Every practice-management product on the market was evaluated and rejected. The objection wasn't price — it was that each one turned out to be a project-management tool with accountancy labels on it. None handled a two-pipeline sales CRM, staff capacity against real hours, and deep Companies House and HMRC integration in a single flow. Getting all three meant three subscriptions and a person to reconcile them.
So we built it instead. Not a prototype: the actual system the firm runs on, with 487 clients migrated off Xero Practice Manager and the old software switched off.
It kept growing because each module made the next one obvious. Once client records held Companies House data, deadlines were automatic. Once deadlines were automatic, jobs could generate themselves. Once jobs existed, capacity was measurable. Once capacity was measurable, the planner was worth building.
The last stretch was the hardest and the most valuable: making it fit to file tax returns with HMRC as an agent. That's a different class of software, with a compliance bar to clear and no room for approximation.
- Two-pipeline CRM — new prospects and existing-client opportunities, with automatic price-review detection against turnover
- Jobs, tasks and capacity — recurring compliance jobs generated from Companies House deadlines, rated against a real hours baseline
- Onboarding end to end — proposal builder with discounting, engagement letter, e-signature, HMRC agent authorisation, AML check and direct-debit mandate
- Full HMRC Making Tax Digital agent software — digital records, cumulative quarterly submissions, year-end and Final Declaration
- Six AI agents — chasing information requests, nudging stalled onboarding, triaging the inbox, pre-reviewing jobs, orchestrating each new client
- A grounded assistant answering staff questions from a curated tax knowledge base rather than from memory
- Client portal with no login — a private link per client to approve proposals, answer requests and upload files
- The rest of the business too — time and WIP with job profitability, HR and holidays, a team hub, booking pages, an installable mobile app
Build, don't buy — but only here
The firm still pays for Xero, BrightPay and its tax software. Those are regulated engines with continuous compliance burdens, and rebuilding them would be reckless.
What got built is the layer those things plug into: the CRM, the jobs, the capacity, the onboarding, the client portal. That's where the firm's actual way of working lives, and it's the part no product could fit.
Client portals with no login
Client-facing software usually dies on the password. Ask a busy business owner to create an account to approve one proposal and a good proportion simply don't.
Every client gets a private tokenised link instead — no account, no password, bookmarkable. The same pattern runs e-signature, direct debit setup and the new-client form. Adoption went from a hurdle to a non-issue.
Every AI agent drafts, none of them send
Six agents run daily: chasing information requests, nudging stalled onboarding, triaging the inbox, pre-reviewing jobs before a human review, orchestrating each new client.
Not one of them sends anything unsupervised. Everything lands in an approval queue, and anything ignored twice escalates to a partner. The value is in the drafting and the noticing — the send button stays human, deliberately.
Grounded AI, not a chatbot with opinions
The internal assistant answers staff questions about tax and the practice. A model answering from memory would be confidently wrong about rates and thresholds.
So it can't answer from memory. It retrieves from a curated knowledge base and live practice data through defined tools, and it's told to say when it doesn't know. Every question and answer is logged, and there's an escalate-to-a-partner button on every response.