Onboarding a new accounting client is a sequence that is well known inside every firm and written down inside very few. Collect the details, get the engagement signed, identify who you are dealing with, get access to the records, take on the predecessor's information, set up the deadlines, and start the work. Accounting client onboarding software is worth buying when it runs that sequence identically on every client and leaves what it collected somewhere permanent. It is not worth buying as a form with a nice progress bar.
The list is the product, the interface is not
What you are buying is the ability to define your firm's onboarding once and have it run without anybody remembering it. That means steps with owners, relative due points, conditional steps for client types that need them, and visible status per client. If configuring the list is awkward, the firm will end up running the software's default onboarding rather than its own, which is exactly backwards.
Answers must land on the record, not in a submission
A form that emails the firm a submission has moved the retyping, not removed it. The details collected during onboarding are the opening state of the client record: identity, contacts, year end, references, who else is involved. If the software writes them straight into the record, the record is complete from day one and nobody ever has to reconcile a form against it.
Where professional obligations sit
Accounting onboarding includes steps that exist because of professional and legal requirements: engagement terms, identification, communication with a predecessor. Software can hold the step, record that it was done, store the evidence and prevent it being skipped. What the requirement actually is, and what satisfies it, is a matter for your professional body, your regulator and your own advisers, and no product can answer it for your firm.
Questions people ask about accounting client onboarding software
Should onboarding software be part of our practice management system?
It helps, because the client record is already there. It is not essential if the onboarding product can write into that record rather than keeping a second list of clients.
Can the client complete most of onboarding themselves?
A good part of it, if the questions are short and the reasons are obvious. What clients abandon is long forms asking for things they need to look up, so split those into named requests that can be answered over a few days.
How do we handle clients coming from another firm?
Treat it as a variant of the same list with extra steps for obtaining prior information, rather than a separate process. Keeping one list with conditional steps is what stops the two versions drifting apart.