Sadler Advisory handles payroll, bookkeeping, and tax for roughly 350 to 400 small businesses and individuals across the UK, run by a 12-person team spread across the UK and India. Founder John Sadler had been using Karbon for onboarding, but found it wasn't built for how his firm actually needed to collect information.
“It was just too generic and it didn't really have the tools that could allow you to get exactly what you wanted from the clients. It wasn't dynamic enough. It didn't have conditions.”
That gap showed up in two places at once: onboarding new employees for clients' payroll, and onboarding new clients themselves. Sadler had heard of Content Snare six months earlier but had dismissed it, assuming it covered the same ground as Karbon. It took a payroll bottleneck to make him reconsider and run a month-long trial.
A single unavoidable request
The core difference Sadler found was conditionality. Instead of a static list of questions every client had to work through regardless of relevance, Content Snare let his team build templates that branch based on each answer.
Here’s how it works:
- A client who already has a government gateway account gets asked which taxes are connected.
- A client who doesn't gets walked through setting one up first.
That mattered because static forms had been producing unreliable data. "There would be fields blank in Karbon on the workflow and two weeks later they've left that blank," John explains. "Does that mean they didn't know at the time, but they're looking it up, or that they just don't have that number, or they do and they forgot?" There was no way to tell the difference.
Required fields solved a related problem on the payroll side. New employee onboarding requests can't be submitted without a P45, and can't be submitted without a signed contract unless the employee explains why. Sadler suspects that condition alone has closed a gap most firms never notice. "God knows how many employments might have started without a signed contract," he said.
Measurable time back
The clearest result came from payroll. Sadler's team has onboarded around 120 employees through Content Snare since adopting it, with requests going directly to each new hire rather than routing through the client. He estimates each one used to cost roughly 20 minutes of email back-and-forth, not counting delays from chasing missing paperwork.
"That's 40 hours. That's one whole week of my payroll manager. Saved a whole week of time.”
Client onboarding brought a different kind of payoff: fewer surprises after the fact. A bookkeeping scoping questionnaire, for instance, asks new clients directly about past frustrations and technical details like transaction volume and payment platforms in use, information the firm previously only uncovered once work had already started, and often underpriced as a result.
A habit, not a one-off fix
Sadler treats every onboarding issue as a signal to refine the template further, rather than a one-time problem to patch. "Every time we have an issue onboarding, it's like, okay, someone didn't understand something there. So what do we need to change?" he said. "You have to keep at it... it's just about continually thinking and working at creating these things."
For a firm managing hundreds of clients across payroll, bookkeeping, and tax, the value wasn't one feature. It was replacing guesswork with confirmed, complete information, collected once, without a team member having to ask twice.
Stop chasing incomplete submissions
See how conditional logic and required fields can turn your onboarding into a one-and-done process, just like Sadler Advisory did.
