New client onboarding for UK accountants
New client. Messy records. Clean start.
Clients judge you on the first month, and that’s usually the month you spend rebuilding their history for free. Get the past bookkeeping and opening balances done the week they sign, using the rules you already have.
| Account | Opening | Movement | Closing |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1000 Current Account | 10,000.00 | 11,536.31 | 21,536.31 |
| 1010 Savings Account | 5,000.00 | 4.11 | 5,004.11 |
| 4000 Sales Revenue | 0.00 | (12,750.00) | (12,750.00) |
| 4200 Interest Received | 0.00 | (4.11) | (4.11) |
| 7200 Rent & Rates | 0.00 | 950.00 | 950.00 |
| 6300 Computer & IT | 0.00 | 263.69 | 263.69 |
| 9999 Opening Balance Equity | (15,000.00) | 0.00 | (15,000.00) |
| Totals | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
A new client almost never arrives with clean books.
They turn up with a login you can’t get into, an old accountant who’s slow to reply, accounts from eighteen months ago and a bank account. You need an opening position before you can start the work you quoted for, and that rebuild is rarely on the engagement letter.
Build the history from the bank, the one record that’s always complete. Set the opening balances and the client starts your normal process with the numbers already straight.
Before and after
Bring a client in without rebuilding everything by hand.
FAQ
Onboarding questions.
Can I import the previous accountant’s spreadsheets?
Not as the source of transactions. Entrio builds the ledger from bank statements, because the bank is the one complete record that isn’t someone else’s interpretation. The old accountant’s schedules are still useful for setting opening balances and checking the result.
Can I set opening balances?
Yes. Enter them from the last set of accounts and they go into the trial balance from day one. If you rebuild the prior year in Entrio as well, you can roll it forward instead.
What if the client has never used accounting software?
That’s the easiest version of the job. There’s no old ledger to reconcile against and no half-finished coding to undo. Bank statements in, reviewed trial balance out.
How long does onboarding take?
It depends on the state of the records, so we won’t guess. What changes is that each new client reuses the rules you wrote for the last one.
Can I set a client up before I have all their statements?
Yes. Import what you have now and the rest when it arrives. New statements slot into the same ledger by date and your rules file them as they come in.
Founding firms · 22 of 25 places left
Start every new client with clean books.
Fourteen days free and no card. A sample client is set up when you sign up, so you can see the whole thing before any real data goes in.
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Solo
£49£33 /month Up to 50 clients -
Practice
£129£86 /month Up to 250 clients -
Firm
£299£199 /month Up to 1,500 clients