The CRM for accounting firms that only sell in January
Prospect, proposal and onboarding as stages, with advisory cadences that run in the eight months nobody is selling.
- Unlimited seats
- Your own database
- AI waits for your approval
A firm's whole year of new business arrives in a window measured in weeks, and by the time anyone has capacity to think about growth the phone has stopped ringing. The result is a business that is too busy to sell for four months and has nothing to sell to for eight. A CRM here is not about closing faster. It is about making the quiet months productive, and about knowing which of your existing clients are buying only half of what you do.
A year in a twelve-person firm
Three things every partner recognises, and what gets configured for each.
Referrals arrive and nobody records where from
A new client mentions that a lawyer sent them, someone says thank you, and the relationship never becomes a pipeline. Configure referral source as a field on every prospect and referrers as contacts with their own cadence, so you can see which three relationships produce most of your work and contact them on purpose.
Proposals go out in the busiest week of the year
The prospect who called in February gets a proposal in March, when the partner writing it has forty returns open. It sits unanswered and nobody chases it. Configure a proposal stage with a follow-up cadence and a task, so the gap between sent and signed stops being invisible in the month it matters most.
Compliance clients never hear about advisory
The client you have filed for six years does not know you do cash-flow forecasting, and asking them in April is impossible. Configure a segment by services held, and an advisory cadence that runs in June and October when there is time to have the conversation and time to deliver it.
The growth question is which of your clients buy one thing
Compliance work is a commodity that renews, and advisory work is what changes a firm's economics. The uncomfortable part is that the best prospects for advisory are already clients, and the firm has no list of them because the practice management system organises around jobs and deadlines rather than around what each client buys.
Configured properly, that becomes a query. Services held is a field on the company record, and a segment finds clients holding compliance work and nothing else. The advisory cadence runs against that segment when both sides have capacity, and any reply pauses it and lands in a shared inbox rather than one partner's mail.
The seasonal shape also decides when to run outbound. Cold prospecting works badly in the six weeks before a filing deadline and well in the quarter after one, when a business owner has just had a bad experience with their current accountant. That timing is a campaign schedule, and it is the first thing worth configuring.
What we configure for you
A working setup for an accounting, tax or bookkeeping firm, inside the first 14 days.
- 1
Pipeline stages
A new-business pipeline (Enquiry, Discovery call, Proposal sent, Signed, Onboarding, Live) and a client-growth pipeline (Service gap identified, Conversation booked, Proposed, Added), because selling advisory to an existing client is not the same motion as winning a new one.
- 2
Channels
Your firm mailbox connected over IMAP, the enquiry form on the site posting to the inbound webhook with the service of interest as a field, Calendly discovery calls landing as meetings, and the LinkedIn queue for the referral-partner side.
- 3
Cadences
A proposal follow-up, a referral-partner cadence for the lawyers, bankers and brokers who send you work, an advisory cadence timed for June and October, and an onboarding sequence that runs while documents are being collected.
- 4
Agent policy
The Inbox agent set to review, so it drafts a scheduling reply or a document chase and a person approves it. Guardrails hold sends to business hours and cap touches per contact, and no agent drafts anything that reads as advice.
- 5
Knowledge-base voice
Your services, your pricing bands, your onboarding checklist, your jurisdictions and your engagement terms loaded as knowledge, so a draft never states a fee or a filing position you did not authorise.
Your stack, and what sits beside it
Practice management owns the work. We own the conversation before and around it. Read this row by row.
| What you run | What it keeps | What SalesCrew adds |
|---|---|---|
| Karbon | Jobs, workflows, capacity planning, the internal collaboration around every deadline | The pipeline before a client exists, proposal follow-up and advisory campaigns to existing clients |
| Canopy | Client portal, document requests, workflow and time tracking | Referral-partner development and a shared inbox for enquiries that never became jobs |
| TaxDome | Portal, e-signature, workflow and billing for smaller firms | Cold outbound to owner-managed businesses, and segments by service gap |
| QuickBooks and Xero | The client's books, and your ledger | Nothing. We never touch accounting data |
| Your tax software | Returns, filings, the compliance record | Nothing. Return data does not belong in a marketing database |
| Your website and directories | Enquiries, directory listings, paid clicks | The enquiry lands with its source, so cost per signed client by channel is a query |
These connections run through webhooks, CSV import and the API. There is no native practice-management connector, and we would rather write that plainly than call it an integration it is not.
