Professional services

Where the work comes from

Most professional firms are referral businesses whether or not they describe themselves that way. An accountant sends you work. A solicitor introduces a client. An existing client recommends you at a dinner. Those relationships take years to build and are almost never recorded as anything.

The consequence is that the firm cannot answer basic commercial questions. Which referrers actually send work, as opposed to which ones you know well. Which have stopped. What an introduction is worth on average. Everyone has an impression and nobody has a number, and the impression is usually shaped by who is most sociable rather than who is most productive.

A referrer as a relationship, connected to every client who came through them, turns that into arithmetic. It also makes the quiet decline visible, which is the expensive one: someone who sent you four clients a year and has sent none for eighteen months is a telephone call worth making, and nobody makes it because no one notices.

What happens before someone becomes a client

Practice management software begins when a file is opened. Everything that determines whether one is opened happens before that: an introduction, a meeting, a fee conversation, an engagement letter, and often several weeks of the prospective client thinking about it.

In most firms that period lives in an inbox and in somebody's memory. It is not searchable, it is invisible to anybody covering, and when it does not convert it leaves no trace. Firms genuinely cannot say how many enquiries they received last year or what proportion became instructions, which for any other kind of business would be an obviously unacceptable gap.

What was actually agreed

The substance of a professional relationship is in correspondence. What scope was agreed, what caveat was given, what the client said they wanted and what you told them was possible. It is in email, and which email depends on who was on the thread.

When that person is away, the firm's ability to serve the client drops measurably and the client can tell. When they retire, a portion of what the firm knew leaves with them. Putting correspondence on the client record is what turns individual knowledge into firm knowledge, and it is the single change most firms of this kind would benefit from.

Not practice management

No billing by time. No work in progress ledger. No client money handling. No compliance workflows specific to any profession. No accreditation. Time can be recorded against a project, and it stops there: it informs you, it does not invoice.

Those are the core of practice management software for professional firms, they are genuinely difficult, and building a worse version of them inside a CRM would help no one. If time recording is what you need solved, buy something built for it.

What firms use it for alongside one

The pattern is a firm with practice management software that handles the engagement competently and knows nothing about the six months before it existed, or about the referrer who caused it, or about the enquiry that did not convert.

Those live in an inbox and a partner's memory, and they are the part of the business that determines whether next year's fee income exists.

What we would build if firms asked

Reading from practice management software so the engagement status and the fee position appear against the relationship without being typed twice. The connector framework exists and this trade is not on it, which the roadmap says by name instead of describing as coming soon.

Name the relationship types your firm actually uses

Client, former client, prospect, referrer, professional contact, supplier. Six is usually right for a professional firm and the one people leave out is former client, which is a mistake: a former client is a different thing from a prospect and is overwhelmingly your best source of work.

Referrer is the other one worth having as its own type rather than as a note. Most professional firms cannot say which of their referrers actually produce work, and the reason is that referral is recorded as gratitude rather than as a connection.

Import the client list, not the mailing list

Start with the people you have actually acted for. It is a smaller file, it is cleaner, and it produces a system that looks like your firm from the first afternoon rather than one that looks like a marketing database.

The mailing list can come later against the same records, and doing it in that order means the duplicates resolve in your favour instead of creating four hundred thin records that swamp the real ones.

Decide about sensitivity before anyone is invited

In a professional firm there will be matters that not everyone should read. The important thing to understand is that sensitivity is decided separately from ownership, so a partner who can read everything still cannot open a sensitive record they have not been granted.

Use it sparingly. A firm that marks half its records sensitive has removed the information from the marking and will end up granting blanket access, which leaves the inconvenience and removes the protection.

While you are there, do not give everyone the administrator role because the firm is small enough that it feels harmless. The cost is rarely what a colleague might do deliberately. It is what one compromised account can reach, and it is the audit trail losing its ability to answer who could have done this.

Put in the commitments that already exist

Every review date, every promise to come back to somebody, every renewal. This exercise reliably surfaces two or three that were not written down anywhere, and in a professional firm those are the ones that turn into a complaint rather than into lost revenue.

Then leave it alone for a fortnight and use it

Do not configure pipelines, reports or anything else yet. Two weeks of ordinary use will tell you what your firm's stages actually are far better than a planning session, and it will tell you which of the fields you thought you needed nobody has filled in once.

The question, put plainly

A solicitor at a two office practice has introduced six clients to you over four years. She moves to a larger firm across the county. Who sent you that work?

If your answer is the practice, then next year she introduces two more from her new employer and your figures say you have acquired a promising new referral source, while the practice she left appears to have gone quiet. Both statements are false and both will be acted upon. If your answer is the person, the practice she left disappears from your records entirely, including the three other people there who have never sent you anything and whom someone ought to be visiting.

Hold the person, and put the dates on the employment

The durable record is the individual. The firm she works at is an organisation, and the connection between them carries the period she was there. Referrals connect to her. The count follows the person, because it was the person who made the introduction, and the history of the old practice stays intact because the connection ended rather than vanished.

This costs about ten seconds at the point someone hears she has moved, and it is worth having a habit about, because the news always arrives informally. Someone sees it on a professional network or hears it at a conference. In a firm where that fact has nowhere to go it stays in one person's head, and the head it stays in is rarely the head that will need it.

The same shape answers the question the page raises elsewhere about the instructing director who moves employer. It is one mechanism and it earns its keep twice: once on the client side, where a saved view of former instructing contacts now somewhere else is a better prospect list than most firms have, and once on the referral side, where it stops a good source being written off because it changed address.

What hangs off the client, and what hangs off the engagement

The test is whether the answer changes when you do a second piece of work for the same client. The year end does not. The responsible partner rarely does. The fee basis for that particular job frequently does, the scope always does, and what was expressly excluded is specific to the piece of work and to the argument you might have about it.

