How to get new accounting clients: what to fix first

An enrolled agent opens a firm in June. The website goes up in August. By December the phone has rung twice for a new client, and one of those calls was spam. Every client so far came through a former employer or a financial advisor met at a networking breakfast.

That firm doesn't need a bigger idea. It needs the calls and messages it already gets to end with an engagement letter signed. It also needs last year's clients back in January. Here, step by step, is how to get new accounting clients: five things to fix, in order, before a dollar goes to ads.

Why the order matters

Most advice on finding clients starts with more traffic: a new website, more posts, an ad budget. Every one of those ends the same way, with a person who calls or fills in a form. If nobody picks up, or the reply comes two days later, the money spent bringing that person in is gone.

So the five fixes run from the moment someone reaches out to the moment they come back next year:

1. Answer the phone.
2. Get a reply out to every inquiry before five minutes pass.
3. Follow up on each proposal until it's signed.
4. Request reviews from clients who consented.
5. Keep last year's clients from drifting before the season.

Each one is cheap next to an ad budget, and each one feeds the one after it. Reviews bring calls, and a call only counts if someone answers it.

Fix 1 of 5 Answer the phone

A small firm's best prospects still call. A business owner holding a letter from the IRS, a family whose preparer retired, a new LLC owner who needs payroll set up: they phone the first two firms that look right.

At a small firm, calls go unanswered for ordinary reasons. The owner is in a meeting. The front desk is checking in a drop-off. Or it's twenty past six in February, and the office shut at five.

Start by counting. For two weeks, write down every call that went to voicemail, and when it came in. Most firms find the misses bunch up: the lunch hour, the first hour after closing, Saturday mornings in season.

Then cover those hours:

• Ring more than one person. A ring group sends a new call to the front desk, then the office manager, then a preparer's desk.
• Add a short menu. "Press 1 if you're a new client" puts a prospect ahead of someone asking for a copy of last year's return.
• Send missed callers a text. Sixty seconds after the ring stops, the caller's phone shows a note from your office number, while they're still deciding who to try next.
• Cover the evenings. That can be a person on call, an answering service or an AI receptionist. With AI, the greeting should tell callers they've reached the office's AI assistant. It books the meeting and leaves every tax question to your staff. The after-hours post linked below works through what each option costs.

Leave the owner's personal number off all of this. Once a client has that number, every quick question arrives at 9 p.m.

Fix 2 of 5 Get a reply out before five minutes pass

A web form or a Facebook message feels less urgent than a ringing phone. It isn't. The prospect who wrote to you late on a weeknight probably wrote to a couple of other offices before bed.

Set a rule your firm can keep: every new inquiry gets a reply within five minutes, day or night. Nobody on staff can do that at 11 p.m., so the first reply goes out two ways at once, text and email, both drafted by your firm beforehand and sent the moment the form arrives.

A good first reply does three things:

• Says who it's from: the firm's name and a real person's name.
• Asks the one question that sorts the inquiry: an individual return, a business return, monthly bookkeeping, payroll or an IRS notice.
• Offers a booking link for a short intro call.

Then a person follows up the next working morning. Keep a list of open inquiries, each one assigned to a named person, with a time it's due. The list matters more than any software: an inquiry with nobody's name on it waits.

Texting is for people who started the conversation and handed you their cell number. Your form needs two consent boxes, one covering service texts and a second for marketing, and every series stops at the first "not interested" or STOP.

Fix 3 of 5 Follow up on each proposal until it's signed

This is where small firms lose the most prospects without noticing. The intro call goes well. The owner promises a proposal. It goes out on Thursday, and then nothing happens.

The prospect hasn't said no. Usually the proposal is buried under forty other emails, or it's a hard week. Two weeks later they sign with the firm that called back.

Write the follow-up once and use it for every proposal:

• Day 0: the proposal and the engagement letter go out together, fee and services spelled out, signable from a phone.
• Day 2: a short text asking whether anything is unclear, plus an offer of ten minutes on the phone.
• Day 5: an email answering the question people ask most, such as what the fee covers and what costs extra.
• Day 10: a last note saying you'll close the file unless they want to go ahead.

End the series as soon as the letter comes back signed or the prospect declines. Circular 230 says a practitioner may not keep trying to contact a prospective client who has said no, and your series should respect that.

