How to automate client onboarding in an accountancy practice, without skipping the law.

Onboarding used to be a form, an engagement letter and a photocopy of a passport. In 2026 it is a regulated process with three government systems inside it. Companies House identity verification became a legal requirement on 18 November 2025, and accountants registered as Authorised Corporate Service Providers can verify clients on its behalf. Making Tax Digital for Income Tax began on 6 April 2026 for sole traders and landlords with qualifying income over £50,000, with the £30,000 tier following in April 2027 and £20,000 in April 2028, and each of those clients needs software, an agent authorisation and quarterly updates. And HM Treasury decided in October 2025 to move AML supervision of accountancy service providers to the FCA, which will inherit around 60,000 regulated firms.

None of that changes what the original version of this guide said: the chasing is where the hours go, because it happens every day, for every client, for ever, while the form is filled in once. What has changed is that the chasing now has statutory deadlines attached to it, and the checks that used to be a photocopy now have to be evidenced in a form a supervisor can inspect.

This guide sets out what the law requires you to collect, what the Companies House and HMRC steps actually are, what the tools that do this cost, and a worked example priced from ONS pay data. It ends with what we charge, because we build these flows and you should know our interest before reading our advice. Everything cited was read on its source page on 14 September 2026, and where a page could not be read, such as ICAEW’s own AML guidance, we say so and cite the joint CCAB guidance instead.

Regulation 27 says customer due diligence applies when you establish a business relationship, carry out an occasional transaction of £12,000 or more, suspect money laundering, or doubt documents you already hold. Regulation 28 says what due diligence is: identify the customer, verify that identity, and assess the purpose and intended nature of the relationship. For a company, that means the name, registration number, registered office, the law it is subject to, and the names of the directors; where the customer is owned by someone else, identify the beneficial owner and take reasonable measures to verify them and to understand the ownership structure.

Regulation 33 adds enhanced due diligence for high-risk cases, politically exposed persons, unusually large or complex transactions, and anything involving a country on the FATF call-for-action list. Regulation 40 says the records must be kept for five years from the end of the relationship, and then deleted unless there is a legal reason to hold them. The CCAB guidance, approved by HM Treasury and adopted by every UK accountancy supervisor in its July 2026 edition, confirms that electronic verification is permitted where the process is secure from fraud and impersonation, and says a digital verification service should be on the government’s register of certified services.

The practical point for automation is that every one of those requirements is a field, a document or a decision. Fields and documents can be collected by a system. The decisions, which are the risk assessment and the sign-off, cannot, and the flow has to stop and wait for a named person at exactly those points. A supervisor reviewing your files wants to see that the person made the decision with the evidence in front of them, and a system that timestamps the evidence arriving and the decision being recorded gives you that without anyone reconstructing it.

Regulation text as displayed on legislation.gov.uk on 14 September 2026; the thresholds are shown in sterling following the 2026 amendments. CCAB guidance is based on the law as at 1 July 2026.

Companies House verification runs through GOV.UK One Login, which is free, or through an ACSP, which may charge. Becoming an ACSP requires supervision by a UK AML body and a one-off £55 registration fee. From 18 November 2025 new directors and people with significant control must verify; existing directors provide their personal code with the company’s next confirmation statement, and Companies House describes the year from that date as a transition period. From no earlier than November 2027, anyone filing on a client’s behalf will need to be an ACSP, with at least six months’ notice promised. If your practice files for clients, capturing the personal code at onboarding saves a second round of chasing later.

HMRC authorisation has three routes and the automated flow should know which one applies. The digital handshake covers Making Tax Digital for Income Tax, VAT, Capital Gains Tax on UK property and several others: the agent creates a request from the agent services account, the client receives an email link and signs in, and the link expires after 21 days. The older Online Agent Authorisation posts a code to the client within seven working days, which the client must pass back within 30 days, and has to be repeated per tax service. Form 64-8 is still paper, signed and posted, and still covers PAYE, Self Assessment, Corporation Tax and trusts.

The 21-day and 30-day windows are exactly the sort of deadline a person forgets and a system does not. A good flow sends the request, records when it was sent, reminds the client before it lapses, and tells the practice the moment it succeeds or expires. Getting the agent services account itself requires proof of AML supervision, so a practice that is not yet supervised, or whose supervision has lapsed, cannot start the digital handshake at all; that is a prerequisite to check before designing anything.

This is the sequence we build. Steps marked "person" stop the flow until a named individual acts, and the system records who acted and when, which is the evidence a supervisor asks for.

These are prices read on the vendors’ own pages on 14 September 2026, excluding VAT unless the page says otherwise. Some are per user, some per client, some per check; the arithmetic for a practice of your size is in the worked example below.

Read on 14 September 2026. Karbon, FYI and Pixie display non-sterling prices; Karbon offers a GBP selector we could not render. Prices change; the vendor page is the authority.

