CRM for UK accountants: clients, AML files and deadlines

A CRM for an accountancy practice follows the client relationship: who the client is, who sits behind it, what you agreed and what you exchanged. Practice management software runs the work itself. Xero's UK guide, published in June 2026, draws the same line: "Practice management tools like Xero Practice Manager are built to handle the operational side of running a practice" (Xero). Take a typical client of a small practice: a limited company with two directors, one of whom also trades as a sole trader and owns a buy-to-let with a partner. That makes one relationship, with three tax returns and four people to identify, where a generic contact list sees five unrelated names. Standards covers that relationship side and leaves your jobs, timesheets and invoices in the practice software you run today. The industries hub lists the other trades Standards serves as their pages go live.

Standards starts from your own objects instead of a generic template: client companies, sole traders, partnerships, people and engagements, each with the fields your practice uses. The link between two records carries its own details. A person joins a company as a director, a shareholder or a person with significant control, and the link records the role and the share held. You filter on those details like any other field, so a list of every director who also holds shares in another client company takes one filter instead of a spreadsheet. Each client record has its own drive, with folders you search by name. When a partner creates a new client, Standards generates the folder tree your practice uses for every client file, with the same folders in the same order. A manager who takes over a portfolio then finds the bank statements, the signed accounts and the engagement letter where they expect them.

You import your client list in bulk, hundreds of records at a time, and our guide on building a customer database from your client spreadsheet shows how to prepare that list. Enquiries go on a record of their own with a status field, and a kanban view grouped by status shows each one from first contact to signed engagement.

Standards keeps the customer due diligence file of each client on its record: the ID documents with their expiry date, the copies themselves, and the history of who checked what. Google's AI summary and Workbooks' page, read in October 2026, mention KYC checks without naming the rules a UK practice answers to. Under the Money Laundering Regulations 2017, an accountant must "verify the customer's identity unless the customer's identity has already been verified by the relevant person" (reg. 28). Ongoing monitoring includes "keeping the documents or information obtained for the purpose of applying customer due diligence measures up-to-date". Those records are kept for "five years beginning on the date on which the relevant person knows, or has reasonable grounds to believe" that the business relationship has ended (reg. 40). Standards does not run electronic identity checks against third-party databases: your ID verification provider keeps that job, and you file its result on the record. Each duty maps to a field, a page or a folder in Standards:

File a director's passport scan on their record, and an agent set to start on that change reads it, checks the document and writes the holder's name and expiry date into the record. Each value goes into the record's history next to the one before, with the agent named as its author.

Connect your Gmail inbox, and Standards files each thread on the records whose email addresses match its participants, where you read it as a conversation beside the client's documents. One limit, in October 2026: on the Standards cloud, the connected inbox and calendar are Google's, and Outlook runs on a dedicated instance or on your own infrastructure. Standards gives each email a category (direct, transactional, newsletter or one of your own) and turns each correction you make into a rule for the next ones. You read HMRC notices in one list and a client's questions about their return in another. For meetings, Standards sends a bot to record your calls on Zoom, Meet or Teams and returns the transcript and the minutes in the language of the meeting. Each meeting attaches to the records of its participants, so a year-end review with two directors appears on both of their records, and on the company's when its record holds one of the invited addresses.

Standards tracks filing deadlines on the client record. Companies House expects a private company's first accounts "21 months after the date you registered with Companies House" and its later accounts "9 months after your company's financial year ends". HMRC expects the Company Tax Return "12 months after your accounting period for Corporation Tax ends" (GOV.UK). Put the year end and the filing dates on the company record as date fields, and a deadlines page lists the ones coming up, next to the ID expiry dates written on each person's record. A routine can run each Monday, find the clients whose accounts fall due within the month, and assign each one to its manager, who gets a notification.

Standards logs each change to a record: who made it (a colleague or an agent), when, and the value it replaced. Neither Xero's guide nor TaxDome's CRM page, read on 26 October 2026, says which changes AI may make to a client file on its own. In Standards, a deletion or an outward send waits for a person's approval by default, with the number of records or recipients it touches. For edits, you pick the mode. In Manual mode, the agent asks for your approval before each change to your data. In Auto, the default, it changes your data without asking, and the history keeps each previous value. An agent never does more than the person it works for. Roles set who reads, creates, edits or deletes, object by object, and a private record stays out of other people's lists, searches and agents. Your money laundering reporting officer opens the record's history and reads who updated a client's ID details.

An agent starts on an event you choose: a client record created, updated or deleted, a form submitted, a webhook call or its schedule. An incoming email starts nothing by itself: you ask the agent, or a routine does.

Standards is not practice management software. It does not track time, raise invoices, file returns with HMRC or accounts with Companies House, or sync with Xero or QuickBooks, and it has no client portal or e-signature. TaxDome and Workbooks advertise the ones in the table below on their own pages, read on 26 October 2026. A practice keeps one of them for the work and uses Standards for the client file. Our comparison hub lists the comparisons as they are published.

Our engineers set Standards up with you, on your own client files; self-serve sign-up is on a waitlist. Your practice brings its client list, the ID documents it requires and its Gmail inbox. Your team then decides what the agents may change without asking.