There is nothing more important in your entire relationship with a client than those critical first few months.
First impressions last.
The moment a prospect turns into a new accounting client is the one that sets all future expectations for how your team works, communicates, and creates value for clients. It’s also a chance to bring attention to the full range of services that your firm offers.
Firms like Envolta Cloud Accounting invested in client onboarding, and achieved a 99% client retention rate. So, if your firm focuses on mastering just one process, let it be this one.
Here’s everything you need to know: the basics, the best client onboarding software, tips for communication, and a nine-step checklist for building a repeatable onboarding framework.
What is client onboarding?
Client onboarding is the process of welcoming new clients into your accounting firm and progressing as efficiently as possible to a rhythmic working relationship.
The onboarding process is your opportunity—and responsibility—to get a clear understanding of your client’s concerns, uncover needs the sales team hasn’t identified, and clearly communicate how your services will assist them.
This is your time to understand how your client likes to work, communicate, and collaborate, and set expectations for how your team does the same.
The 6 best client onboarding software for accounting and bookkeeping firms
1. Karbon
Karbon for Clients client portal preview
Karbon is the #1-ranked practice management platform for accounting firms and the category leader on software review website, G2.
Karbon is our rocket booster that’s allowing us to grow at 40% to 50% year‑over‑year.
Client onboarding best practice template
Download our detailed best practice checklist for onboarding new clients to your accounting firm, complete with internal tasks, client requirements, and email templates to send to your clients.
Because it’s not a traditional, standalone client onboarding solution, it doesn’t yet offer every bit of functionality you might expect from a purely engagements and proposals tool, for example.
But it also brings a significant advantage of being part of a wider practice management platform—and with that comes lots of other features and functionality from one single app. And for client onboarding, that means an accelerated process for both your firm and your clients.
Highly customizable to match your practice’s workflow
Workflow automation kicks off client onboarding
Mobile app for the client portal
Open API so you can build custom solutions for client onboarding
Many powerful integrations to streamline client onboarding (Xero, Ignition, QBOA, etc.)
The only accounting practice management solution where you can @mention colleagues and comment on emails, turn emails into tasks, and assign them to colleagues, clients, and jobs
May require more time to be set up than basic alternatives
Functionality is geared towards teams, so may not be suitable for sole practitioners or teams of two to three staff that don’t anticipate growing
What types of firms use Karbon?
Karbon is built for accounting, tax and bookkeeping firms with teams of five or more members that are looking for a practice management solution that meets the operational and strategic needs of their firm.
What do Karbon customers say?
Pricing
Karbon has three pricing plans: Team, Business, and Enterprise. The below pricing is based on annual billing (monthly billing is also available).
Ignition (formerly Practice Ignition) is a platform designed to manage client engagements, manage contracts, automate billing, and collect payments securely. It is a powerful component of an accounting firm’s overall tech stack, especially when partnered with a robust practice management tool like Karbon.
Key features
Custom proposal and quote creation
Proposal templates
Bulk proposal creation
Proposal upsell options
Auto-price increases
Engagement letters and contracts
eSignatures
Automated billing and payment capabilities
Client profiles and portals
Integrations with popular accounting tools like Karbon, Xero, and QuickBooks
Some reports of a delay in billing and processing times
What types of firms use Ignition?
Ignition is best suited for modern and progressive accounting and bookkeeping firms looking to automate and streamline their client onboarding process with a seamless engagement and proposal experience for clients.
Ignition pricing
Ignition offers four pricing plans. The breakdown below is based on monthly billing.
GoProposal is client engagement software for accounting and bookkeeping firms that enables them to create instant proposals and generate automatic engagement letters. Like Ignition, it’s used in conjunction with other accounting tools, like practice management.
GoProposal’s key client onboarding features
Automated proposals and engagement letters
AML (anti-money laundering) add-on
Accounting proposal templates
eSignatures
Service schedules
Repricing tools
Auto-invoicing sync to Xero and QuickBooks
GoProposal’s pros and cons
Pros
Cons
Templates are highly customizable
Ability to bulk-create your library of engagement letters
Lacks business intelligence tools for revenue tracking
What types of firms use GoProposal?
GoProposal is best suited for small to mid-sized firms that don’t need highly customized pricing structures, and want to standardize pricing and automate engagement letters.
Financial Cents is a practice management solution for accounting firms with client onboarding features, designed for small to mid-sized accounting firms. It’s not a dedicated client onboarding tool, but does offer client onboarding features.
