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The year as a calendar: turning a repeated deadline into batch work
A deadline that comes round every year is not a surprise. A practice that treats it as one endures it twelve times.
The article beside this one says your visible product is a deadline kept. That is right, and it is about how the deadline is *shown* to the client: what is announced, what is asked for, what is promised.
This article is about how it is *made*. That is a different subject and it shows in the vocabulary: batches, capacity, the date of a grouped request, and the file that blocks the other nineteen.
The starting point is an ordinary observation that is rarely used: your deadlines are known in advance, they recur, and they are the same for every one of your colleagues. Nothing that happens to you in March is a surprise.
We publish no productivity ratio and will compare none. The reason is in section 10, and it is that an average computed over your clients, in a market this size, describes identifiable people.
A deadline that comes round is not a surprise
A practice lives in a calendar it did not write. The dates are set elsewhere, they are not negotiable, and they are identical for every practice in the country — which is the most useful characteristic of this trade and the least exploited.
A date known in advance should produce no emergency. It produces one every year nonetheless, in almost every practice, and the mechanism is always the same: work starts when the date approaches, because nothing compels it to start earlier.
The difference between a practice that endures its calendar and one that holds it is not competence, nor headcount, nor tooling. It is one decision: at what moment the work starts.
And that moment is not determined by the deadline, it is determined by the date the client hands over their documents. That is the only real lever in the calendar, and it is the one almost no practice acts on deliberately.
Everything that follows is about that lever: how to bring the handover date forward, what can be grouped, and what to do with the file that arrives on the last day anyway.
The map of the year, written once
The first thing to make is one page. On it, month by month, the deadlines that genuinely concern your clients, with the number of files each touches. It is written once and corrected each year in twenty minutes.
The document is not an aide-mémoire — everybody knows their dates. Its value is elsewhere: it shows the distribution, which is to say the months where three deadlines land together and the months where there is nothing.
That distribution decides everything else and it is only visible written down. Nobody carries it accurately in their head, because a practice’s memory is dominated by its two hardest months and forgets the quiet ones.
The second column is the only one that takes work: how many of your files each deadline concerns. It turns a calendar into a workload plan, and it almost always reveals a surprise — a secondary deadline touching more clients than a major one.
The third column is filled in after reading: for each deadline, the date on which documents must be requested. That is the date that really counts, and it is the one the practice controls.
The late client is a structural fact
Every practice has its late clients and everybody describes them as characters: that one is disorganised, that one never replies. It is sometimes true and it is rarely the explanation.
The usual explanation is structural. A client supplies documents when they have them, and they have them when their own work produces them — which depends on their activity, their seasonality and whoever keeps their books, often themselves, in the evening.
A practical consequence follows: a late client is late predictably. The same one, every year, at roughly the same moment, with the same lag, and that information is in your own history.
Once written down, it changes how you ask. You do not ask the same thing on the same date of everybody: you move the request three weeks earlier for the clients you know will take three weeks longer.
It is a modest adjustment and it produces most of this article’s result, because it acts on the only variable the practice controls without demanding anything of anybody.
The batch: handling similar things together
A practice handles files in the order they arrive, which is the most expensive order possible. Every change of file costs a resumption: recovering the context, reopening the documents, remembering what was left to do.
A batch is a set of similar files handled consecutively. Similar means: same deadline, same nature of operation, same level of complexity — three criteria, and the third is the one people forget.
The saving is not marginal. The first file in a batch costs what it costs; the ones after it cost less, because the method is warm, the questions have been asked and the odd cases have already been met.
The corollary is that a batch must not mix levels. A complex file slipped in among fifteen simple ones breaks the run, costs double, and destroys the benefit on every file after it.
Batches are formed when the map of the year is drawn, not when the work is done. Deciding in January what will be grouped takes an hour; deciding in March, under load, does not happen.
The grouped request for documents, and its date
The request for documents is the only act in this calendar that starts at the practice, which is why it is the lever. Everything else is a reaction; this one is an initiative.
It goes out by batch and on a written date, not as things come. Twenty requests sent on the same day, with the same list and the same announced deadline, cost one morning; twenty sent over several weeks cost twenty interruptions.