Client data, and the line this page will not cross
When practice management software is the better answer
A configurable CRM (SalesCrew)
- A real pipeline before the client exists, with proposal stages and follow-up that runs
- Segments by services held, which is where advisory revenue actually comes from
- Unlimited seats, so partners, managers and the person who answers the phone all have access
- One Postgres database per firm, exportable whenever you ask for it
- No job or workflow management, no capacity planning, no time tracking, no billing
- No client portal and no document collection, which is what most firms mean by onboarding
- No native connector to Karbon, Canopy or TaxDome — webhooks and CSV only
- Proposals with e-sign are on the roadmap, and this is a new product with no accounting customers yet
The practice tool (Karbon, Canopy, TaxDome)
- Jobs, deadlines and capacity built for how a firm's year actually runs
- A client portal, document requests and e-signature already in place
- Onboarding checklists and recurring work templates for compliance cycles
- Vendors who understand professional confidentiality expectations
- Sales before the engagement is usually a light CRM bolted onto a workflow tool
- Cold outbound to prospects is not what a practice system is for
- Per-seat pricing, and the growth conversation lives outside the system
- Your client list lives in their system, and export is a report rather than a database dump
The call pattern is a wave, and it arrives before a deadline
A firm's phone does not ring evenly. It is quiet for months and then, in the weeks before a filing deadline, produces more calls in a fortnight than the previous quarter. Most are existing clients with a document question, and buried among them are prospects who have just fired their accountant and are calling three firms in an afternoon. Those are the calls that get missed.
Today SalesCrew captures the web enquiry at any hour with the service of interest recorded, drafts the first reply through the Inbox agent for a person to approve, books the discovery call through Calendly, and makes outbound calls through Vapi. It does not answer the phone.
When the phone pack ships, the useful behaviour for this trade is unglamorous: capture the caller, ask which service they are asking about, book the discovery call, and text back the ones who hung up during the deadline rush. Numbers with inbound routing, missed-call text-back and reminders that send are on the roadmap, along with the assistant that books into the calendar.
Two constraints to plan around now. Cold email to businesses is commercial email, so the federal rules that govern it in the United States apply to every prospecting campaign, including a working opt-out and an accurate physical address, and suppression is enforced at freeze and again at send. Professional bodies also set rules on how firms may advertise, and those differ by body and jurisdiction, so check the ones that bind your firm before a campaign goes out. This is not legal advice.
Where this gets used
Three jobs a firm does every year, described as mechanism.
Chasing a proposal in the busiest month
The proposal moves to Proposal sent with a follow-up cadence attached. Three touches over two weeks go out without a partner remembering, the cadence stops the moment the prospect replies, and the reply lands in the shared inbox.
Running the advisory conversation in June
A segment finds clients holding compliance work and nothing else, filtered by size. The cadence offers a conversation rather than a service, and anyone who books drops out of it. Suppression is applied when the audience is frozen.
Working the referral network on purpose
Lawyers, bankers and brokers are contacts with a partner cadence and a dormant stage. Every touch is logged against the source, so which relationships actually produce signed clients becomes a report instead of a feeling.
What partners ask first
- Client confidentiality is not negotiable for us. What actually sits in this system?
- Names, contact details, the services a client buys, the stage, the source and the conversation history. Not returns, not financial statements, not figures from a client's books. That line is a configuration choice you make on day one. Underneath it, your firm runs in its own Postgres project rather than a shared tenant, credentials sit in a secrets vault, every tool call is audited with the actor recorded, and every AI agent runs in review mode.
- Can we market other services to our tax clients?
- Carefully, and with your own advice. Using information gathered while preparing a return to market other services is specifically regulated in the United States, and the consent rules are strict. Segmenting on the services your firm sells to a client is a different thing from mining return data, and it is what the setup on this page describes. We give you the mechanism and the suppression list; the consent and the professional rules stay yours.
- We are flat out from January to April. When would we even set this up?
- Not then. The honest answer is that the trial is 14 days and the useful months are May to November, which is also when the advisory campaigns you would configure are supposed to run. A firm that starts in the quiet season has a working pipeline and two cadences by the time the next enquiry wave arrives.
- Does it do proposals and engagement letters?
- Not yet. Quotes with line items, a PDF and typed e-sign are on the roadmap, and a payment link on your own Stripe key comes with them. Today the proposal goes out however you send it now, and SalesCrew holds the stage and runs the follow-up so it does not sit unanswered through the busiest fortnight of your year.
- Will partners actually use it?
- Partly. The practice manager or the marketing person lives in it, partners approve drafts and read the pipeline before a partners' meeting, and nobody re-enters job data that already exists in Karbon or Canopy. Unlimited seats mean the whole firm has access without a licence argument. There is no native mobile app, only responsive web.
- What does it cost, and what happens if we leave?
- Core is $299 a month with unlimited seats, Local is $499, Outbound is $699 and Agency is $1,200. A firm doing cold prospecting to owner-managed businesses usually wants Outbound for the sender pool. The trial is 14 days and a card is required to start it. If you leave, you take a full Postgres dump plus CSVs, because your firm's instance is a separate project. It goes read-only with export available, and a person deprovisions it after 90 days.
Which tier fits an accounting firm
Core for the pipeline and the advisory campaigns. Outbound when prospecting is the plan.
Core at $299 a month covers both pipelines, the shared inbox, email cadences and the data bank, with unlimited seats for partners, managers and support staff. Outbound at $699 adds the sender pool, the Instantly send provider and the campaign agent, which is the tier for a firm running cold campaigns to owner-managed businesses in the quiet quarter. Local at $499 is the phone and SMS tier and ships with the roadmap pack described above.
Start with the clients who only buy compliance
Import your client list in the quiet season, segment by services held, and see the advisory cadence line up in review.