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Weekly Live Session - August 5, 2026

This week's Engager Live covered the Deals board naming conventions, a reminder about an upcoming webinar on how the host uses Claude with Engager, a walkthrough of using Claude or ChatGPT to audit client data and to update AML risk assessments against HMRC's updated guidance, and a run of practical Q&A on jobs, views, MTD filing and client disengagement.

Key takeaways

  • There's a webinar on the 25th of August at 1pm on using Claude alongside Engager and TaxCalc -- keep an eye on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and the weekly lives for the link once it's ready.
  • For the Deals board, use a consistent naming convention -- for example "new prospect", "additional services" or "referral" followed by what the work is -- so you can filter and report on the type of work rather than losing track by client name.
  • You can export all client data as a CSV and feed it to Claude or ChatGPT, asking it to flag which key fields (UTRs, authentication codes etc.) are missing for each client based on which services are turned on -- a good way to spot and prioritise data gaps.
  • Settings > (export data) now shows a log of who has exported data from your account, when, and which clients and columns were included, as a security check if a leaver's access needs auditing.
  • A fee-review widget is in development that will let your team flag whether a client's service needs a fee review, with a dedicated view to see everything flagged either way -- currently in design, not yet live.
  • HMRC's updated AML guidance (in force from 30 June, published 8 July) significantly expands what firms need to consider, including modern slavery and human trafficking risk -- the suggestion is to feed the guidance plus your existing risk assessment questions to Claude or ChatGPT and ask what's missing or needs updating.
  • A picture of a passport alone is no longer considered sufficient ID verification under the updated guidance -- a biometric check is recommended for every client, including those met face to face, partly to keep the process consistent across the team and partly to verify the passport itself.
  • AML risk assessments are best run inside Engager (via the manual AML section and custom fields) rather than only in a separate tool, so the whole team has visibility of the risk assessment behind a client, not just the person who ran the ID check.
  • For saved views under Jobs, use "days forward" rather than a fixed date if you want a view to keep working correctly over time, and use Views > Manage views to delete old ones and control which are private versus shared with the team.
  • When a client disengages, cancel any outstanding forms manually (they don't cancel themselves), and archiving a limited company does not automatically archive its associated contacts -- those need archiving separately if appropriate.

Full transcript

Good evening everybody. Hope you are all well. Um, just turn my phone on to do not disturb. That'll help. Right. If you can hear and see me, please say hello in the comments. Cursy straight in there loud and clear. Thank you. Good evening, Jennifer. Hope you're well. Kathy, how are you? Beautiful. Right. Good evening, Melissa. Evening, K. Good to see you here. Fantastic.

Cappy K. Melissa. Yeah, brilliant. I'm just going to give everyone a couple of another minute to pile in before we get started. Good evening, Lisa. Hope you're well.

Miriam, how are you?

Good evening, Paul. Fantastic. Okay. Um, so [clears throat] as always guys, uh, this evening is all about you. It's about your questions and me here to answer them. Ideally around engager, but if it's anything around to, um, your practice, how I'm doing things in my practice, how I would tackle any challenges you're facing, feel free to stick them in the Q&A box. try and avoid putting them into the webinar chat because it can get a bit busy, especially when Kirsty's talking about sneaking off from work for the afternoon to watch the new Spider-Man. Kirsty, no spoilers. Um, that's it's one of the few films that's on my list to go and watch purely because I want to see if I can spot where they filmed it in like can you tell it was in Glasgow, uh, which is where they did most of the filming for it. Um but yeah, so if you've got any questions tonight, please put them into the Q&A box. Along the bottom is um the various tool options you have. Uh one will be Q&A with a speech bubble and a question mark in it. If it's not there, click on the big circle with three dots in and more underneath it. If you click on that and then you can you'll see the Q&A button there as well. Um, I don't want to deep dive too far into all the different uh updates that we did back in July because we're actually running a webinar next week which you can book using this link that I'm just putting into the chat now for everybody. So, we're going to do a webinar where we do we talk all things about the updates that we did in July. And I might may be able to give you a sneak peek if I can convince Ash, if I can twist his arm, he might let me give you a sneak peek of what to expect in August as well. Um, but yeah, sign up to that webinar that I've just put the link into the chat for you. If you sign up and you can't make it, that's not an issue. you will get um to be able to get a a replay. You'll be able to click on the link and go and watch it uh backwards at a time that suits you.

Um right, first question has come in from Kirsty and then she said, "Ignore me. I found it and scrolled down further." There we go.

D. Okay. So, yeah. So, there's going to be a webinar next week about July's updates. And then I'm just going to pull my phone up and check the diary for this one cuz I want to give you a false dates.