The list has to be exact and complete first time. An incomplete list produces two round trips, and two round trips with a busy client cost three weeks — the mechanism the neighbouring article describes for an incomplete file, applied to a whole batch.
The request date is calculated backwards from the deadline: batch processing time, plus that client’s usual response time, plus a margin. It is the third column of the map of the year, and the only date in the whole calendar you choose.
One follow-up is planned from the start, also on a written date. One only: beyond that you are not dealing with forgetfulness but with a problem, and a problem is handled by a call rather than a third message.
The capacity of a batch, and what happens when it is exceeded
A batch has a capacity, and knowing it is what separates a plan from a wish. It is measured once, on a real batch, simply by noting the start and finish times.
That measurement belongs to your practice and is comparable with no other. A file is not a unit of work: depending on the quality of the client’s own bookkeeping, two files with the same name take unrelated amounts of time.
Once capacity is known, the map of the year becomes usable: you see immediately which months have more volume than can be processed, and you see it in January rather than in March.
What happens when capacity is exceeded is always the same thing and deserves naming: quality drops first, silently, then a file is filed late, and that one is what gets seen. The first effect is the real cost, the second is the symptom.
Overload is handled three ways and the choice is made in January: bring part of the batch forward, subcontract part of it, or tell a client their file will be handled after the deadline with what that implies. All three are unpleasant; discovering the problem in March leaves only one.
What is done out of season, and why nobody does it
Every practice has quiet months and treats them as rest or as prospecting. Both are legitimate uses and neither is the most profitable.
The most profitable is doing out of season what will have to be done in season. Updating a permanent file, checking documents, a conversation with a client whose situation has changed: each takes the same time in January as in March, and in March it takes the place of something else.
The reason nobody does it is honest: there is no urgency, and work without urgency is what gets postponed. It is exactly the mechanism other articles in this series describe for routines.
The remedy is the same: a written date rather than an intention. The quiet month is given two or three named tasks in the map of the year, with a name against each, and they stop being optional.
The task that pays best is almost always the same: go back to the clients whose files blocked last year and settle the cause while it is not urgent. It is unglamorous work and it removes an entire crisis.
The engagement letter is a calendar instrument
An engagement letter describes what is done and what is not. It is read as a document of responsibility, and it is one; it is also, and nobody writes it that way, the only place where the calendar becomes a shared obligation.
What it can carry and rarely does: the date by which documents must reach the practice, and what happens if they do not. Those two sentences turn a polite reminder into a clause accepted in the cold.
The wording stays factual and avoids threat. Saying that a file received after a given date will be handled subject to the practice’s availability is information; threatening refusal is a posture, and it does not survive the first important client.
The point of putting it at signature is that nobody is in a hurry then and nobody is in the wrong. Six months later, the same sentence on the phone to a late client sounds like a reproach and is received as one.
It relieves no professional obligation and reduces no responsibility, which is not the subject. The subject is that a calendar accepted in writing in the cold is honoured more often than one announced in the heat.
The file that blocks the batch
In every batch one file arrives incomplete or raises a question that has to be settled. If it stays in the run it stops it: the person working slows on it, the other nineteen wait, and the batch loses the benefit that justified forming it.
The rule that protects the run is to take it out immediately. Not to handle it, not to resolve it: to set it aside, with one line about what is missing, and carry on.
The files taken out are handled together afterwards and form their own batch — a batch of exceptions, slower by nature, whose duration is known because it contains nothing but odd cases.
That small action produces the most measurable effect in this arrangement, and it is counter-intuitive: the instinct is to settle the problem while it is in front of you. That instinct is right for an isolated file and expensive in a run.
It has a second virtue, less obvious: the list of files taken out, reread after the deadline, is the best diagnosis a practice has. It says which of your clients cost structurally more than what you invoice them.
What is said to a client when the batch is full
A client sometimes arrives too late, and the conversation that follows decides the relationship more than the file does. It is prepared once and reused, because it happens every year.
What does not work is reproach, even deserved. "I asked you in February" is true and gets nowhere: it puts the client in a defensive position, and a defensive client does not organise better next year.
What works is neutral information and an option. Here is the state of the workload, here is what I can do within the deadline and what I cannot, here is what that implies. The client chooses, and has been treated as somebody who decides.
