser letter one partner still signs.

The assessment is from £395 + VAT, sized on a free one-hour consultation, with an exact price before you commit. For a practice workflow system that means a few days with the practice manager, a partner and whatever built it, finding the rules and the risks, and a report with costed options and a fixed price for each. Each stage after that is priced before you commit to it. How we work, what drives the price and the payment terms each have a page.