Workflow management for accounting firms

It is the 7th. Three VAT returns for the stagger 1 clients are due today and two of them still sit waiting on records, because neither client has sent bank statements. Your junior spends the morning writing chase emails while her month-end close for six bookkeeping clients goes untouched. One set of statements lands at 2pm, so the return gets filed at 4:40pm by a senior who was meant to be clearing review points on a year end. Nobody writes down that the month-end list has slipped, so it happens quietly, and you only find out three weeks later.

How forty jobs fit into twelve projects

Workflow management for accounting firms starts with one compliance calendar that repeats forever, and every client drops a bundle of jobs into it: weekly or monthly bookkeeping, payroll runs with their own cutoffs and an FPS due on or before payday, a VAT quarter on whichever stagger they landed on, year end accounts and corporation tax, the personal tax return. Each job walks the same pipeline: records in, prepared by a junior, queries out to the client, reviewed by a senior or partner, approved and signed, filed at Companies House or with HMRC, billed. The pipeline stalls twice, at records in and again at queries out, and the second stall is the worse one because the job is already half done and half billed, which across forty live jobs means each one sits parked about a fifth of the time.

Most of managing that pipeline is knowing which jobs are stuck and who has room to clear them, and in ToDoing that maps onto the client list directly: a project is usually a client, and that client's VAT quarters, payroll runs and year end sit underneath it as milestones and tasks, so forty jobs across twelve clients becomes twelve projects.

The shape of the team makes the planning harder, because the roles do not map onto a single planner: one or two partners hold the client relationships and the sign-off, a client manager plans and reviews a portfolio of 30 to 80 clients, bookkeepers and trainees prepare the work itself, one person runs a dozen payrolls on the side, and a part-time practice manager tries to hold the whole deadline list together underneath it all. Planning happens in a spreadsheet, but execution is split by client rather than by job type, so everyone carries a personal slice of the whole calendar in their head. Since April 2026, MTD for Income Tax has added four quarterly updates per income source for clients over the £50,000 threshold, so a sole trader who also lets a flat files eight, plus a final declaration, with the first falling due on 7 August, and whatever advisory work there is has to fit into the gaps the compliance calendar happens to leave.

Monday's job review is a spreadsheet read aloud

The ritual is the same in every firm: the partner walks the deadline spreadsheet row by row asking where each job is, while the senior checks a private list that does not quite match it. ToDoing gives you one grid for the working week instead. Rows are people or projects, one project per client, and columns are days, and the whole week fits on one screen. Every task lives on a person and a day, and filing dates sit on that same calendar as milestone flags, so a year end drifting past its slot is visible days early rather than on the morning it is due. Drag a job to another day or another person, and the change shows up wherever anyone else is looking, because My Week and the team Overview are the same data seen two ways rather than two separate lists that can quietly drift apart.

Half the plan collapses into waiting

Nothing starts until the client sends something, so whatever gets planned on Monday morning is often out of date by Tuesday lunchtime, and ToDoing is built around that reality: anything unfinished rolls forward to today automatically each working day, so nothing falls off the bottom of a list, and a job where there's no telling when the records will come drops into the Someday column until they do. When Hartley finally emails their statements on Thursday, you drag that VAT return onto Thursday and onto whoever has room. Moving a job takes seconds, which matters when you do it most days.

Busy season

January in the UK, late January to 15 April in the US with a second wall at 15 March for partnerships and S-corps: the whole firm is full at the same moment, and the partner reallocates by walking the office asking who has slack, which really just means finding a gap you can see. Leave, on the Pro plan, sits in the same picture: half days, balances, and public holidays by country and region. It can also mirror the leave calendar you already keep. Check the team wall chart before you promise a client a filing date, so you don't get caught out on the Wednesday when payroll is off sick and nobody remembers which clients run weekly.

Chargeable time without a six-minute timer

If you still bill time, tracking on the Enterprise plan captures it straight from the plan itself: ticking a task done logs its planned time, and one tap adjusts the number if it needs it, so nobody has to start a timer. Set a job to days or hours and give it a budget, and the burn bar shows when a fixed-fee year end has eaten its price. The by-person and by-type report exports to CSV when you need the numbers outside ToDoing, and rates stay visible to admins only throughout.

Estimation, on the same plan, builds a median and a p80 for each task type from your own completed history, so a bookkeeping catch-up or an R&D claim gets priced against what similar jobs actually took rather than a guess. The accuracy view then compares your estimates with the effort you actually spent.

What ToDoing will not do for your practice

ToDoing is not practice management. It will not generate jobs from a compliance database, chase clients for records, or file anything with HMRC or the IRS, and there is no client portal, no WIP ledger, and nothing that raises an invoice from time. It does not connect to your ledger either, and the only integrations are calendar feeds in and out. It has no automatic recurrence, so the monthly bookkeeping list gets re-planned by a person each week. If automating the compliance production line is your core problem, Karbon, IRIS Senta, Bright Manager, TaxDome, Financial Cents, Canopy and Jetpack Workflow are built for exactly that. Keep your practice software running underneath. ToDoing handles the part those tools are usually weakest at: giving everyone a shared, current view of who is doing what this week.

Workflow management for accounting firms: common questions

What is the best workflow management software for a small accounting firm?

If your problem is the production line itself, things like recurring job templates, document chasing or a portal for the client to log into, then Karbon, IRIS Senta or TaxDome will serve you better than we will. ToDoing is aimed at a narrower problem than that, which is simply what the whole firm is doing this week and who still has room on Thursday.

Is ToDoing right for a five-person practice?

It is built for teams of roughly 3 to 15, so a two-partner practice with a handful of staff sits squarely in scope. The deadline list already exists somewhere in the practice, and what is usually missing is a week view that everyone actually trusts.

Will it replace our practice management software?

No. Keep the system that holds client records, job templates and billing. Use ToDoing for the week itself: who has capacity, who is on leave and which filing dates are coming up, visible to the whole team. Run both for a while, and if the week view turns out to be the one people actually check each morning, the spreadsheet is naturally the one that falls out of use.

How do VAT and filing deadlines show up?

As milestones on the team calendar, coloured by the project they belong to, sitting beside the tasks that feed them. You add them, because ToDoing does not know your staggers. Once they are in, a return with three days left and no preparation started is visible on the grid.

More on the thinking behind it in plan the week, not the backlog, or see how it compares with Asana, ClickUp and Float. Pro is $2 per person per month and Enterprise is $6, at the time of writing, July 2026.

ToDoing also works for architects, consulting firms, creative agencies, engineering consultancies, event planners, interior design studios, law firms, pr agencies, recruitment agencies, software studios, video production.