How Lee Coombes Accountancy Digital grew 15% without growing its workload

A typical accounting practice treats growth and workload as a package deal: more clients means more chasing and more evenings spent tracking down a missing bank statement. Lee Coombes, head of accountancy and tax at Accountancy Digital, has broken that link.

Over the past 12 months his UK and Spain-based practice has taken on around 15% more clients, and he says he's working roughly three hours less a week than he was before. The shift came from removing an entire category of admin work that used to eat the day - chasing clients for documents, retyping the same request for the twentieth time that month, renaming files, and keeping a spreadsheet just to track who had sent what.

Growth without the trade-off

For Lee, the clearest sign that something had changed wasn't a number on a spreadsheet but rather what he could do with his afternoons. Living in Spain, he'd previously lose chunks of the day to email and client queries regardless of what else was on. Now those hours are simply his again. As Lee put it:

We're taking on more clients, but we're doing less work. It's actually improving our work-life balance as well.

That's not a minor perk bolted onto a growth story. It's a growth story. A practice that can absorb 15% more clients without a matching rise in hours worked has changed something structural about how it operates, not just found a way to work a bit harder for a bit longer.

Where the extra hours came from

It may sound as if Lee discovered some elaborate trick for buying back his afternoons. In reality, the mechanism is fairly unglamorous: recurring and automated Content Snare requests replace one-off manual chasing.

At the start of each month, Lee has VAT and Making Tax Digital (MTD) requests go out automatically, tailored to how each client actually works. A client who uses Excel gets asked for an Excel export. A client uploading receipts through separate software just gets asked to confirm they've done it. None of that requires Lee to sit down and write anything out each time.

For anything that isn't a standard recurring request, he uses Content Snare's AI builder instead of typing from scratch:

In the time it used to take to write, 'Tom, I need the following information,' you can put that into the AI builder. It builds it, sends it, and it's going out.

The same logic applies at scale. The practice runs around 150 payroll cycles a month, and self-assessment season means bulk-sending questionnaires to 50 clients at once rather than emailing each one individually. Lee estimates the cumulative effect at roughly 600 hours saved a year, once every small saving across every client and every month is added up.

A system the whole team can rely on

Automating requests only solves half the problem if the information still lives in one person's inbox. The other half is making sure growth doesn't create a bottleneck around whoever happens to be available that day:

It's massive with a team, because I might create the request and then another member of the team will go and work that request.

This played out clearly in the practice's first MTD quarter under the new system. The statutory deadline for the relevant submissions was 7 August. Accountancy Digital had them done by 15 July, three weeks early, across a client list that had already grown well beyond what the old spreadsheet-and-email process could have handled without adding staff.

That's the part of the story that matters beyond the headline stat. After all, 15% more clients and three fewer hours a week is more than a one-off efficiency win: it's a practice that scaled its client base on the same infrastructure and the same headcount. For Lee, that combination of growth and higher margins without added overheads is hard to argue with:

Obviously the more clients you get, the more money you make, your margins are higher. It's a no-brainer in my eyes.