A new client signs and nobody wants it
A new client signs up on a Thursday. You look at the team list: Sarah has 22 clients, Imran has 18, the part-timer has 11. On paper Imran has room. In practice Imran looks after the two restaurant groups with daily takings and a dozen card terminals, and he has not had a clear afternoon since spring.
So you ask around. Everyone says they are busy, because everyone is. You give the client to whoever seems least stretched that week, and three months later that person is the one missing month-end dates.
Why a client count is the wrong measure
Bookkeeping effort per client varies enormously, and the drivers are things your client list does not record. Transaction volume, the number of bank and card accounts, whether a bank feed exists, how tidy the client is with receipts, VAT scheme and frequency, payroll or CIS on top, and how many questions the client generates.
The information to measure this already sits in your ledgers. Xero and QuickBooks know how many bank lines each client produced last month. Your practice tool, whether Xero Practice Manager, Karbon or a spreadsheet, knows the deadlines. Nobody has joined them up, so allocation runs on memory and goodwill.
| What the list shows | What actually drives the load |
|---|---|
| Number of clients | Bank lines and documents per month |
| Service name, e.g. monthly bookkeeping | Accounts, feeds, VAT, payroll and CIS per client |
| Monthly fee | Queries raised and time to get answers |
| Start date | Deadlines falling in the same week |
What the guesswork costs the firm
Uneven load shows up in the worst places. The overloaded bookkeeper rushes reconciliations and leaves suspense balances for later. Deadlines bunch because nobody spotted that one person has nine VAT quarters ending on the same date. Good staff leave because they feel the unfairness before you do.
It also makes growth nervous. Without a measure of spare capacity you either turn work away that you could have taken, or you take it and hope. Neither is a decision, they are both guesses.
How we build a capacity view for a bookkeeping firm
- We connect to each client file through the Xero or QuickBooks API and count the activity that matters each month: bank transactions, bills, sales invoices, bank accounts and feeds.
- We pull deadlines and service lines from your practice management tool, so VAT quarters, payroll dates and year ends sit next to the activity.
- Together with you, we set a simple weighting per driver, for example a manual statement import counting more than a feed line. You own the weights and can change them.
- Each client gets an effort score that updates monthly, and each bookkeeper's load is the sum of their clients, laid against their contracted hours.
- A calendar view shows where deadlines cluster per person, week by week, so a pile-up is visible before it happens.
- When a new client arrives, you enter the expected volume and the view shows who it would fit with and what their month would look like afterwards.
Where time tracking exists, we compare the score against recorded time per client and flag files where the two disagree, because those are usually the clients with a hidden problem such as a broken feed or a messy chart of accounts.
Allocating work on evidence
The Thursday decision becomes a short look at a screen. You can see that the part-timer has light volume but three deadlines in the week the new client's first VAT return falls, and that Sarah's load dropped after a client left. The conversation with staff changes too, because nobody has to argue that they are busy.
Over time the effort scores tell you which kinds of client suit your firm, which is useful when you price and when you decide what work to chase.
Does this sound like your firm?
- You allocate new clients by asking who has room.
- Two staff with the same number of clients have very different weeks.
- Deadlines bunch for one person and nobody saw it coming.
- You cannot say how much more work the team could take.
- Your best bookkeeper is also the most overloaded.