Marking a new client active
What Achekam's onboarding readiness checklist requires before a new client can be marked active, why each item matters, and what it does not check.
By Achekam · · 5 min read · For Accountants & audit firms in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya
A new client is easy to create and surprisingly hard to finish. The record goes in on the day the engagement letter comes back, everyone is pleased, and three weeks later the first invoice cannot be raised because no service was set up, the tax return deadline arrives without an income tax number on file, and nobody is sure which manager looks after the client. The client is "active" in name and unfinished in fact.
Achekam deals with this by refusing to call a client active until certain things are in place. This article explains the checklist, why each item earns its place, and the gaps the checklist does not cover.
The readiness checklist
Under CLIENTS > Onboarding, each new client has a readiness checklist built from what Achekam's server holds about it, not from a form someone ticked. The items are:
| Item | What must exist on the record |
|---|---|
| Registration number | The company or entity registration number |
| Income tax number | The client's income tax reference |
| Service | At least one active service |
| Contact | At least one contact person |
| Engagement | At least one engagement |
| Account manager | A named account manager |
The 'Mark active' action is offered only when every item is met. There is no override button. If a client cannot be marked active, the checklist tells you which item is missing, and the fix is to supply it rather than to work around it.
The client directory itself is kept on the server. Staff add clients with a step-by-step wizard or a CSV import, edit them and archive them under CLIENTS > All Clients. When a firm takes on a batch of clients at once, the CSV import is the quickest way to bring in registration and tax numbers that already sit in a spreadsheet.
Registration and income tax numbers
These two numbers are the client's identity in every dealing with the state: the company registry (CIPC in South Africa, the CAC in Nigeria, the Business Registration Service in Kenya) and the tax authority (SARS, the NRS or KRA). Annual returns, tax returns, tax clearance and correspondence with the authority all turn on them.
Capture them from the source document, not from the client's e-mail signature. The registration certificate and a tax authority letter or registration notice should be filed in the client's folder in the Document Centre, which keeps a folder per client, with versions, tags, and archiving and restoring with a reason. An income tax number typed from memory and wrong by one digit is worse than a blank, because the checklist will treat it as met.
A service, a contact and an engagement
These three items are what make the client workable.
- An active service is what the firm will bill and deliver: monthly bookkeeping, payroll, annual statements, an audit. Without one, there is nothing to invoice and nothing for the work schedule to follow.
- A contact is who the firm deals with: who receives requests, who approves draft statements, who signs. A client record with no contact sends requests nowhere.
- An engagement is the piece of work the firm has agreed to do, with its type and its team.
For clients that come through the firm's proposal process, much of this is created automatically. When an engagement letter is signed, Achekam turns the lead into a client, activates a service for each mapped quotation line and drafts, but does not issue, the invoice. A quotation line that was not mapped to a service is recorded as unmapped, so check the services on a newly converted client before assuming the checklist's service item reflects everything the client bought.
An account manager
The account manager item looks administrative and is the one that matters most over time. One named person owns the relationship: they notice when requests go unanswered, when the scope creeps, and when the client's circumstances change in a way that affects acceptance. A client owned by "the team" is a client nobody watches.
Name someone with the seniority to raise a difficult conversation with the client, not only the person who does the day-to-day work.
Acceptance comes first
The readiness checklist is about whether the client is set up to be served. It is not the acceptance decision, and acceptance is not one of its items. That decision lives under QUALITY & GOVERNANCE > Client Acceptance & Continuance, where the firm records an acceptance review after a conflict check against its own clients and contacts, and only a signed-in partner can approve it. Make an approved acceptance review a precondition in your own procedure before anyone works through the onboarding checklist. The acceptance process is covered in client acceptance and the conflict check.
Customer due diligence in the acceptance review is a tick-box confirmation by the preparer. Achekam runs no automatic FICA, CIPC or sanctions check. Investopedia's overview of know your client (KYC) explains what know-your-client checks involve, from identity and due diligence to ongoing monitoring, and how they fit with anti-money-laundering rules. The checks themselves, and the evidence for them, are the firm's work.
Sub-lists that still live only in the browser
One limit needs to be understood by everyone who edits client records. Some sub-lists that are edited in place on the client record, namely statutory deadlines, accrued hours and KYC fields, still live only in the browser, according to the record store's own header. They are not on the server.
In practice, a KYC field one staff member fills in on their laptop is not seen by a colleague on another machine, and is lost if that browser's data is cleared. Until that changes, do not use those fields as the firm's record. Keep identity documents and due diligence evidence as files in the client's vault folder, and keep statutory deadlines where the whole team can see them.
After the client is active
Once marked active, the client's Client 360 record reads its services, contacts, timeline and profile from the server, and becomes the place staff go to see the relationship as a whole; it is described in the Client 360 record.
A short routine for every new client:
- Partner-approved acceptance review on file.
- Registration and tax numbers captured from source documents, with copies in the vault.
- Services checked against the signed engagement letter, including any unmapped lines.
- Contacts entered with their roles.
- Engagement created with its type and team.
- Account manager named.
- 'Mark active'.
Run the Onboarding page once a week and ask why each client still on it has not been marked active. The answer is usually one missing item, and the person who can supply it usually does not know it is missing.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
