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Accountancy practices are an unusually good fit for process work, for a straightforward reason. The work is high volume, highly repeatable, deadline driven, and largely made up of the same handful of client interactions repeated across a whole book. That means a small inefficiency does not stay small. It multiplies by the number of clients and again by the number of times per year.

Certain findings come up again and again. Here are five, with the sort of numbers typically attached to each.

One. Chasing records

Almost universally the single largest recoverable block of time. Records are requested, some arrive, most do not, and somebody starts chasing. The chasing is manual, it is done from memory or a list somebody maintains, and it escalates as deadlines close in.

The cost is not only the chasing itself. It is the compression it creates, where a large share of the work lands in the final weeks, which drives overtime, errors and the review bottleneck below.

Typically found: four to eight hours a week across the practice during ordinary periods, considerably more approaching deadlines. It is normally the first thing worth fixing, because the fix is structural rather than a matter of chasing harder.

Two. The same client information typed more than once

Client details exist in practice management, in the accounts package, in the tax software, and in a spreadsheet somebody maintains because none of the above holds the thing they need. Onboarding a client means entering the same information repeatedly. Changing an address means remembering all four places.

The visible cost is the re-keying. The invisible one is worse: four versions of the truth, quietly diverging, until something is filed against an out of date detail.

Typically found: two to five hours a week, plus a recurring error rate that nobody has ever costed.

Three. Review as a single point of failure

Work stacks up waiting on one or two reviewers. Everything below moves at whatever rate they can absorb, and around deadlines they become the constraint on the entire practice.

You cannot solve a review bottleneck with hours. The reviewer is already working them.

What usually helps is unglamorous: getting work to review in a genuinely consistent state so review time is spent on judgement rather than on catching the same five preparation issues repeatedly, and separating what actually requires a senior signature from what has simply always gone that way.

Typically found: a delay measured in days per job rather than hours per week, which is why it hurts most at exactly the wrong time of year.

Four. Status is unknowable without asking

Somebody rings about their return. Finding out where it stands requires opening two systems and asking a colleague. Multiply that across a book of clients and a practice loses a substantial slice of its week simply establishing facts about its own work in progress.

The tell is a partner walking the office to ask how things are going. That walk is a reporting system made of legs.

Typically found: three to six hours a week across the practice, concentrated in the most expensive people.

Five. Onboarding rebuilt from scratch each time

Engagement letter, anti money laundering checks, authorisations, system setup, records request. The steps are known and identical every time, yet each new client is assembled by hand from memory, with a slightly different sequence and a variable amount of chasing.

This is the most fixable item on the list and often the last one anyone looks at, because each individual instance feels small.

Typically found: one to three hours per new client, most of which is recoverable through sequence and template work rather than any purchase.

What this adds up to

For a practice of six to ten people, these five findings commonly total somewhere between twelve and twenty hours a week. Not all of that is recoverable, and no honest audit will claim otherwise. Realistically, half is, and half of it recovers through changes that cost nothing beyond the decision to make them.

The point of putting numbers on it is not the precision. It is that a partner can then weigh a specific fix against a specific annual cost, instead of weighing a vague sense that things are busier than they should be.