The Third Reminder You Sent: Chasing as a Symptom
Client chasing isn't a discipline problem — it's a design problem. Here's how a client portal changes what you're chasing, and how often.
Count the reminders you sent last week. Not the first ask — the follow-ups. The "just circling back on this," the "did you get a chance to look at this?", the third email that finally got a signed engagement letter or a bank statement across the line. Now multiply that by every client on your list at the busy end of the year.
Most practices treat chasing as a fact of life. Clients are busy, they forget, you nudge them. But when chasing becomes a daily job for someone in your firm, it stops being a personality trait of your clients and starts being a symptom of how work moves through your practice. The good news: it's fixable, and the fix mostly comes down to where the request lives.
Why the inbox breeds chasing
When you ask a client for something by email, you've created a request with no home. It sits in their inbox alongside four hundred other emails. There's no status, no reminder that isn't manual, no record either of you can point to that says "here is what's outstanding." If they miss it, the only recovery mechanism is you, remembering, and typing another message.
That's the whole problem in one sentence: email makes the client's memory your responsibility. Every outstanding item is something you have to hold in your head and re-send until it lands. Multiply that across a firm and you've built an unpaid, invisible job that eats hours nobody bills for.
Good accounting client management software doesn't just automate the reminder. It changes the structure so the request has somewhere to live, a status that's visible to both sides, and a follow-up that fires whether or not anyone remembers to send it.
A portal turns requests into a shared list
A client portal gives an outstanding request three things it never had in the inbox:
- A single place it lives. The client logs in and sees exactly what's outstanding — the document you need, the query you asked, the letter waiting for signature. No scrolling, no "which email was that?"
- A status both sides can see. You know it's still open. They know it's still open. Nobody has to ask "where are we up to?" because the answer is on the screen.
- Reminders that don't depend on you. The system nudges on a schedule you set. You're no longer the reminder engine.
The shift is subtle but it changes everything about your week. Instead of chasing individual items, you're maintaining a list that clients can act on when it suits them — and the follow-ups run themselves.
What you stop chasing
When requests move into a portal, whole categories of chasing disappear:
- PBC and document requests. Instead of emailing a list and waiting, the client sees each item, uploads against it, and the outstanding ones stay visible until they're done. You can tell at a glance who's complete and who isn't.
- Engagement letters and signatures. A letter waiting to be signed sits in the portal with a clear call to action, and reminders fire automatically. The three-week signature chase becomes a two-day one.
- Queries during a job. The "one quick question" that would have become its own email thread is a portal item with a due date, not a message you have to remember to follow up.
- Invoices. If the same login shows the client what they owe and lets them pay it, the gap between done and paid closes without a separate chasing cycle.
The portal only works if it's the front door
Here's the trap. A lot of firms bolt a portal onto the side of their process and keep doing everything else by email. Clients end up with two channels, get confused, and default back to the inbox — where you're back to chasing.
A portal reduces chasing when it's genuinely the single front door: document requests, letters, queries, invoices, status, all in one login. That's the difference between a portal as a filing cabinet and a portal as the way your clients actually deal with you. The point isn't storage — it's that everything a client needs to see or do lives behind one login, and everything you're waiting on has a home there.
This is where practice management software earns its keep. In Finye, the portal isn't a separate product you manage on the side — it's the client-facing surface of the same system that holds your work items, recurring jobs, engagement letters and invoices. When you raise a request against a client's file, it appears in their portal. When they respond, the work item updates on your board. There's no double handling and no gap between what you've asked for and what's outstanding.
What changes when chasing stops being your job
The first thing that changes is your headspace. When you're not holding a mental list of everyone you're waiting on, you can actually focus on the work in front of you. The list is in the system; it will remind people; you don't have to.
The second thing is capacity. Chasing is deceptively expensive — it's not just the minute it takes to send a follow-up, it's the context-switching, the re-reading of the original thread, the mental tax of tracking who owes you what. Take that off your team and you free real hours, especially in the run-up to deadlines when chasing peaks and capacity is tightest.
The third thing is the client relationship. Counterintuitively, clients don't love being chased any more than you love chasing them. A clear list of what's outstanding, on their own time, with gentle automated nudges, feels more respectful than a human emailing them three times. You look more organised, and they feel less hassled.
Start with your worst offenders
You don't need to move everything into a portal on day one. Start with the requests you chase most:
- Pick the one or two request types that generate the most follow-ups — usually documents and signatures.
- Move those into the portal and turn on automated reminders.
- Tell clients, once, that this is now where they'll find what you need from them.
- Resist the urge to "also" email it. If it's in the portal and in the inbox, the portal loses.
Give it a full cycle — a BAS quarter, a tax season — and count the reminders again. The number that used to define your busy weeks is the number a portal is built to shrink. Chasing was never a discipline problem. It was a design problem, and design problems have solutions.