Mark your diaries. 1:00 on the 25th of August, I am going to do a webinar about how I use Claude in my firm and with Engager. So there's no link for that one yet. We've not built the link yet, but mark your diaries 1:00 on the 25th of August. How I use and Claude in my firm and in engager. Um so you'll learn all my all my little secrets. Power make my life a little bit easier using AI. Um and I will put the links out for that as soon as I've got them. I'm just waiting for those to be created. Um,

cool. Is there any other deal videos or guides for the deals part from the launch other than the launch one? There isn't, but it's really it's really simple. It's really kind of a blank space to do what you want to do with it. Um, so all you do is go into deals. You click on create a deal deal and then it's really up to you how you do this. So in my firm we make sure we have a the same naming convention. Everyone follows the same naming convention. Okay. So if it's a new prospect we call it new prospect and then we state whether it's an annual uh service. So like a tax return or we would say it's maybe a oneoff fee or we would state if it's a monthly client. Oh problems. Sorry all I'm not sharing my screen. Give me a minute.

Give me a minute.

Share my screen. That does help.

Yes, that one. Got too many screens as well. Okay. Hopefully this works better. So, basically in deals to create a deal, you just create a deal. Then it's just basically I recommend coming up with some consistency. And I'll tell I'll tell you why you're going to do this in a moment, but let me explain the consistency first. So, in my firm, if it's a new prospect, like we don't work with them at all yet, we call it a new prospect, and then we give it a naming convention like oneoff fee. Let's say it's a client just wants to do a bit of tax advisory work with us. Or maybe it's a bit of software training that they want and it's just going to be a one-off thing. That's fine. Maybe they want us to do their tax return each year and it's an annual fee.

Maybe it's a monthly fee. Um, and they're putting us kind of on a retain on our monthly retainer. So, that's what we'd do. And then we'd link it. We' We'd have created the prospect before we do this. And then we'd link it to that business. So, we I didn't see the point in putting the name of the business here when it's already here. Okay. If however it's a client we've already got and they want more work, we'll call it additional services and then we'll name what that additional service is. So let's say it's a client we're doing the bookkeeping for and they said, "Oh, can you do my tax return?" There we go. And then I'd link it to the SL client. If it's a new prospect, but someone's referred them to us. So a client's made a referral to us. one of our uh business partners. So, you know, we do some work with some uh business coaches. We do some work with some will writers. If they've referred someone, we'd call it a referral. Okay. Oh, sorry, no, we scrapped that. They're still a new prospect. Ignore that bit. If we are generating some business by referring someone out in my firm, that's what we call a referral. So referral will writing. So client, we've had a chat with a client during a tax return meeting. It's evidently clear that their will doesn't exist or it's completely out of date. We will make an introduction to our will provider and in return we will get a kickback for that. So we want to track that as a new revenue opportunity for us. So really it's about thinking through this and I'll tell you someone that's great to brainstorm this with chat GPT or claw AI literally tell it I've got this new deals feature engager this is what it can do I want to brainstorm how we can best use this in my firm and standardize it so we're doing it all the same way every time um and the beauty of doing this is so if I uh put a zero oh no I've got to go to If I do that and I've got all my deals over. Yep.

So, if I've got all my deals, the reason I do it this way is because maybe I want to see all my new prospect work. Okay. So if everyone every single deal's got new prospect written in front of it or referral or additional services by putting in new or

referral or additional, it filters all the work, all the jobs down to just the additional services or just the new prospects. So I can have a better look at things. Whereas if you fil if you put like each client each client's name up here, you start losing track, you know. I mean, I could even go right, I want to just look at the additional services that are SA100s. So, and then it would show me all the additional services which are just SA100s. So, that's how I use the deals board pool. Hopefully, that gives you some ideas and some insights. Um, let me know if you've got any further questions. Any

other questions, folks? Anything whatsoever? Paul says, "Thank you." You are very welcome, Paul.

Uh, I'm going to cover this in a couple of weeks on my clawed AI thing, but I had a very cool idea the other day. I went to clients and I went to my data. I went to export. I literally clicked on all of these big headings,

absolutely all of them, and I exported the CSV. Then I gave it to Claude and I asked it to list the most important points of information that an accounting firm should have on record for their clients. like you know think I'm thinking national insurance numbers UTRS or a authentication codes all that good stuff. So it listed that stuff for me. Then I said right based on each service turned on for each of these clients list for each client what key information I'm missing from from my records in engager. And it came up within minutes this big report of every single client and all their key data. And it had a tick in it if there was already a B uh if it was already there. It had a cross in it and shaded it red if it wasn't there. And it had NA written in it if it wasn't applicable. So uh corporation tax return uh sorry corporation UTR number. Well, this is an individual so it knows it's not applicable. Um, so that was a really good report and I passed that on to my admin team to be able to go for them to go and start getting more data in and starting to improve the quality of the data we've got in engager.

