The email only one person saw
A client emails their bookkeeper on a Monday: the new van was bought on finance, not cash, and here is the agreement. The bookkeeper is off sick for the week. Nobody else sees the email. The van goes through as a cash purchase in the month-end figures, and the client is surprised when their management accounts show a hole in the bank.
It is not really anybody's fault. The client emailed the person they always email. The problem is that the firm's record of that client lives in one inbox.
Why client email scatters
Clients build relationships with people, not with info@ addresses. They reply to whoever last wrote to them, copy in someone from two years ago, or send documents to the partner because they met them at onboarding. Staff file emails differently, or not at all. Some practice tools can capture email, but only if every person remembers to do it every time.
Shared mailboxes help a little but fail in a different way: everyone can see everything, nobody owns anything, and the client still writes to the individual anyway.
What scattered email costs
Cover for holidays and sickness is weak, because the covering person cannot see the conversation. Instructions get missed, which shows up as errors in the books. When a client complains, piecing together what was said means asking several people to search their inboxes. And when someone leaves, their inbox holds years of client history that is awkward to hand over.
| Setup | Who sees the email | Problem |
|---|---|---|
| Personal inboxes only | One person | Invisible during absence |
| Shared mailbox for everything | Everyone | Nobody owns it |
| Manual filing into practice tool | Anyone who looks | Depends on people remembering |
| Automatic filing by client | The client's team | Needs setting up once |
How we build client-based email filing
- We connect to your Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace mail through their APIs, with permissions agreed with you.
- Incoming and outgoing email is matched to a client by sender and recipient addresses held in your practice tool, with a language model helping where the address is new, for example a client's new accounts assistant.
- Matched email is filed to the client record, where anyone on that client's team can read the thread. Personal emails and anything unmatched stay private in the person's inbox.
- Attachments are saved into the client's document folder with consistent names.
- When a person is marked as away, new client emails to them are also flagged to their named cover, with a short summary of what the client is asking.
- Emails that contain an instruction, such as a change of bank account or a new loan, are highlighted so they are not treated as routine.
Staff can mark any thread private, and the matching rules are visible. You decide which mailboxes and clients are included.
We also handle the messages that never touch email. Notes from phone calls and WhatsApp messages that a bookkeeper wants to keep can be added to the same client thread from a phone, so the record is not only the part of the conversation that happened to be typed into Outlook.
One place to see what a client has said
Anyone picking up a client can read the conversation, not just the ledger. Cover works without phone calls to people on leave. Instructions get acted on because they are visible and highlighted. When someone leaves, their client correspondence is already filed where it belongs, and their inbox is no longer a vault the firm has to empty.
Is client email trapped in your firm?
- Holiday cover involves asking someone to forward emails.
- Client instructions have been missed because the wrong person was away.
- Emails are filed in the practice tool only when someone remembers.
- Clients still email a partner they met once at onboarding.
- You worry about what is in a leaver's inbox.