For most practices under about fifteen staff, the honest answer is to buy. Xama’s free tier and Core plan at £13 a month cover verification, screening and a basic onboarding form for less than the cost of one hour of a qualified accountant’s time a month. BrightManager and Senta add the chasing. If your practice runs on one of those and the team actually uses the automated reminders, you do not need us for onboarding.

Bespoke earns its place in three situations. The first is when the practice already has software it will not change and the gap is the joins: the proposal tool, the AML tool, the practice manager and the bookkeeping software each do their part, and a person re-keys between them. The second is when the chasing has to be intelligent rather than scheduled: reading what the client sent, recognising that the bank statement is there but the closing balance does not match, and asking for exactly the missing thing rather than "your outstanding documents". The third is the MTD wave, where a practice with 100 or more clients entering quarterly reporting needs the authorisation, software set-up and quarterly chase to run without a person driving each one.

In all three cases the build sits around the product rather than replacing it. The AML tool keeps doing the checks; the practice manager keeps the client record; the bespoke layer orchestrates, chases and reports. That is the £4,000 to £15,000 project, not a rebuild of the practice. It also means the practice can leave: if the bespoke layer is switched off, the products still work, the records are still in them, and nothing has been locked into a system only one supplier understands.

Take a practice of twelve people with 400 clients, taking on eight new clients a month and with 120 sole trader and landlord clients entering Making Tax Digital for Income Tax by April 2027. Price the time at the ONS median gross hourly pay for the two roles that do this work, from the 2025 Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings: £16.77 for a full-time bookkeeper, payroll manager or wages clerk, and £26.02 for a full-time chartered or certified accountant. Those are gross pay; employer National Insurance and pension sit on top, so the figures below understate the true cost.

Onboarding by hand today: assume three hours of administrative time per client across the proposal, letter, portal, checks and software set-up, plus 45 minutes of a qualified accountant’s time on the risk assessment and sign-off, plus another hour and a half of chasing spread over the following weeks. That is 4.5 hours at £16.77 (£75.47) plus 0.75 hours at £26.02 (£19.52), or £94.99 per client. Automated, the administrative time falls to about an hour and the accountant’s time to half an hour, because the risk decision still has to be made: £16.77 plus £13.01, or £29.78. The saving is £65.21 per client, and at 96 new clients a year that is £6,260.

Now the MTD clients. Each of the 120 needs four quarterly updates a year, and each update involves a chase for records and a check that the figures are in. At 30 minutes of administrative time per update by hand, that is 240 hours a year, or £4,025. Automated chasing and classification cut that to perhaps a third. Together the practice recovers close to £9,000 a year of gross pay, against a bespoke flow at £4,000 to £15,000 plus Xama at £13 a month and roughly £2 to £3 per check. The payback is inside a year at the bottom of our range and inside two at the top, before counting records arriving on time in January, or the evidence being timestamped rather than reconstructed.

Hours are our assumptions and are stated so you can substitute your own. Pay rates are ONS ASHE 2025 provisional, Table 14.5a, full-time median gross hourly pay for SOC 4122 and SOC 2421.

Count three things before you start. How many hours a week the team spends chasing, which most practices have never measured; Sage’s 2024 survey of 1,000 accountants and bookkeepers found 92 per cent agreed they spend too much time on manual tasks, and 89 per cent said automating would free up time, yet only 37 per cent were doing it. What proportion of clients are complete by a given date before a deadline. And how many days pass between a signed engagement letter and a live HMRC authorisation.

All three move within a month if the automation is in the right place. If none of them has moved, the automation is on the form rather than the chase, and it should be moved. The bigger proof arrives the following January, when the practice finds out whether records came in earlier than last year, and again at the first MTD quarter-end, when the chase either ran itself or did not.

One measure to resist is messages sent. A system that sends more reminders is not necessarily working; a system that needs to send fewer, because clients respond to the first specific request, is. The same is true of chasers that go out to clients who have already sent everything, which is the fastest way to teach clients to ignore the practice. Count what arrived and when, not what went out.

A first implementation, which for an accountancy practice is usually the onboarding and chasing flow described above built around the tools you already have, is £4,000 to £15,000 fixed, against a written scope with an explicit list of exclusions. If the practice wants a written plan first, an AI adoption audit is £2,500 to £6,000 over one to two weeks, credited in full against any build that follows. We do not sell day rates. Running costs, which for this kind of flow are the verification checks and a few pounds a month of hosting and messaging, are set out before you sign.

We read the current revised text of the Money Laundering Regulations 2017 on legislation.gov.uk, the July 2026 CCAB guidance, the Companies House and HMRC guidance pages on GOV.UK, and HM Treasury’s October 2025 consultation response, on 14 September 2026. Vendor prices were read on the vendors’ own pricing pages the same day and are quoted as displayed, in the currency displayed. Pay figures are from the ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings 2025 provisional Table 14, downloaded and read directly. Hours in the worked example are assumptions and are labelled as such. ICAEW’s and ACCA’s own AML pages could not be read by our tools on the day, so the CCAB guidance they jointly prepare is cited instead. Nothing here is legal advice; confirm your obligations with your supervisor.