Accounting firms run on engagement letters, recurring monthly bookkeeping, year-end deadlines, and a single quarter of unholy capacity pressure. Tonic Desk holds the engagement letters, the deadline calendar, the recurring clients, and the partner allocation that decides who survives tax season.
The 2024 engagement letter is on a network share. The 2025 update is in DocuSign. The amendment to add VAT services is in a partner's inbox. When a client query lands, the team cannot answer "what are we contracted to do for this client this year?" in under 20 minutes.
200 limited company clients. Each with a different year-end. Each with statutory accounts due 9 months after, corporation tax due 12 months after, confirmation statement due annually. The deadline tracker is a Google Sheet that someone updates manually and sometimes forgets. When a deadline slips, the firm eats the penalty.
The bookkeeping team services 80 clients monthly. The partner sees a quarterly review meeting and an invoice. Between those moments, the partner has no visibility into which clients are 12 days behind on their reconciliation, which are getting written down due to scope creep, and which are quietly delighted and could buy advisory services.
January looks fine in November. By January 15 the firm is in chaos: every senior is at 110%, the juniors are doing returns above their grade, and the partner has stopped sleeping. The same chaos arrives every year because capacity is decided one week at a time inside individual inboxes.
Build engagement letter templates per service — bookkeeping, VAT, statutory accounts, personal tax, payroll — with merge fields for client name, services, fees, and renewal date. Generate the letter from a deal, send for sequential e-signature, and the signed copy attaches to the client record with a clear effective date and review date. Renewals trigger 60 days before the anniversary.
Each client carries custom fields for Year-end date, Accounts due, CT due, Confirmation statement due, VAT quarter end, VAT submission due, and Payroll year end. A workflow generates statutory tasks 90, 60, and 30 days before each deadline, assigned to the correct preparer and reviewer. The firm-wide dashboard shows every deadline in the next 90 days, with traffic-light status. Slipped deadlines escalate to the partner.
A Monthly bookkeeping pipeline (Records received, Bank rec in progress, Reports drafted, Sent to client, Approved, Invoiced) runs in parallel for every recurring client. The pipeline resets on the 1st of each month. The partner dashboard answers "which clients are behind?" and "which are running over scope on hours?" in one view — without sitting through a status meeting.
Tag every client and every deadline with a Lead partner, Preparer, and Reviewer. The capacity report rolls up forecast hours by person across the next 30, 60, and 90 days — calibrated by service type (a personal tax return is 1.5 hours, a CT return is 4 hours, a stat accounts file is 14 hours). The partner plans January in November with real numbers, not vibes — and reallocates before the bench breaks.