Does Your Accounting Firm Need a Website or a Workflow Fix?

• Your team can be busy for different reasons. Establish which one is costing you before choosing a project.
• Enquiry problems belong on the marketing site; client chasing and delivery constraints need their own assessment.
• Count across a full year so a seasonal swing doesn't become the justification for a redesign.

The first is acquisition. People find you, and then nothing happens. No enquiry, no call, and no way of knowing which part of the page lost them. That's a framing and structure problem, and it lives on the marketing site.

The second is what happens after the sale. The clients are signed, and working with you costs them more effort than it should. You can hear it in season, when a large share of what your staff do is administering clients rather than doing their accounts. That's an interface problem, and the marketing site has nothing to do with it.

The third is delivery. However the work gets done was designed for a firm smaller than the one you now run, and nobody has revisited it since. That one is a strategy question before it's a build, and it's the most expensive of the three to answer wrongly.

Most firms have two of these at once. The order you take them in should come from which one is costing you this year, not from which one is the more interesting conversation.

Look at where people stop, not where they arrive. If enquiry volume is low against the traffic you get, it's acquisition. If enquiries are steady but too many of them are poor fits, it's still acquisition, except the problem is qualification rather than volume, and more traffic makes it worse.

If enquiries and fit are both fine and your team is drowning in season, it's one of the other two. Ask whether the effort goes into chasing clients or into doing the work. Chasing points at the interface. The work itself being the constraint is a delivery question, and it's the one that justifies building software.

Two things make that reading honest. Count enquiries rather than sessions, and count them across a full year, because accounting demand is seasonal enough that a single quarter tells you whatever you already believed. Then pull your last twelve months of new clients and write down where each one actually came from. If most of them arrived by referral, more traffic isn't your constraint, and that changes which of the three is worth money this year.

This sounds obvious written down. It gets skipped constantly, because a redesign is a satisfying thing to buy and a diagnosis isn't.

A page per town. Near-identical pages that differ only by place name get treated as doorway pages, they rarely rank, and they convert no better than one honest page about where you work.

A rebrand when the problem is content, because new colours don't make a service page specific. A chatbot standing in for information that belongs on the page, because a visitor who has to interrogate a machine to find out whether you handle their situation has already been failed by the page. And more ad spend pointed at a page that doesn't convert, which is the most expensive way there is to find out the page doesn't convert.

Write down the point where the work stops, the person affected and what happens instead. That gives you a question to investigate before you choose a project.

The accounting firms overview links to the different pieces of work.

If the question is still what to build, read how product strategy defines a first scope before asking for a development quote.