You also have to be able to say no, and to say it early. Accepting a file you cannot handle properly is more damaging than a refusal: a refusal costs a client, a rushed job costs a client and a liability.
Finally, the conversation ends with a date for next year. It is the only moment in the year when a late client is receptive to the subject, and it is how the list of late clients shrinks by one or two a year.
What is counted, and what cannot be published
Three things are counted in a practice, once per deadline, and all three are about the practice itself. How many files were taken out of a batch and why, the gap between the written request date and the actual date of receipt per client, and the hours a batch took against the number of files it contained.
The second is the most useful because it is individual and stable: a given client’s lag repeats from one year to the next, and it lets you date their own request rather than the general one.
The third compares with nothing outside, and it is important to say so plainly. A file is not a unit of work: depending on the client’s bookkeeping, two files of the same name take unrelated amounts of time, and a published ratio compares two things sharing one word.
There is a second and more binding reason to publish nothing at all, and it is particular to this profession. You are bound by professional secrecy, and aggregation does not protect in a market this size: in a wilaya where four practices operate, an average over your book describes businesses the reader can name.
That is why the only figures in this article are about your organisation and never about your clients. The general rule that follows reaches beyond this profession: data is not anonymised by averaging, it is anonymised by numbers — and the numbers, here, are not there.
What we do, and what we refuse to do
What we do is shaping: we write the map of the year with you, we calculate the request dates backwards, we draft the grouped document request in both your clients’ languages, and we set up the tracking of files taken out of a batch.
We give no legal or tax advice, and we do not draft your engagement letter. Those are acts of your profession, governed, and what we say about them in this article is an observation about organisation — not a model to copy.
We do not build a tool that hosts your clients’ documents until the question of where they are stored and who can reach them has been settled with you. A practice file contains information covered by secrecy, and convenience is not an admissible argument.
We will publish no figure about your book, even aggregated, and we will refuse if asked. In a market this size an average describes identifiable businesses, and it is the only rule in this article with no flexible version.
Finally, the substance happens without us: one page for the map of the year, one column for the request dates, and the discipline of taking the blocking file out of the batch. A morning’s work, and most of the result.
Frequently asked questions
Where do we start if nothing is written down?
With one page: month by month, the deadlines that genuinely concern your clients, and how many files each touches. Everybody knows their dates; what nobody carries accurately in their head is the distribution, because a practice’s memory is dominated by its two hardest months and forgets the quiet ones.
What can be done about clients who supply documents late?
Move their request forward, not the general one. A late client is late predictably: the same one, every year, with roughly the same lag, and the information is in your own history. Ask three weeks earlier of the people who take three weeks longer.
What exactly is a batch?
A set of files handled consecutively that share three criteria: same deadline, same nature of operation, same level of complexity. The third is the one people forget and it is decisive — a complex file slipped in among fifteen simple ones breaks the run and destroys the benefit on everything after it.
What should be done with a file that blocks a batch?
Take it out immediately: not resolve it, set it aside with one line about what is missing, and carry on. The instinct to settle a problem while it is in front of you is right for an isolated file and expensive in a run. The list of files taken out, reread after the deadline, is the best diagnosis a practice has.
Can a document deadline be written into the engagement letter?
That is an act of your profession and we will not draft the document. What we observe is that a date accepted in the cold at signature is honoured more often than the same sentence said on the phone six months later to a late client — where it sounds like a reproach and is received as one. The wording stays factual: a threat of refusal does not survive the first important client.
What files-per-person ratio should we aim for?
None, and not only because a file is not a comparable unit of work. There is a more binding reason: you are bound by professional secrecy, and aggregation does not protect in a market this size — in a wilaya where four practices operate, an average over your book describes businesses the reader can name. Data is not anonymised by averaging, it is anonymised by numbers.
Where we come in
A map of your year on one page — the deadlines, how many files each touches — takes an hour and changes how you size your weeks.
- We work backwards to the dates when documents must be requested.
- We draft a single request covering everything, in your clients’ languages.
- We leave the map with you, because it gets corrected every year.
No figure about your portfolio will be published by us, even aggregated: it is information about your clients before it is information about you.
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