Chasing client documents: what the industry's own numbers say it costs

Ask accountants what slows a close down and "chasing clients" comes up before software, before staffing, often before the technical work itself. That is not an impression — it shows up, repeatedly, as one of the top-ranked pain points in the profession's own surveys. Here is what the sourced numbers say, and why the gap is this wide.

What accountants say, in their own surveys

A 2022 study by Canopy and TrendCandy Research, surveying 150 US accountants, found that 83% of advisory accounting professionals say tracking down documents is a bigger problem than client appointment "no-shows." The same study found 69% of accountants spend excessive time gathering client documents, and separately, 79% spend too much time locating files once they already have them — the intake problem and the internal-filing problem compound rather than substitute for each other.

A follow-up study conducted for Canopy and CPA Practice Advisor in June 2024, with 240 accounting professionals, quantified how long a single engagement's information-gathering actually takes: 49% typically need 1–2 days to collect what they need from a client, 36% need 3–7 days, and 16% report two weeks or longer. The same respondents reported spending, on average, 9.3 hours a week on client communication, with a stated target of getting that down to 7.2 hours.

Internationally, the pattern repeats. Wolters Kluwer's 2022 Tax Season Challenges Report, surveying 430 accounting and tax professionals in Australia and New Zealand, ranked chasing client information as the third most common challenge firms face, cited by 45% of respondents — not a one-off finding, since the same issue appeared in the firm's prior-year survey too. In Wolters Kluwer's separate annual survey of nearly 2,000 US accounting firms, "late and unprepared clients" was ranked the number one challenge firms report.

Why the number stays this large

Three structural reasons keep this at the top of the list year after year, independent of which tool a firm runs internally:

• The first step is not under the firm's control. Every downstream process — extraction, checks, coding, reconciliation — runs on data the firm controls once it arrives. The single step that decides whether any of it starts on time is the client sending the document, and that step belongs to someone outside the firm's workflow.
• There is no error signal until reconciliation runs. A missing receipt does not announce itself the day it goes missing. It surfaces weeks later, at reconciliation, as an unmatched transaction — by which point the client has usually forgotten the context that would make finding it quick.
• Chasing is unpleasant, so it gets postponed. Asking a paying client for something, again, reads as friction in the relationship. Staff instinctively deprioritize it against work that feels more productive — which is rational for any single instance, and compounding across a full client book.

At volume, the arithmetic changes shape

For a handful of clients, a few days of back-and-forth per engagement is an inconvenience. Multiply the CPA Practice Advisor figures above across even a modest book — say 60 active clients, each needing an average of a few days of chasing across a handful of touchpoints per year — and the totals move from an inconvenience into a headcount line the firm has not budgeted for. At the volumes an outsourcing operation or a BPO processes, the same arithmetic does not just scale linearly; it compounds, because follow-ups that outrun the staff available to send them do not stay flat — they queue. What actually breaks when a BPO scales past 10,000 documents a month covers the same shape of problem from the processing side; chasing is its mirror on the intake side.

What actually moves the number

The surveys above describe a symptom that is consistent across firms, tools and countries — which is itself informative: this is not a training problem or a discipline problem on the client's side, it is a structural gap in how the ask is made. Closing it takes three things together, not any one alone:

• A precise ask. "Send your missing documents" asks the client to reconstruct a period from memory. A specific transaction, dated and amounted, asks them to answer a question instead.
• Zero-friction delivery. A request that requires a login competes with every other unread email in the client's inbox. A request that requires nothing but a click does not.
• Follow-up that does not depend on a human remembering. The 9.3 hours a week reported above is not all spent asking — a meaningful share is spent re-asking, an activity a calendar reminder handles more reliably than a person's memory ever will.

Missing receipts after bank reconciliation covers the concrete mechanism for the specific case of unmatched bank transactions — the same three principles applied to the exact exception list reconciliation already produces.

FAQ

Are these numbers specific to tax season?

No — the Canopy/TrendCandy and Canopy/CPA Practice Advisor studies both measure general client-information gathering across engagement types, and the Wolters Kluwer Tax Season Challenges Report, despite its name, measures a challenge accountants report as persistent across the year, not a tax-season spike.

Is this US-only data?

No — the Wolters Kluwer Tax Season Challenges Report surveyed accounting and tax professionals in Australia and New Zealand; the Canopy studies surveyed US accountants. The consistency of the finding across three different survey populations is part of why it is worth taking seriously rather than treating as one market's quirk.

Does automating the request eliminate chasing entirely?

No — it removes the two failure points that are mechanical (a vague ask, a follow-up someone forgot to send). A client who genuinely does not have or cannot find a document still needs a conversation; automation makes sure that conversation happens over a short, current list instead of a backlog nobody has looked at in weeks.