So, oh, actually that's a feature you probably haven't seen before. We launched this a little while ago. I don't think we've really pushed talked about it, but up here when you click on the export data, click here and you can see who's exported data from your system and when. So, and what data they've exported. And if I click on here, you can see what makes up those 97 clients. If you click on here, you can see what columns were exported. Okay. So, 251 columns on that one. 94 clients. Yeah. Um, so yeah, that's just been built in. We've put that in there just as a bit of a security check. So if you've got any concerns like, "Oh, Bob's left. He wasn't very happy about being asked to leave." I got rid of all his loginins, but I better just check that he didn't log in and take any of our data before I managed to delete his access to engager. So that is there for you.

Right. Who's got more questions for me? Come on.

Anybody whatsoever?

Can I ask about fee reviews? We find that this the that the there is a fee review necessarily doesn't do anything. How are people tackling that? Uh K there is a widget on its way for that. We're working on a widget. So what K's referring to is on a checklist you can have the option to mark whether you can have the option as to whether you ask your team to say whether they think there should be a fee review for a client on that service and there will be a widget coming up on here soon. I've seen the initial designs of it. Uh so it's now in development stage. Um where you'll be able to click on it and see all the all the fee all the services that have been marked as needing a fee review by your team. Um and you'll also be able to see all the fee all the ones that have been marked as not needing a fee review as well. Uh just so you've got a bit more context. Uh but that is the fee review widget is in design at the moment.

Um done. Paul, where where was there a live session last week? When I looked this afternoon, there wasn't. It wasn't there. Uh there was. I think Ash put it up over the weekend, he said to me. Uh let's go to the help center

weekly. What was the date last week? It was a 20

in July. Yeah. 30th of July. There it is, Paul. Oh, no. That's 20 2020. There you go. 22nd of July. Is that last week? Don't know. I've not got my diary in front of me.

No, we're looking for the 29th. Uh, I will track down where that is, Paul. Um, I thought Ash had put it up there for us. He me he messaged me over the weekend saying he'd done it. Um, but yeah, if you just type in the the date, you it will come up in the search box, but I will try and hunt that down. No problems at all. Okay, saying thank you. Um

yeah, I will

I've made a note in my notepad to upload last week's live session for you into the help center.

Any other questions, folks? Come on. We've been here 16 minutes and I've got no questions left. And for anyone that's new to the to this, uh please don't think your questions are dafted. If you're new, the amount of times the more experienced people that come to these weekly and have done for many years ask uh see someone new asking a question, they go, "Oh, I've forgotten it can do that. Oh, I missed that update. I wasn't aware it could do that. So, there's no such thing as a silly question. Um, so please feel free to ask any questions that you've got.

Is everyone getting on with MTD considering the deadlines on Friday? I think we're done in my firm. All 35 are processed and filed. K is done. Love it. Well done, K.

K. What softwares were you using for filing MTD? And there's no that's not a trick question. I'm just curious to find out.

QuickBooks. Fantastic. Yeah, we had a few on QuickBooks, a few on Free Agent, of uh the majority on Zero and didn't have any problems whatsoever. It's been a very easy wander down the road. Our biggest headache was just the registration agent authorization, but everything else was really easy. Kirsty's done, but only had three. She had one on stage, two on QuickBooks. Miriam, we had two and it's done. No, that's fantastic. Uh, Cheryl is got was using zero. Nikki, you've got seven left to file using tax cap quarterly MTD. Fantastic.

Yeah. No, I the the filing part I found really easy and getting the information's been relatively easy from the clients. Um, the the real headache for us was the registration of clients. Um, Nissa, we have two, one on QuickBooks and one on Zero still to file. Trying to file the QuickBooks one now. Fantastic.

Yeah, I'm I'm left quietly confident ready for round two um after this round cuz we don't have to do the registrations again, do we? That was the biggest time consuming part um and the agent authorizations. So yeah, I am left quietly confident.

Right, come on. Any more questions people otherwise these sessions get cut short and I don't want to do that?

We've managed to keep these sessions going for three years now. Um, three maybe. Yeah, four years. free going on four years. I don't want to I don't want to start getting quiet so we uh end up having to cut them back or anything. Um

Nath says, "Next quarter will be quieter as my zero client is closing the business." That will be interesting. Uh I'm not sure how MTD it handles midyear closing. I suspect Nisa, you're going to have to file quarter three and quarter four still even though he's closed. Um

Miriam, on the subject of MTD, did you send your clients any Jazzy report after the submission? Uh did we file any? No. So, we sent the client the MTD print out like PDF of the figures for them to authorize, but we didn't uh send them any reports or anything like that. We're we're trying to operate with it being as cheap a service as possible. Um cuz soul trader budgets are normally pretty tight and software can take a big chunk out of that budget.

Um K, is it possible to merge versions of engager? It's not K because every Yeah, it's just not possible, unfortunately. You'd need to export all the data and then import it into the other one. But before you do that, you need to make sure you've got all the same custom fields stuff. Um I found it easier because I've got two two brands, two limited companies in my group. So I and I've done some merging ones in the past. Um and I have found it easier just to maintain separate dashboards uh separate engager login really.

