Who it is for
Outsourced accounting and back-office teams that provide bookkeeping, payroll, AP/AR or reporting to several business clients.
What gets in the way
- Every client sends a different set of records, and the team rebuilds the request each month.
- The work moves between people, and the new owner cannot tell what the last person already received.
- A client with several entities needs a different request for each one.
- The team has no standard way to show a client what is still missing.
Standardize the request
Start with the services the team provides and build one checklist per service: monthly bookkeeping, payroll, AP/AR, sales tax or reporting. The client sees the list for the service they bought, not a universal list.
Use the same checklist for every client in the same service. The team learns the list, the client learns the list, and the missing items are easier to spot.
Add client-specific items only when the client has a real difference, such as a second entity, inventory or a loan covenant.
Segment clients by service
A client that buys bookkeeping and payroll needs two requests, or one request with two clear sections. A client that buys only AP needs a shorter list.
Group the clients in the team's dashboard by service, so the person who runs payroll sees the payroll clients and the person who closes the month sees the close clients.
A client with several entities needs a separate request for each entity, with the entity name on the request. Combining them makes the review and the filing ambiguous.
Handoffs between people
The request record has to outlive the person who sent it. A new team member should be able to open the client, see what was requested, what arrived, what was accepted and what was sent back.
Use one status per item and one owner per request. A request that is shared by three people without an owner is a request that waits for all three.
When someone leaves, the request and the files stay with the client, not with the person's inbox.
Reporting and advisory
The collection record feeds the monthly report. The team can see which clients are on time, which are late and which items are consistently missing.
That data is also useful in the client conversation: a client who is always late on the same item may need a different process, a different contact or a different due date.
Advisory work starts from a clean close. A team that collects well can spend the client meeting on the numbers instead of the missing receipt.
Where Usual fits
Usual gives each client a personal link that opens on a phone without a password or an app. The client can finish one item at a time and come back later.
The team sets the reminder schedule once, and the reminders go out by email until everything is in. Accepted files are filed into the client's folders by year.
The team keeps its ledger, payroll and reporting tools. Usual does the request, the reminders, the review and the filing.