Practice Ledger.

The operational reality

A growing accountancy practice can carry hundreds of clients on fixed monthly fees. Each one has its own agreed fee, payment day, renewal date and a running list of ad hoc work: a VAT query, a payroll correction, a meeting with HMRC, a set of management accounts done at short notice.

None of that lived in one place. Agreed fees sat in a spreadsheet, engagement letters in a shared drive, ad hoc requests in email threads and the actual invoices in QuickBooks. To answer a simple question such as “has every client been billed correctly this month?”, someone had to open all four and check each client by hand.

What it was really costing

Month-end checks took senior people away from client work for days at a time. Every hour spent ticking invoices against a spreadsheet was an hour not spent on chargeable advice.

Ad hoc work slipped through. When a partner helped a client with an urgent query mid-month, it was easy for that work never to reach an invoice. Across a full client list, those small omissions added up to a meaningful amount of lost income every year, and nobody could say exactly how much.

Renewals passed unnoticed. Agreements rolled on at old fees long after the scope of work had grown, because there was no reliable reminder that a fee review was due. Failed or changed direct debits could go unseen for months, only surfacing as aged debts at year end, when they are hardest to recover.

And because the records disagreed with each other, every figure needed double-checking. The practice had the data, but no confidence in it.

One secure client and fee register

Practice Ledger brings every client into one register: monthly fee, payment method and day, agreement renewal date and any ad hoc charges logged against the month.

Fee changes are recorded with a reason and a history, so anyone can see what a client pays today, what they paid before and why it changed. Renewals due in the next 60 days are surfaced on the dashboard rather than left to memory.

Live data from QuickBooks

Invoice data is pulled from QuickBooks for the month, so nobody has to rekey figures or keep a spreadsheet in step with the accounts.

Customer names in QuickBooks rarely match the register exactly. The matching logic handles saved links, small spelling differences and clients invoiced under more than one name, and only asks a person to confirm when it genuinely cannot tell.

Automatic reconciliation

For every client, Practice Ledger works out what should have been billed (the monthly fee plus any ad hoc services due) and compares it with what QuickBooks shows was actually invoiced, accounting for VAT and overseas clients.

Matching records are cleared automatically. The exceptions are what remain: a missing invoice, an unbilled ad hoc job, an amount that does not agree. The team reviews a short list instead of the whole client base, then locks the month once it is clear.

The outcome

• Month-end checks reduced from days of line-by-line work to reviewing a short list of exceptions
• Ad hoc work matched to invoices, so chargeable time is no longer lost
• Every renewal and fee review visible well before it falls due
• Client, fee and QuickBooks data combined in one secure place the whole team can trust