Um

Dusty, what's the timeout on engager? I'm sure I logged in earlier today with password and it's just asked me again. It always seems to be when I'm in a hurry and need something quick. Yeah, we literally sit there and go, "You know what? Kirsty's in a hurry. Make her ask make it ask the for the password." Uh, no. It's normally when you've closed the window. Um, or your So, there's a number of things. So, Engager will automatically ask you to log in again after 24 hours. Okay? Even if you leave the window open. If you close the window, depending on your computer, depends on how long it ask until it asks you for your login, but it also depends on how quick how often your computer's clearing its cache. So, if your computer's clearing its cache every 15 minutes or so, then technically next time you come back to your computer after 15 minutes, it will ask you to log in. So, it's a series of things mainly driven by your cash clearing process if that makes sense. And K says, "Okay, no problems." K.

And as Cheryl says, the Nissa, the client will still have to do a 26 27 tax return. So yeah, I imagine they're going to have to do even though it's technically no activity, they'll still have to file another two quarterly returns even though they're not trading. Uh Melissa, I'm struggling with logging notes against a meeting conversation and then being able to search for a keyword a couple of months later. I have a weekly service called contact hours and usually record the meeting in otter and then put the notes in the comments section against service. Can we export the comments? I could use the communication section but the search function seems to be only for the subject title. Uh yes. So the the search function in communication logs is only for the subject. Uh otherwise it will take forever to search because of how many words and there's it's also going to get lots and lots of false positives because you think the amount of words that are in like email footers that and like uh disclosures and privacy policies at the bottom of emails. Um so we in communication we're only looking at the subject for the meeting or the email or the text message. Um, we're not looking at the content and there isn't a way at the moment to export this data. Um, if you put it onto the ideas list though, Melissa, then we can have a look to see if we can build an export option because one of my favorite parts of Claude is an engager is the ability to export like all the time logs, all the client data, all the deals data, all the jobs data. So if you put it on the ideas list to build an export feature for communication, I can see what we can do about that. Uh Melissa says, "How do you do it in your firm?" Uh I wouldn't. So we log our calls in here, but I would never search in here for the call logs. So if uh all of our we don't really do calls, we do teams v uh teams meetings with clients. Um so they are all recorded on vinyl which is your version of otter. So, if I'm looking for a meeting log, I would go to vinyl because vinyl's got a ask vinyl option which is built-in AI and I can say, "Oh, find me the meeting which me and Bob discussed his pension in and it will find the meetings." So instead of depending on the communication log for that where you know in in my firm we we use the communication log like we used it today because we've got a HR matter we're dealing with and we need to go into the communication log and stuff and see the timelines and it's very good for looking at timelines. Um, but if I wanted to look into specific emails, I would go and search for those inside. I'd either go into my emails bit where I've got my uh if I go to here, I've got the search function in here, or I'd go into my Google or my Outlook and use their search function. Or I'd go to Claude, which is plugged into my Outlook, so it can search. Um, and then for meetings, I'd go to vinyl and ask vinyl to bring me up the information I'm looking for. Hopefully that helps, Melissa. But for definitely put the uh ability to export communication log into uh the ideas list. Click on your name in the top, request a feature, and put that forwards.

Thank you. You're going to put it forward. Um, Lizzy, I keep saving views, but when I go into a client, I have to change views again constantly. I think I'm doing all the views and dates wrong. So, the views you're looking at saving are these ones here under jobs. Is that right, Lucy? So, I've got my my accounts CT 90 days. So, I've got all my accounts and CT jobs in the next 90 days. Uh, but the dates wrong here. Someone's been messing around. Um, or all jobs minus bookkeeping or uh overdue jobs, etc. What I wouldn't do is I wouldn't go 200 days forwards because that was only 200 days forwards based on this date at this time. Um, unless you're if you're not using dates and you're using in settings, go to jobs and general settings and go for number of days. Save. then go to jobs 200 days forwards and then it works. But you can you can't have it you can't tell it to look save it with amount of days forwards unless you're using days forward here instead of a date.

Yes. So go to jobs. So basically the thing to do is you go in here and you create whatever it is whatever filters it is you want to create. Okay. So you get all the information how you want it. Then you click on views and click on save. Now you can either save it private to you or save it for the whole team to see. And then it goes into views here once you've saved it. And on here, if it's got people, that's shared. And when I hover over it, it tells you it's shared. When it's just a private view, it's here. Okay. I think you've just worked it out what you were doing wrong there. Fantastic. Kirsty, on the widgets, there is a red mark against those not invited. This might be for good reason, external account or something like that. Can I clear this? Uh you can't at the moment, Kirsty, but it's on the list for us to look at uh for the portals. Yeah. So, um

it's one of these, but yeah, it's on our list to look at how we can make this tidier. So, client portals, 52 people not invited. Um, we're going to we are looking at a way to mark people as to ignore portal or portals not applicable. Something like that. That that is on our list to look at.

