The client year, month by month

Using the calendar you already have

The hardest part of raising financial planning is finding a natural moment. Practices that make this work do not create new meetings; they use the ones the compliance calendar already puts in the diary, where the client is expecting to talk about money and the numbers are in front of both of you.

What follows assumes a 31 March or 5 April year-end for the personal work and a spread of company year-ends. Adjust for your own book.

January and February

The self assessment deadline has just passed, and you have been through everyone’s personal position in detail. This is the point in the year when you know most about your clients’ income and least about what they intend to do with it.

• Dividend income that has grown for several years with no corresponding change in the client’s plans.
• Deposit interest large enough to matter, which points at cash sitting unallocated.
• A first year of higher rate or additional rate liability, which changes what is worth doing.

March and early April

The end of the tax year concentrates minds and creates a genuine deadline, which is the one thing that reliably moves an owner-manager from intention to action.

• Annual allowance and carry forward, where the oldest unused year is about to expire.
• Employer pension contributions decided alongside the remuneration package.
• Clients who said last year they would sort something out and have not.

May to July

The gap between the filing peaks is where most firms do their thinking, and it is the best time to look at the book as a whole rather than at individual clients as they come in.

• Read the client list against the public record and produce a shortlist, rather than waiting for people to walk through the door.
• Look at which clients have a company year-end coming in the autumn, so the conversation can be prepared rather than improvised.
• Train or re-brief the client managers, because a session in this window is still fresh when the autumn meetings start.

The company year-end meeting

Whenever it falls, this is the single most productive meeting in the year for this purpose. The accounts are in front of you, the client is thinking commercially, and the balance sheet shows the things worth discussing.

• Surplus cash with no stated purpose.
• New borrowing, and whether anything sits behind the personal guarantee.
• Profit rising while drawings stay flat.
• A shareholding that has become worth a great deal with no agreement about what happens to it.

September to December

Company year-end meetings cluster here for a large part of most books, and the December quarter is when owners think about the year ahead.

• The main run of year-end meetings, which is where the balance-sheet conversations happen.
• Clients who want something settled before the calendar year turns.
• The point at which anybody planning a sale for the following year needs to have started.

Whenever a filing changes

Some moments do not sit in the calendar at all. A charge registered, a director appointed, a change in company status or a confirmation statement showing a new shareholder each say something happened that nobody has planned around yet.

These are worth catching when they occur rather than at the next scheduled meeting, because the gap between the event and the conversation is where the problem grows.

Making it survive contact with a busy year

Every firm intends to do this and most lose it by about week six, because it depends on somebody remembering in a meeting where there are twenty other things to get through.

What works is making it part of the paperwork rather than part of anybody’s memory:

• One standing line on the year-end meeting agenda, so the question gets asked whether or not anybody remembered to think about it.
• One field in the client record that says whether the conversation has happened, so a partner can see the gaps at a glance.
• A weekly shortlist arriving by email, so the work comes to the firm instead of waiting for somebody to go looking.

None of that adds a meeting or a member of staff. It changes what happens in meetings the practice is already holding.

Building it into the practice

Firms that run this well add one line to the year-end meeting agenda and one question to the personal tax review, and leave everything else alone. The point is not to do more meetings. It is that in the meetings already happening, somebody remembers to ask.