Playbooks · January
How to clear a queue of clients who are behind.
Most January advice is about staffing and stress, and it isn’t wrong. This is the other half: what actually eats the hours when a dozen shoebox clients land at once, and the order that clears the most of them before 31 January.
Where the time actually goes
Three things repeat across every client in the queue.
Rebuilding a year from nothing
Every client starts from a blank sheet unless something carries over. Twelve months of transactions typed or pasted, coded from scratch, is the same job done ten separate times rather than one job done ten times faster.
Recoding payees you already know
The same handful of suppliers, the same bank charges, the same recurring payments turn up on client after client. Coding each one from memory, per client, is where a fast reviewer and a slow one look identical from the outside. The fast one just remembers more payees.
Finding the double-counted month
A client who sends "the last few months" more than once, or two statements with a week of overlap, is normal, not an edge case. Spotting it by eye across twelve files, at 11pm, is where backlogs quietly become wrong rather than just slow.
Sequencing
The order that clears the most clients, not the most hours.
Start with the worst client
It’s tempting to clear the easy ones first for a sense of progress. That puts the deadline pressure on whichever client turns out to be the messiest, normally the one who could least afford it. Front-load the worst records while there’s still slack in the calendar to absorb a surprise.
Ask for one file, not twelve
Most UK online banking lets you export a custom date range. A full tax year in one file is one thing to check for gaps and overlaps; twelve monthly exports are twelve, and the eleventh is exactly where a missing month hides.
Let overlaps happen on purpose
A gap in the records is worse than a duplicate, because a duplicate is detectable and a gap usually isn’t until the bank fails to reconcile. If your workflow catches repeated transactions automatically, asking for slightly overlapping ranges is the safer default, not a mistake to avoid.
Write the rule once, reuse it on client two
If your bookkeeping runs on rules rather than memory, the first client in the queue is the expensive one: every payee is new. By client four or five, a growing share of the file is already coded before you’ve looked at it, because you wrote the rule for someone else’s statement first.
If you want to see the whole queue automated end to end rather than sped up by hand, the Self Assessment deadline page walks through how Entrio clears one.
FAQ
Before the queue starts arriving.
Is this just a pitch for Entrio?
The mechanics below apply whatever you do the bookkeeping in: the sequencing, the overlapping-statement trick, starting with the worst client first. Where a paragraph describes something Entrio specifically does, such as a rule set carrying across clients or duplicate detection on overlapping ranges, it says so, rather than presenting a product feature as universal advice.
What if a client sends statements as twelve separate monthly PDFs instead of one file?
Ask for the year as one export before touching it, if the bank’s online banking allows a custom date range (most do). One file is one thing to check for gaps; twelve is twelve. If only monthly PDFs exist, that is worth converting to CSV or Excel before starting, not worth typing from.
Which client should actually go first?
The messiest one, not the easiest. There is no clean formula for "how many can I still clear before 31 January" (it depends on the state of the records), but starting with the worst client means the deadline pressure lands on the job that needed the most time anyway, instead of on whatever is left over.
How do I stop importing the same month twice across overlapping statements?
If your process detects duplicate transactions automatically, request overlapping date ranges on purpose. A client who exports "last 90 days" every few weeks will hand you overlapping files, and that is safer than gaps. If it does not, the discipline has to be manual: log exactly which date range each file covers before it goes anywhere near the ledger.
More playbooks
The rest of the queue.
Founding firms · 22 of 25 places left
See what one client’s year looks like coded automatically.
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.
-
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