Fantastic.

Brilliant. Any other questions, folks? Anything whatsoever I can help with?

I'm going to get rid of that. I'm going to get rid of that. Let's have a new countdown for

Brilliant. Anything else, guys? What else are we stuck on?

Right. So, Kirsty, if I sorry, Lucy, if you go into a current view, how do you change it? So, if I go to uh all work for example, on this side here on these filters, this is where you set everything. So, let's say I want to see all job, all accounts that are due in the next 90 days. I'm going to go onto my jobs. I'm going to untick them all and I'm just going to go in and click tick the accounts jobs.

Okay, I'm going to change my days forward from 200 to 90. And remember, if this field has got a date in it, you need to go into your settings and change that.

Um, and I want to see all my jobs. I want to see all my jobs for all my staff. Like, this is basically it. This is everything I want. Okay. Then I can go to views and save the current view as that. Oh, accounts due in 90 days.

Save. Then I can go actually I just want to see all jobs. Now I can see all my jobs. But if all I need to do is go back here all accounts due in 90 days and that it it reapplies the filters. Maybe I now want to see my on boarding jobs. Maybe now I want to go back to my dragon 200 days forward jobs. Now I want to go to my all my jobs. Then I want to go to my overdue jobs. Then I want to go to my 30 days worth of bookkeeping jobs. all my self assessments, all of my MTD it all services. So yeah, I it's literally just you build out the filters and then you go to whichever one uh then you press save it, save it, and then you can use whichever ones you want.

Uh yes, you do. If you're going to change the view, let's say you want different filters applied and stuff, then you need to delete the old one. Otherwise, you're going to get hundreds of views here, all you do is click on views, manage views, and delete these. So, I'm going to get rid of that one. I'm going to get rid of the test.

Um, I'm going to make this one now private, and I'm going to make this one now, uh, sharable. So that's all under views, manage views.

Hopefully that answers that question for you, Lucy.

Right. Any other questions, folks? Anything else I can be helping with?

Lucy says, "Thank you. That's so helpful." You're very welcome, Lucy.

Anything else whatsoever? Still got 25 minutes to go.

Uh let me say what's the date of your claude webinar? So, it's going to be on the 25th of August at 100 p.m.

It's a problem. And in case you've not seen it, oh no, Cheryl says, "Where will the link be shared?" It'll be shared. You'll get an email about that. You're going to get it on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and in the weekly lives as well. Cheryl, we will bombard you with it.

No problems. Jennifer says, "No questions, just here to listen and learn." Paul, is there any guides with jobs? Paul, absolutely. If you go to get help and just type in jobs, it's already come up with some there. But if you then search, it comes up with loads like there's over eight pages of things relating to the jobs in engager, viewing deadlines, etc. Absolutely tons of help. If you want a quickery thing to do, what you can do is ask engager. Um, so

I don't want to complete a job.

in. There we go. So, it doesn't you don't even have to read all the guides anymore. You can now use Ask Engager and it will go through and it'll tell you what steps to do and you can go and click on the number one and it theory. Oh, there we go. It opens up the knowledge base and it takes you to the article in question.

Nice and easy. Hopefully that helps.

Um, when a client disengages, does their forms outstanding stop or do I have to cancel them? You'll need to cancel them, Lucy, because they they still they're still there. They're still live and active. So, if they disengage, you'll need to cancel them.

Um,

let's see another disengagement question. I think you said archive the main one and that switches off all the jobs. Then also have to archive the people. Correct. So if you archive a client, you'll you're only archiving that one client. You're not archiving everybody. But if you ever delete a limited company, for example, it'll ask if you it'll ask you if you want us to delete the contacts with that limited company. But we'll archive your limited company, but you need to go in and archive the contacts because sometimes you don't want to archive them because they're linked to other limited companies. You might be doing tax returns for them and you've just lost the limited company. You're not losing the individuals, etc. There's too many. Paul, thanks. I need to use the search function more. You absolutely do, Paul. It's a very powerful feature in help center. Miriam MTD question again. What is the best practice? Would you file year-to- date figures at the end of next quarter or only Q2 figures since HMRC will have the year-to- date figure anyway? Uh, no. It's not a matter of best practice, Miriam. It's a matter of HMRC requirements and HMRC require you to f file year-to- date figures. So, the figures we've just filed at the moment is April to June. When you file for Q2, which will be July, August, and September, you're actually you've actually got to file April to September's figures. And then when you file in January, you're filing April to January's figures. And then when you file in April for up to the end of March, you're filing April to March figures. And that's Yes. And that's why they don't need because originally when they were going to do originally they wanted you to do just a quarter then you had to do a annual submission to tie up all the numbers and then you had to do the self assessment whereas now they want you to keep when you file your numbers you have to file the whole financial year to that point each time and then you file just the self assessment. So if you're using spreadsheets, you need to you keep adding the same the data to the same spreadsheet really. If you're using QuickBooks Zero, Free Agent, Sage, any of that, they automatic, they know you what you've got to file and they will automatically generate and file those figures for you. Um, so they'll put into the report the figures that should be in there. So yeah, it's not a matter of best practice. It's a matter of HMRC rules dictate you must keep filing the whole financial year up until the that uh deadline up until that cut off for that period. Hopefully that helps Miriam. Thanks for the clation. You're very welcome Miriam. That that's the beauty of this isn't it? It's not just about engagement. It's about every aspect of our firms no matter how challenging that can be at times.