Financial Cents’ key client onboarding features
Proposals
Engagement letters
Billing and payments
Client portal
Automated client requests and reminders
CRM
Financial Cents’ pros and cons
Pros
Cons
Quick to implement (however this might be a drawback for some firms looking for a more powerful solution)
Client onboarding workflow templates
Offers a 14-day free trial
Limited workflow automation for complex clients and projects
Financial Cents is best suited for small and mid-sized accounting firms that want to start off with an accounting practice management solution to help them deliver work efficiently. As these firms start to grow and client onboarding increases in frequency, they may find it lacks the advanced functionality needed to support a scalable business.
Pricing
Financial Cents has three pricing plans. The following are based on the monthly billing:
Solo: $19 USD/month, per user
Team: $49 USD/month, per user
Scale: $69 USD/month, per user
Important client onboarding features like auto-client follow-ups, customized client task emails, and access to the open API are only available in the top tier.
Does Financial Cents offer a free trial?
Financial Cents offers a free 14-day trial for all plans.
TaxDome is another practice management tool for accounting and bookkeeping firms. As a result, it’s not a dedicated client onboarding tool but does have relevant features.
TaxDome’s key client onboarding features
Proposal creation
Client portal with client mobile app
Client requests
Client chat
CRM
Invoicing and payment processing
eSignatures
TaxDome’s pros and cons
Pros
Cons
Robust and customizable client portal
Email templates help standardize client welcome emails
No built-in reporting and analytics or customizable business insights dashboards
No free trial
What types of firms use TaxDome?
TaxDome is best suited for tax and accounting firms that are looking for functionality across a wide range of features, but don’t necessarily require much depth to each one. The lack of collaboration features can make it difficult for large teams to unite across client onboarding and give new clients a seamless experience.
Canopy is an accounting practice management tool for small and mid-sized tax and accounting firms. It started as a tax resolution tool and has since developed additional features, some of which are related to client onboarding.
Canopy’s key client onboarding features
Client portal
Mobile app for clients
CRM
Engagements and proposals
eSignatures
Client requests
Questionnaires and organizers
Canopy’s pros and cons
Pros
Cons
Engagement letter templates
Robust client portal
Automated proposal workflows
Key features are only available as paid add-ons (e.g. automation and document management)
Complicated and expensive pricing (pay per client, per add-on module, per user)
Canopy is best-suited for specialized tax firms that place high value on its tax resolution cases and integration with the IRS.
Pricing
Canopy has a modular pricing model, where you pay for the base platform and then add features as needed. Here is an attempt to break down the Canopy pricing plans using monthly billing.
For teams of four or more staff, pricing starts at:
Standard: $180 USD/month
Pro: $210 USD/month
These include the client portal, mobile app, proposals, eSignature, client requests, and organizers.
However, these essential add-ons are charged separately:
Document Management: starts at $43 USD/month, per user
Workflow: starts at $38 USD/month, per user
Time & Billing: starts at $27 USD/month, per user
Other paid extras include Tax Resolution, Collection Cases, KBA eSignatures, and Transcripts & Notices.
For smaller firms (under four users):
Starter: $60 USD/month, per user
Essentials: $88 USD/month, per user
These plans also require the same add-ons for full functionality.
It’s important to note that if your team is larger than nine, you will need to contact Canopy for custom pricing.
Think about why your clients sign up for services.
They want the burden of accounting taken off their plate. They want to reduce their stress and gain clarity. They want a smooth experience, and a polished set of reports every month.
They want to grow their business and be better off, so they can enjoy more time with their family, take vacations, and enjoy a better quality of life.
By providing a first-class client onboarding experience, you can bring your clients closer to that reality faster.
Onboarding sets the tone for the entire client relationship. It’s an opportunity to make expectations clear, understand communication styles, gather all necessary information, and train the client on your systems.
This not only gives a solid first impression, but it quickly moves the relationship toward the monthly deliverable your client signed up for.
Providing this type of experience is also a source of additional profit for your firm. If you can satisfy your clients from the start of your relationship and do it efficiently, you can set a framework that allows you to increase profits by:
Reducing client churn (61% of consumers walk away from brands based on poor experiences)
Increasing the overall client lifetime value
On the other hand, when onboarding is inefficient, a host of problems emerge:
Wasted time and resources
A bad experience at the time when it’s easiest for the client to leave
Service delays
Fear of expansion due to growing pains
Common client onboarding challenges for accounting firms
Talking about what a client onboarding process should look like is one thing, but actually putting it into action is another. Here are some of the common pitfalls that accounting firms fall victim to:
1. Not taking the first step fast enough
The best time to get started with a new client is now. If your client agrees to work with you and signs a contract, that’s when you want them to take the next action.
