Three hundred new clients and a spreadsheet
The deal is done. The retiring practitioner's clients are yours. What you have received is an export from their practice software, a folder of documents organised their way, a spreadsheet of fees and a list of deadlines that may or may not be up to date. The first filing dates are only weeks away.
Your team starts setting clients up by hand. Some clients appear twice. Some have no year end recorded. Nobody is sure which ones have had this year's work started by the seller.
Two practices never store things the same way
Every practice structures its data differently: how clients are named, how services are recorded, how deadlines and jobs are tracked, where documents live. Even when both practices use the same software, the setup differs. So a transfer is less about copying and more about mapping and checking.
The risk during a transfer is time. Deadlines keep coming while the data is in transit, and a client whose work falls between the seller's system and yours is the one who misses a filing.
There is also the client side. Clients need to be told what is changing, who their new contact is, how to pay, and may need to give new authorisations. Doing that one by one takes weeks.
What a manual transfer risks
| Risk | Effect |
|---|---|
| Deadlines lost in transit | Filings missed in the first months |
| Duplicate or incomplete records | Clean-up work for months after |
| Services not mapped | Wrong jobs scheduled or none at all |
| Inconsistent client letters | Confusion and clients who leave |
| Billing not set up | Fees for the first months not collected |
The first year after an acquisition is also when clients decide whether to stay. A missed deadline or a confusing welcome in that period can undo the value of the deal.
How we build a transfer that can be checked
- We extract the seller's data from their practice software, accounts system and document store, through exports or APIs, into a staging area.
- Clients, contacts, services, fees and deadlines are mapped to your practice software's structure, with rules agreed with you, and duplicates are flagged for a person to merge.
- Company clients are checked against Companies House for names, numbers and due dates, and differences are listed.
- A gap report shows every client with missing information, such as no year end, no services or no fee, for your team to resolve before import.
- Once cleared, clients are imported into your practice software, and recurring jobs and billing are set up from the mapped services.
- A handover deadline view lists everything falling due in the first months, with who holds the work, and clients receive a welcome letter from your template with any actions they need to take.
Decisions about which clients to keep, what to charge and how to communicate are your practice's. The tooling makes the data move checkable.
A transfer you can see
Every client arrives with a record, services, deadlines and a fee, or on a list of gaps. The first months' deadlines are visible to your team from day one. Clients get a consistent, clear welcome. And the documents from the seller end up where your team expects to find them.
Is a transfer ahead of you?
- You have bought or are buying a practice or fee block
- The seller's data is in a different system or structure
- Deadlines in the first months are a worry
- Setting clients up by hand would take weeks
- Client letters need to go out consistently