For accounting & bookkeeping practices
You've been chasing the same six clients for documents since March.
The work itself is fine. It's the coordination around it — the chasing, the onboarding, the deadline scramble — that costs a practice its evenings.
Where a practice loses time
None of this is a technical problem. It’s coordination being done by people who should be doing the actual work.
01Be findable
Nothing that says who you're for, what you specialise in, or why a business should move to you.
Referrals that stall when someone checks you out.
02The enquiry
A prospect's details sit in one person's inbox under forty other messages until somebody remembers.
Good clients who went to whoever replied.
03The proposal
Scope, fees and engagement terms reassembled from the last similar client, then chased for signature.
Days of partner time on work a template should do.
04Onboarding
Document requests followed up manually, with no record of who was chased when — and work banking up around the same two people until a deadline is uncomfortably close.
Hundreds of hours a year, most of it compressed into six weeks.
05The annual cycle
Renewals, re-engagements and annual document requests generated one at a time rather than on a schedule.
The most predictable work in the practice, done the hard way.
Count it in hours per client
Say you have 250 clients on an annual cycle, and two hours per client per year go on chasing and coordination that a reminder sequence would have handled. That’s 500 hours a year — around a quarter of a full-time person, spent on follow-up nobody in the building enjoys.
The compression matters more than the total. Most of those hours land in the six weeks before a deadline, which is exactly when you have none spare and when the mistakes happen.
Worth doing this sum with your own client count before you talk to anyone. It’s usually larger than partners expect.
Your clients’ data, before you ask
We ask for the least access that will do the job — read-only wherever read-only is enough, and only the systems the specific piece of work touches.
We keep a written list of every system we can get into and we’ll send it to you whenever you want it. When an engagement ends, that access is removed and we confirm in writing that it’s gone.
We hold no formal security certification and we won’t claim one. No ISO 27001, no SOC 2. If your professional indemnity cover or a large client requires a supplier who holds those, we’re not that supplier and we’d rather say so now than be discovered later.
The full detail is on our privacy page, including what happens to access at the end of an engagement.
The systems you’re already running
Most NZ practices are built around Xero Practice Manager, and a good number of the growing multi-partner firms have moved to Karbon. Proposals and engagement letters through Ignition. Document management and secure client collection in FYI or Suralink, signing through Annature, advisory reporting in Spotlight.
Worth noting that Karbon, Ignition, Spotlight and Xero itself were all built in New Zealand. The stack a practice here runs on is largely local, which is part of why it’s worth knowing properly rather than generically.
We’re not replacing any of it, and we’re not selling you a migration. The gap is almost always between those systems and the email threads where the actual chasing happens.
What we’d automate
- Document requests with a real deadline, chased automatically, with a record of who was chased and when
- Onboarding checklist that starts itself the moment an engagement letter is signed
- A workload view that shows where work is actually banking up, before the deadline arrives
- Annual renewals and re-engagements generated on a schedule instead of one at a time
- Client queries triaged into the right person's queue rather than one partner's inbox
Where AI earns its keep — and where it doesn’t
This section is deliberately narrow. In a practice, the line between useful and unacceptable is much sharper than elsewhere.
Useful: when a client sends in a year’s worth of paperwork as forty attachments, it gets sorted, named and filed against the right job before anyone opens it — and whatever’s missing gets chased automatically. Same for reading a bank statement or an invoice into a record.
Not acceptable, and we won’t build it: anything that interprets, advises, forms a tax position, or reaches a client without one of your people reading it. Nothing is interpreted, nothing is advised on, and the review step — the part your professional indemnity cover exists for — stays entirely human.
If a supplier offers you AI-generated client advice, that is a very different proposition from what’s described here, and we’d be as cautious about it as you are.
Where to start
Start with a conversation
No charge and no pitch. If we’re not the right people for the problem, we’ll tell you and point you somewhere better.
Free · no pitch
You tell us what’s slow or manual. We ask the questions we’d ask any new client. By the end you’ll know whether we can help, roughly what it would involve, and what it would cost.
We work evenings and weekends, so there are a limited number of slots each week. Trades tend to ring rather than book — info@nullnil.net works just as well.