Delays prohibit growth because a backlog in onboarding causes internal chaos. When your team is forced to be reactive—rather than having the capability to be proactive—resources become imbalanced and you lose momentum.
2. Misaligned expectations
During any sales cycle, it’s easy to make big promises. Your clients will remember these, so for a seamless onboarding process, it’s critical that communication is aligned across your team.
To prevent misaligned expectations and under-delivering, you should have templates for your sales processes, just like your other workflows. For example, your intake calls should step through a series of clear and standardized questions to ensure you’re setting the right expectations.
3. Scope creep
Have you ever worked with a client who seems to demand more and more of you each time you connect? That’s scope creep, and it’s a common problem for firms that haven’t set clear expectations from the start. And without firm boundaries, those one-off favours quickly become diminishing returns.
Again, clear expectations from the very beginning are critical to protecting your time.
Communication is critical to efficient onboarding
Client onboarding commonly takes at least 6-8 weeks for accounting firms. But with a strong process, it can move much faster. A key part in achieving that is clear communication.
To improve communication, consider the following tips:
Eliminate silos
Client onboarding should be a seamless transition. The client shouldn’t feel like they’ve been ‘handed off’ to another department, and they certainly shouldn’t be asked questions they’ve already provided answers to.
The trouble is, the client communication so far has occurred in an isolated inbox. Breaking down this barrier involves using tools like Karbon that connect your team and client communications.
Now everything you need to know about what’s been said to a client and what information they’ve provided so far is available for your team to see and take action on.
Maintain a consistent experience
If you’ve ever bought an Apple product, you know that it serves as an experience more than anything else. Every step—from their marketing, to the packaging, to the initial steps to set up your device—is a unified experience.
Your firm should also be carefully considering the client experience. From marketing, to sales, to onboarding and beyond—take the time to both define how your firm will communicate and how you’ll ensure the experience meets expectations.
How to streamline client onboarding
For every common issue in the onboarding process, there is an effective solution. These techniques will improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your client onboarding.
Make it a priority
It’s all-too-common for client onboarding to be put on the backburner. Often a firm’s focus is on two things: getting new clients and serving them well. But none of that can happen without a streamlined onboarding process.
In order to succeed, you need to devote the resources, time, and people necessary to onboarding clients effectively. You need to have a strategy, and your team needs to understand the importance of this process.
Develop and document a process
Develop a process that is easy to understand, adopt, and replicate.
This means having a documented process that is accessible for the entire team. For example, in Karbon you can document your bookkeeping onboarding process in a template, laying out every step in the process.
For every new client, it's as simple as creating a new onboarding work item from that template, so that everyone is held accountable for what they're responsible for, and no task slips through the cracks. As the process gets refined and improved, the template can be updated, ensuring consistency and efficiency across your firm.
Set proper expectations
Make sure that when the deal is closed, your client knows exactly what you can offer them.
You need to understand their goals and preferred style of communication. And they need to understand their role in ensuring a successful relationship. It’s your job to set those expectations from the beginning.
Provide the client with a roadmap
Don’t set expectations and forget them. List out all the stages of the onboarding process as a checklist. This gives them something to refer to and can help them prepare their documents and information.
Providing this roadmap is not only necessary for a successful onboarding experience, but it also demonstrates that you’re organized and prepared.
Automate processes where you can
Many aspects of your onboarding process will be the same from client-to-client. Creating a system that automates these common tasks can lead to huge time-savings.
That’s where the tools listed earlier in this guide come into play.
As highlighted earlier in this guide, open and transparent communication is critical to a streamlined client onboarding process. Having your email directly integrated into your practice management tool is the perfect way to ensure your teams are collaborating internally and communicating externally with the context they need to get the client progressing.
Your client onboarding checklist
1. Sales conversation
Your onboarding success starts before you even get there. The sales conversation is where you will begin extracting key information about the client’s business that will help you prepare an accurate proposal.
Starting work before all documents have been signed isn’t advised—it could mean you potentially waste labor costs on a client who is not legally bound to payment.
3. Start workflow
The moment your client signs their agreement, you must maintain momentum. This is where your practice management tool kicks in.