So the client carries the durable facts: year end, responsible partner, the date identification was completed, consent, and the introduction that produced them. The engagement carries scope, the fee agreed for that scope, the date of the engagement letter covering it, and the correspondence in which somebody agreed to something. Firms that put scope on the client record discover the problem the second time they act, when the field describes last year's job and nobody is sure which year it describes.

Four custom fields worth having, and two that look useful and are not

Worth having: year end, because it drives when everything happens. Fee basis, because it is the question asked most often by people who were not in the meeting. Engagement letter date, because it is the fact that tells you whether the paperwork is current. Responsible partner, because in a firm of any size the second question after who is this is whose client is this.

Not worth having: a status field, which will duplicate the stage and then disagree with it, and the disagreement will be discovered by someone reading the wrong one. And a client value figure typed in by hand, which is accurate on the day it is entered and misleading from the following week, because nobody ever goes back and revises it downward.

A general notes field deserves its own warning. It is where everything goes when the model does not fit, and once a firm has one, the important facts stop being facts and become sentences inside a paragraph that only searches if somebody guessed the same wording. If a thing matters enough to look for, it needs somewhere of its own.

The client who is four companies, a pension scheme and a family

Professional firms constantly act for a group where the letterhead suggests one client and the work suggests several. Companies House will give you the legal shape of it in an afternoon and tell you nothing about who deals with whom. The useful question is not what the group calls itself. It is who instructs you, who pays, and which entity the work is done for, because those are the three things you will need to answer separately later.

Each entity that instructs you separately is its own organisation, with the people connected to it in their roles. The individuals appear against each entity they are involved with, which is what allows someone to see that the same two people are behind all of it. Collapsing the group into one record is faster on the first afternoon and starts costing on the day the trading company is sold and the pension work continues.

Former client is a state with a reason, not a bin

Keep them, and keep why. Fee, sold the business, took the work in house, a disagreement, or the commonest and least recorded of all, which is that nothing was wrong and someone simply stopped ringing.

The reason changes what you would do. A client who left on fees may return when their circumstances change and does not want an apology. A client who left because they were annoyed needs a different conversation and, more usefully, needs someone in the firm to know before they pick up the telephone. In this trade former clients come back more often than any marketing produces, and they come back to a firm that remembers accurately.

The engagement letter is the only contract most firms have

It defines what you agreed to do, what you did not, and on what basis you are paid. In most firms it is issued once, at the beginning, and then the work changes shape for six years while the letter stays where it was.

A date field and a dated task are a small mechanism against a large risk. The date tells anyone looking at the client how old the current basis is. The task, set for whenever your firm decides letters should be revisited, appears in a daily view before it is due instead of being remembered by whoever usually remembers. The product has no view about how often that should be, and it should not have one, because the answer differs by profession and by the kind of work.

What it will not do is draft the letter, hold versions of your standard terms, or tell you that a letter has become inadequate. Those belong to document tooling and to professional judgement respectively, and a CRM that claimed either would be lying about the second one.

Scope creep is a records problem before it is a billing problem

Almost every fee dispute in a professional firm is a disagreement about what was included. The sentence that settles it was written in an email eleven months ago by someone who was being helpful, and it usually reads like a small favour rather than like a variation to a contract.

Putting correspondence on the client record does not prevent this and nothing does. What it changes is who can find the sentence. Today the answer is the person who wrote it, if they still work for you, if they can remember roughly when, and if the thread has not been renamed twice. Afterwards, the answer is whoever is asked.

Identification records, and what this deliberately does not do

No identity verification. No screening against any list. No risk scoring, no periodic recheck logic, and no opinion about what your supervisory body expects. Those are the substance of specialist products and of your own procedures, and a CRM approximating them would produce the most dangerous thing in this area, which is a firm that believes a check has been done.

What a relationship record holds is the fact and the date: that a check was carried out, when, by whom, and the documents you already keep, against the client rather than in a folder named after them. That is genuinely useful when somebody asks whether the file is complete, and it is the whole of what is claimed here.

Keeping former clients, against the right to have records erased

Professional firms keep client records long after the relationship ends, because a claim can arrive years later and the file is the defence. People also have rights over records about them. Those two facts are in tension, the tension is real, and it is resolved by your retention policy rather than by any supplier.

What is provided, on every plan including the free one and permanently, is the machinery rather than the decisions: an audit trail, consent records, subject access tooling and a complete export in a format that opens without our software. Those are the parts a firm cannot reasonably build for itself and the parts that are needed most urgently at the worst moment. How long you keep a former client's file, and on what basis, remains a judgement for the firm and its professional indemnity insurer. Where someone wants to test that judgement they go to the Information Commissioner's Office, which is also where the guidance on retention is published.

Confidentiality is a professional duty before it is a permission setting

For most firms in this trade the duty is not a preference. It attaches to information about a client whether or not anybody has configured anything, and it survives the end of the engagement.

The mechanism the product offers, described elsewhere on this page, is that sensitivity is a grant on specific records held separately from the role, and that a restricted record is absent from search rather than shown as a locked row. The reason that matters in a professional firm is that the existence of an engagement is frequently the confidential part, and a search result announcing that there is something here you may not see has already disclosed it.

The claim we are not going to make

Nothing here is a compliance system. There is no accreditation, no workflow certified against any profession's rules, and no assurance that a particular configuration satisfies a regulator. If a tender asks whether your CRM is compliant, the honest answer describes what it holds and who can see it, and lets the reader decide.

We would rather be told this section is too cautious than have a firm discover the gap during an inspection. It is also why the questions below answer several things with a plain no.