For anyone that doesn't watch my vlogs on YouTube, I do like a daily vlog on the day life of an accounting firm owner. Um, one of our most challenging um, weeks was this week. A couple of years ago, we acquired a batch of clients and one of the clients was the equivalent of the staff, all the staff we acquired with that batch of clients wage bill. So that client resigned from us this week. Um and which meant all of a sudden we had a wage bill, a whole wage bill missing. Um but thankfully we've m we've diluted it a bit over the years and we've managed to find other ways to offset it and we've done a push on sales this week going forwards to try and get some more money back in uh before they leave us in at the end of September. Um, but yeah, top tip, guys. Don't let anyone be more than 5 to 10% of your monthly revenue. It's not worth the risk. That's I mean, that's been my policy since day one. I'm 9 and a half years into running my firm. And I've always said no client should be worth more than 5 to 10% of our monthly revenue. And um yeah, I I kind of let that rule slip on this acquisition we did. and it's come back to bite me eventually. So, just be careful, folks. Thankfully, we had the resources uh we had the uh deals board capacity and stuff to be able to replace it fairly quickly. Uh but I I woke up Saturday morning to that email and to say it wasn't as fun as Saturday as it could have been is an understatement. So, learn from my pain, people. Do not let clients be worth more than 5 or 10% of your monthly revenue. It's not worth losing the sleep.

But if you want to find out more about that, you can uh watch the full 20-minute video on my YouTube channel.

Um, has everyone looked at the new AML regulations that came out? I feel that this has been really slightly done. It's not been very big announcement because everyone's been so busy with MTD and stuff. I think people have missed the AML guidance updates. Um, which is huge. So, this is the link here. Oh, wait. I'll put it into the chat. Now these this guidance has been updated by HMRC but they are enforcing this guidance and making sure all governing bodies take uh take guidance from this to then pass on to their their their AML supervis supervision people and stuff. So, um, yeah, it was it came into force on the 30th of June. It wasn't published until the 8th of July and it's been updated since, but on the 16th. Okay, let's just have a quick look at updates.

Um, so basically this is huge. Um, all of a sudden we're being expected to consider things like uh human trafficking and modern-day slavery and the risks that these businesses are at that we look after. Now,

my top suggestion is you take this link that I've just put into your webinar chat. You put it into chat GPT or Claude and you tell it to read it. And then you give it all of your risk assessment questions that you already have and say based on my risk assessment questions and my firmwide risk assessment and my AML policy, what do I need to change in my policy, my risk assessment, my firmwide risk assessment or my risk assessment questions to make sure I am compliant with all of these updates. So to give you an idea, I had this done and dusted in 3 hours. It has effectively nearly tripled the length of my firms of my uh client questionnaire. So it's doubled the length of my client anti-moneyaundering declaration form that I send out. It's tripled the length of my risk assessment I run on each client. This guidance inequivocally rules out the ability just to take a picture of a passport and file it. That is no longer good enough. Um it so but Claude and chat GPT will help you deal with this really quickly because it will go right here's all your questions that you ask in your risk assessment. actually here's the areas you're not you're not talk you're not asking questions about that but you now need to so things like you've got you've now got to ascertain whether someone has got more than one accountant/bookkeeper and you have to answer why because HMRC seem to feel that having more than one accountant or bookkeeper could be a sign of money laundering why would they over complicate things well we all know perfectly Well, I'm not going to use a brain surgeon to do heart surgery. I'm not going to use a heart surgeon to do a to deal with a broken leg. We all know we specialize in different fields and that's why you might have a bookkeeper, a general accountant, a tax advisor. We all get that. HMRC think that might be a risk factor. Um, so we have to look out for that now and we have to mitigate the risk by or just explain why it's not a risk in our risk assessment, but we have to show that we've looked at that. Um, so yeah, put this link into chat GPT or Claude, tell it to read it and understand it. Then give it all of your firmwide risk assessment and your company pol AML policy. ask if these are now still suitable for this updated guidance and it will soon say if it is or isn't and it will tell you what to add in. It's really quick and easy. Then give it all the questions you ask in your risk assessment and say right these are the questions I'm asking. Give me the qu uh make sure give me any questions I need to ask on top of these to make sure I'm compliant with the new guidance. And what Claude did for me is it actually came back with two batches. It came back with a the front door someone front door. Uh it came back with a batch of questions that I wasn't asking anything about in those areas of AML and then it came back with a batch of questions going look you already asked about this area but to make sure you're better covered you need to expand that and ask these details uh these questions. So, I was absolutely dreading this when I discovered it. But actually, inside of 3 hours, thanks to AI, I'm all over it. And I've sent my new documents and stuff to Lucy Brown, who is our AML consultant we use in my firm, and she's come back and said, "Yep, fingers up. Uh, thumbs up. You You've got it. You've sorted it. You're on top of it. Um, carry on as you are, sir." So, yeah. And as I say, I know this is HMRC guidance, but this is being passed on to all AML supervisors to bring them up to the same standards as what HMRC are asking for here. Um, so whether it comes to you next month or in December, that's your governing body's prerogative. But this came into place technically on the 30th of June, but it wasn't published until the 8th of July, which is fantastic. Um, and it's not it's not a small document. Um, so yeah, hopefully that helps you all get a head start and something on a heads up on something that a lot of firms seem to have been missed happening because of MTD. it crashes.