For example, if your new client signs their engagement letter via Ignition, that will kick off work for onboarding in Karbon. A work item will be created and assigned to the client, and emails can be automatically sent to the client to begin the onboarding process. To create an exceptional client experience, it’s critical to assign dedicated internal resources to your new client so you’re able to establish accountability. While determining internal resources for the account, it’s also time to start building a roadmap to present to your client:
Project summary
What would make this a successful project for the client
A rough timeline of the project
Any research you have on the client
What is needed from the client to complete the project
This is also a good time to determine which programs, apps and systems can assist you throughout the client relationship. A good practice is to have a standardized form that the client can fill out and make sure the necessary background questions are resolved. Such as:
Basic business information
The main point of contact
Logins and passwords to applicable software
Preferred communication style
4. Kick-off call
Use a tool like Calendly, Acuity Scheduling, or SavvyCal to make it easy for clients to book time in your calendar for a kick-off call.
If it’s a virtual meeting, use a tool like Zoom to have some ‘face-to-face’ time with the client. This is a great way to build rapport as you begin the relationship.
A kick-off call is a perfect time for you to reiterate expectations, ask any lingering questions, and build the foundation for your partnership. The more prepared you are, the stronger your foundation will be.
Remember: never leave a conversation without a clear understanding of next steps and responsibilities.
5. Get the client connected and current
Once you’ve gathered all the necessary information to start services, a crucial point in the client onboarding process is to move as quickly as possible from historical data to current.
If you are stuck because you are missing information, it’s okay to be persistent. Make it clear that you cannot proceed until you have the information you need. If you use Karbon, use auto-reminders to take care of the client chase for you.
6. Check up
Set a cadence for checking in with your client. Face-to-face or phone contact is critical, especially in the initial stages of the client relationship.
If you are progressing through historical information, update the client on your progress. In the early days of a relationship, silence can create doubt.
The end goal is usually a fully reconciled set of reports. If you have not arrived at that destination, provide a status update on what still has to happen to get there.
Clients who churn are more likely to do so within the first 90 days of service, so be proactive in your client outreach to quash negativity before it pops up.
7. Be prepared to make adjustments
While your team should have a proven process for communication and ongoing work, you still need to pay attention to your client’s nuances.
The initial sales conversation is great for extracting the scope of a situation, but you never truly know what you’re getting into until you start handling transactions.
Ask yourself:
Are you still waiting on the client for anything?
Are the reporting needs consistent with expectations?
Are there additional services they need but don't know what to ask for?
Use the onboarding phase as an opportunity to refine the relationship between your firm and the client.
8. Begin the monthly work cycle
Onboarding is usually considered complete when you have a fully reconciled set of reports, access to everything needed for transaction data, and your client is set up and confident using any new systems they are required to.
If you’ve reached this destination and are now moving into your monthly process for accounting, reporting and advisory services, don’t get lost on autopilot.
Keep the client experience in mind and keep communication consistent.
9. Keep iterating and improving
Your onboarding is not a static process that never changes. You should be reviewing and adjusting based on feedback.
Review your onboarding process quarterly and look for at least one small improvement each time. Maybe there’s a step that can be automated or an email exchange that can be replaced by a simple form.
Any small improvements can add up in a big way for the ongoing relationship.
Simplify client onboarding and management with Karbon
Accounting practice management software gives you a suite of tools to execute on the above checklist from start to finish.
Before Karbon, client onboarding took a month and we still weren’t getting paid. Now, we're doing real-time work within 5 business days from people just enquiring, and that’s just unbelievable to me. It makes us a better firm.
Client onboarding sets the tone for your client’s experience. If you don't have a seamless and high-touch onboarding, you risk purchase remorse and the potential loss of a client. Onboarding is the most important part of the sales funnel.
Nothing outranks the importance of clear and timely internal and client communications, but a close second is our relentless adoption of automated, paperless, cloud-based technologies and our continuous streamlining of the workflows that surround them.
The steps to master one of your accounting firm’s most critical processes.
We are never satisfied to keep the same process in place if there is a better way to do something. We routinely ask our team members to tell us three things they see that we can do in a better way.
Karbon for Clients gives firms and clients a single place to manage tasks, documents, and messages, reducing admin work and improving firm-client collaboration.
As you improve the efficiency of your firm with an objective of growing your revenue, there's one key process you should be looking at above all others—client onboarding.
To set your clients up for success, you need an effective method that can be replicated over and over again. If your current process could do with some improving, look at these seven steps.
G2.com
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