Take a deposit or set up autopay at signing. A signed letter with a payment attached is a client. A signed letter alone is still a maybe.

No-shows belong here too. When someone misses the intro call, a text with a rebooking link goes out within the hour, and a person calls the next day.

Fix 4 of 5 Request reviews from clients who consented

When a business owner searches for a bookkeeper or a tax office nearby, the map results come first, and reviews weigh on which firms show. Six reviews, the newest from 2023, make an office look shut.

Most owners don't ask because asking at the counter feels pushy. So skip the counter. Ask by text, on the day the year's job is finished: the return is picked up, the extension is filed, the year's books are closed.

Two rules decide who gets that text:

• Consent comes first. Under section 7216, even the name, phone number and email of a return client count as tax return information. A review request isn't one of the uses allowed without the client's consent, so it goes only to clients who signed your firm's consent. That form can travel with the engagement letter as its own optional page, and the engagement never depends on it.
• Everyone who agreed gets the same request. You don't skip the clients who seemed unhappy, and no client gets anything for writing one. The FTC bans both, in its 2024 review rule (16 CFR 465).

Answer every review, good or bad, and never let a reply say the person was ever your client. Thank them for the kind words, or offer a number to call. Say nothing about a return, a refund or a balance.

Fix 5 of 5 Keep last year's clients from drifting before the season

The cheapest new client is one you already had. A family that filed with you last April and hears nothing by February may book with whoever reached them first.

Run a season kickoff in early January:

• An email, plus a text where the client agreed to texts, saying the firm is booking for the season.
• A link to book a drop-off or a meeting.
• Their tax organizer: the questions and the list of documents for this year.

Section 7216 allows this without a separate consent, within limits. A preparer may keep a list of return clients holding only names, mailing addresses, emails, phone numbers, entity type and the return form number. That list may be used to send tax information and to offer more return preparation, and for nothing else.

So the kickoff offers this year's return, not bookkeeping or advisory. A newsletter that sells monthly bookkeeping to return clients goes only to those who signed a consent for it. And nothing from the return itself, like income or last year's refund, decides who gets which message.

By mid-February, anyone who hasn't booked or sent the organizer back hears from last year's preparer, by phone.

Then search, ads and referrals

Once the five fixes are in, every source you add brings more signed letters, because nothing it sends you sits unanswered.

• Search. Fill in every field on the firm's Google Business Profile, season hours included. Then give each service and each town you serve its own page on the site. Our page on search and AI answers covers what that takes.
• Ads. Run Google and Meta campaigns from ad accounts your firm holds, aimed at the searches you want, such as "bookkeeper near me" or "tax preparer for small business". Set a monthly budget you can hold for a full season, and judge each campaign by cost per new client.
• Referrals. Financial advisors, bankers, insurance agents and past employers. These stay the owner's job: coffee, a call before the season, a thank-you note when they send someone.

What to skip

Skip anyone selling the names of strangers who never reached out to you. Those lists mean reaching out to strangers, and Circular 230 says an uninvited solicitation must say that it is one and where the contact details came from.

Skip anyone who charges a fee for each client they send. A CPA who pays a referral fee to get a client must disclose it to that client under the AICPA Code. A flat monthly fee for marketing keeps that question off the table.

And skip promises about refunds or results in any ad. Circular 230 and the AICPA Code both rule out claims that create expectations a firm can't back.

How to tell it's working

Count these each month, split by where each person came from:

• Calls, and calls missed.
• New inquiries from forms, chat and messages.
• Intro calls booked and held.
• Proposals out, and the share returned with a signature.
• Reviews received.
• Last year's clients booked by March 1.

Every source needs its own number to dial. That way the Google profile's calls and the ads' calls are counted apart. Divide what a source cost by the signed letters it brought: the result is cost per new client.

Where to start this week

1. Count last week's missed calls and the hours they came in.
2. Write the missed-call text and the message a new web inquiry gets first.
3. Pull every unsigned proposal from the last 60 days, and call each one.
4. Add a review consent form to next season's engagement letter.
5. Choose a date in the first week of January for the kickoff.

If you'd rather hand the setup to someone, AccrueNest builds the phones, the first replies, the proposal follow-up, the review requests and the January kickoff, and shows each new client by source in its client pipeline.