How a 1,000-Client Telford Practice Keeps Every Email, Document and Signature in One Place - with Workiro

Challenge

KEW Accountants is a 10-strong practice in Telford managing around 1,000 client relationships across general accounts, tax planning and tax advice. Getting accounts and returns out of the office for signing, and keeping every piece of client correspondence on file, was the firm's heaviest administrative load.

Before Workiro, KEW was tied to a large all-in-one platform that had become expensive and unwieldy, and everyday tasks carried more friction and risk than they should.

Key challenges included:

❌ An all-in-one that had outgrown the firm: Their previous system tried to do everything in a single package and had become, in Karen's words, "too big and unwieldy," with the cost climbing sharply at renewal. When the annual renewal jumped from around £20,000 to £56,000, the firm decided enough was enough.

❌ Emails that never made it onto the file: Every email had to be saved to the desktop first, then transferred across, a manual step repeated many times a day. Trails went missing, and staff had to dig back through inboxes to reconstruct what had been said.

❌ Risky, hard-to-find advice trails: With tax advice spread across email, finding what had been sent to a client meant scrolling back through inboxes, with the ever-present risk a key message had been deleted.

❌ Clunky, metered e-signing: The old signing tool was complicated and capped by pre-bought "envelopes" that expired, and it returned only a timestamp and IP address rather than a proper signed record.

❌ Documents filed inconsistently: Across the firm's earlier setup, working papers and documents ended up filed in the wrong places, making them slow to locate.

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Solution

KEW left its costly all-in-one for a simpler, specialist setup built around Workiro used alongside TaxCalc, providing one place where the whole client file lives and keeps itself up to date as work happens. The switch cost the firm significantly less than the renewal it walked away from.

"It's so simple to just save something. You've got that whole trail just updating, so I don't have to keep saving it."

Key features that made the difference

⚡ One-click email and thread saving: Emails save straight to the client file, and the whole thread updates automatically as replies come in. No saving each message separately, and no lost trails.

⚡ Unlimited, simple e-signatures: Sending a document for signature is quick and uncomplicated, with a clear signed thread to follow, and no envelopes to buy or expire.

⚡ Enforced tagging and fast search: Consistent tagging keeps every document where it belongs, and a strong search engine puts recent work on the first page.

⚡ MS Office document editing: Working papers open and edit in the browser and save straight back to Workiro automatically, with no downloading and re-uploading.

⚡A vendor that responds: When KEW flagged an issue with their year-based tagging set-up, Workiro quickly reworked how tagging behaves so documents no longer duplicated across a client file.

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Results

Since moving to Workiro, KEW has a client file it can trust: captured automatically, easy to retrieve, and simpler for clients to work with.

🟢 A defensible, self-updating advice trail: Tax advice and client correspondence save automatically, and the thread keeps itself current, so the firm can find exactly what was said and when, and feel more secure in the advice it gives.

"It saves a lot of time, and headaches when I need to find that information again. It makes us a lot more secure in the advice we're giving."

🟢 E-signing clients actually use: Signing is simple enough that anyone in the office can send a document out, clients don't need a password or portal, and every signature leaves a clear thread. The firm has even started adding a signature line to its invoices, so clients can't say they never received the bill, turning proof of receipt into faster payment.

"The e-signing is a godsend. It's easier to approach, it's not complicated. And you've got a thread of evidence attached to the file"

🟢 Everything in one searchable place: Emails, documents, notes and working papers now live on a single file across around 1,000 clients, found in seconds when a client calls.

"The search engine is great. Anything you've done recently appears on the first page, so you don't have to look for it."