Talk to us about your firm

What happens next

A free, genuinely useful conversation

What a free client account review covers

• Your last three reconciliations against what rule 8.3 actually asks for — three figures, at least every five weeks, signed off by the COFA or a manager
• The exemption arithmetic: whether client money averaged £10,000 or less and peaked at £250,000 or less across the period, tested on both limbs rather than one
• Transfers to the office account tested against rule 4.3 — a bill or written notification of costs first, for the specific sum, covered by what is held for that particular client
• Residual balances, and which of them fall inside the £500 prescribed-circumstances route rather than needing the SRA's prior written authority
• Whether your breach record would satisfy para 2.2 of the Code of Conduct for Firms and the SRA's guidance for COLPs and COFAs
• Lockup — WIP days plus debtor days — and the tax reserve the firm is running against its partners' actual marginal rates

What to have to hand

Nothing at all, if you would rather just talk. If you want the review to be concrete, the four most useful things are your most recent client ledger listing with balances, your last signed reconciliation, your last set of accounts, and the partnership or LLP agreement if there is a live question about profit shares or members' capital.

If you are switching from another accountant

It is one letter of engagement from you. We then write to your current accountant for professional clearance and for the records, and pick the work up from there. Two things are worth knowing about timing. The first is that the reconciliations which matter to your next Accountant's Report are the ones inside the accounting period, so a switch made early in a period is worth considerably more than one made a fortnight before it ends. The second is that if the period end has already gone, the order of work changes: we get the ledgers and the reconciliations straight first, then talk about bookkeeping systems, because the report will be written against what the period actually contained rather than what the firm does from now on.

Where we are

Remote-first, across the United Kingdom. We do not publish an office address because we do not run a walk-in office — the work happens in your ledgers and your calendar, and a firm in Leeds gets exactly the service a firm ten minutes away gets. One point of substance rather than geography: the SRA regulates England and Wales only. If your firm is regulated by the Law Society of Scotland or the Law Society of Northern Ireland, the accounts, tax, payroll and lockup work is identical, but the client account rulebook is not the SRA's. Scotland runs on an Accounts Certificate delivered to the Law Society of Scotland; Northern Ireland on an accountant's report delivered to the Law Society of Northern Ireland under Part F of the Solicitors' Accounts Regulations 2014. We will say so before you engage us.

Prefer to talk now? WhatsApp us, or email hello@accountantsforsolicitors.co.uk. If you would rather read first, the free calculators and the compliance calendar ask for nothing at all.

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