So, final 10 minutes. Feel free to ask me questions about what I've just spoken about or anything else. You know that. Um, but yeah, a very very helpful AI uh system there.

Any

other questions? Anything else I can be helping with?

But interesting, I don't think I've seen any AML tools about talk about those new this new increase in guidance and I and updating things. So, I imagine they'll be on it in the coming weeks once MTD hits out the way.

Anything else? So, have I just put you all to sleep because of of AML?

Uh, Lucy, do you use Zama and did you amend your templates? So we only use Zama for the ID collection and AML check. Uh in my firm we use uh engager for our risk assessments because we want it all we want it all in one place. We want visible to all of our all of our team members. So when you go into a client you've got the manual AML bit here. So we we've basically bought this out with loads of custom fields to create huge amount of uh risk assessment questions. So, we've got it all here. Um, so that anyone in my team can come in. So, for example, we literally had a live case come in this morning. Well, late last night. One of my team spotted whilst clearing down the receipt publishing software we use, Apron, that a client had accidentally forwarded a contract into Apron. And so, naturally, it got stuck there. didn't publish. Um, on reading that contract, this client who doesn't talk to us very often, normally only contacts us once we send them a tax burn, has gone from being a public speaker to someone to a real estate agent helping people buy houses in Ghana. So all of a sudden, so she literally went, my team member went into the risk assessment part and looked through the risk assessment, went, "This is completely different to what we've risk assessed. We've got a problem." Um, at which point I get a message at late at night saying, "Yeah, I'm really sorry. I've just discovered this. I'm working evenings because it's school holidays, so it's easy around the kids." Which is absolutely fine in our firm. Family first. Um, so I had to have a a a meeting with my ops manager this morning and go right what do we do? Do we re-risk assess? Well, we did it and came out very high. Um, what do we do about the fact that the client's not informed us of this change of business direction? Um, so we ended up actually dis u disengaging the client because their fees were too low to warrant the constant AML risk assessing and constant visual uh visual we need to keep on top of things. Um, and we knew they were never going to pay us the fees we needed to warrant taking on the high-risisk level of business they were doing. Um, so yeah. So in answer to your question Lucy, we use Zarma to collect and verify ID, proof of address and the biometric selfie and we run the AML check in Zarma. Um we also use Zarma for credit reports at times, not for AML purposes. Um we run credit reports for clients that are looking to take on new customers and stuff and they want to check how much credit limit to give them and stuff. Um and then all of our risk assessments are done in engager using this manual engager area. We also log whether we've seen the original certified etc etc etc and we log the outputs so the ID check report the AML check report the biometric check and yeah we log all three of those in files AML we put them in there so we've had it all certified and done properly we store it all in one place where the clients can't see it but our team can and then we do all the risk assessment in the manual AML area. Hopefully that makes sense.

Um

Cheryl, do you do a biometric check even if you meet them face to face? I do mainly so couple of reasons I do that right one is I don't like policies that keep varying like do this unless of this do that unless this I just want one straight streamline process because not everyone in the firm's as sharp a tool as I'd like them to be. So, I don't want any confusion go and them going, "Oh, well, I thought Bob met them, so I didn't need to do a biometric check. Oh, well, no. I thought you met them." And we all of a sudden we've realized no one's met this person and we've not done a biometric check. So, I don't want any messing around like that. Plus

I the biometric check helps verify and improve the verification of the passport because it's you know there's a reason when you come through the airport gates now when you fly back in to the UK or you fly into Spain or wherever you're going you have to put your passport down and the camera looks at you. It's because it's trying to tie the passport with you and your biometrics. And it's for that reason that I I think we want it's not just about the biometric test checks for if you've not met the person in person. It's helping to verify the passport is that person's passport. So yeah, we do biometric checks on everybody uh as part of our AML policy.

But AML is one of those things guys that I always aim for bestin-class. I'd rather go above and beyond and not get pulled for any problems. Um, but I appreciate not everybody wants to do that. Uh, I appreciate not all governing supervisors, AML supervisors require that amount of work. They require what I class as a minimum standard and that's fine. But I want to make sure we're holding our firm up to the best best standards possible using the best technology. Uh Nissa, I'd like uh Johan, I'd like to add ICB questions in this section. How do I do this? And will it give me a PDF report at the end? Uh so it won't give you a PDF report at the end. Nissa, if you're doing ICB, there is no point in putting it in here because the ICB want you to put it in their system. At least they did. I don't know if they've changed that rule. Kirsty, correct me if I'm wrong, Lisa. Correct me if I'm wrong. They still do. Yeah. Okay. So, you may as well put it in the ICB platform, Nissa, unless you see enough value in here for your team to see it to warrant double entering the same data. Okay. Same principle. If you're using Zarma, you could do your risk assessments in Zarma or uh firm check or anything like that. And but the ICB still want the data in their software system is my understanding. So you could do it in here and put all the questions in here and they will still not be happy necessarily with that. So whether you see the effort being worth it to maintain two separate things because if remember if you update a risk assessment in one place you then need to update it somewhere else if you've got two places. I'm lucky or planned it cleverly. I'm with HMRC. They have no view on what softwares I should or should not use. They do well they do care when they do a supervision but um I can do what I want and make it as efficient as I want or best-in-class as I want. So that's for me. Um but if you want to add to if you want to use this all you need to do is go to the settings custom fields. You would create a new section. Let's call it AML questions. Now, I create a section per section of the risk assessment. So, I might have a client section, a geography section, a service section, a transaction section. I could put a description in if I want. And then I'd go and put it the client form step is it goes on to manual AML check. Save. And then when I go, if I then add a question here,

you know, if I then go to a client record,

my next section is here. So I can build out as many sections without with as many questions. They can be uh dates, they can be single line text, they can be multi-line text, they can be drop-own text. Uh drop down options. You can build that all out in here.

Um hang on one moment. Uh

Nissa says, "You spotted the problem. Only I see the ICB so my team don't see it." You see, I think that's a fundamental flaw in the ICB. cuz you're not doing every bit of client work. Your team is. And you shouldn't be doing every bit of client work. You're a leader of a business. You know, the best businesses aren't run by people that doing the bookkeeping. They're run by people that are running the business. You know, I have very little to do with accounts and bookkeeping and tax returns in my business because that's not my job. That's my team's job. And for them to be able to do their job properly, they need visibility of the AML risk assessment in my opinion. Uh Nikki says, "Same with the IAB. We have to put it on their portal." Yeah. Um can you link that to a for client form? You can, Melissa. And actually what I have in my firm is I have a client form that I send out called uh my AML declaration form. and every client fills it in when they sign up. It's not every AML question. What it is is simple things that I'd want to prove that this is that the answer I've put into my risk assessment is the answer that the client gave me. So, are they politically exposed? Are they have they ever been convicted of fraud? them answering that and typing their name under a box that says, "Oh, by typing your name here, you are in effect signing this declaration form as true and honest to the best of your abil to the best of your knowledge." It gives me another layer of defense to say, "Look, I asked them if they were politically exposed. They said no. We ran our checks. Nothing came back. It now turns out they're sat in cabinet." The biggest joke of the whole thing about politically exposed people is unless you're sat in the government's cabinet, they really don't care. and they don't class it as politically exposed. Yet, we all know Bob sat on the local town council getting a brown paper envelope to vote yes for a bit of planning permission is the biggest AML risk going. So, yes, you can build these into the forms uh as well. Nikki says that's a really good idea having an AML declaration. Uh yeah, I've mentioned it a few times on these uh sessions over the over the years, Nikki. Um but basically that came back from a inspection that I had. So I pay Lucy Brown a monthly fee uh to keep me up to date, check things, ask answers to, but she also does a mock inspection once a year and she plays devil's advocate and makes life miserable for a few days for me. But she's lovely. Um, and she said, "How do I know, the answers you've put in your risk assessments is what your client told you?" And I went, "Oh, I don't know. I've got no proof that is what they said to me." Like maybe they said it verbally or whatever. Uh, right. So, I then came up with the idea, well, I'll send them a form and I'll make them type their name next to a box that says, "By typing your name here, you agree that this is all true and honest to the best of your knowledge." And it's like, fine, box ticked. So, it was just another layer of protection. Basically, I'm always looking for how they can try and catch me out and finding ways to prevent them from doing it. Right, there we go. four minutes over a run on a night when we weren't getting very many questions. You see, get me started on AML and that's it. We're here for hours. Um Paul, I hope this was a useful session for everybody. Thank you for those that stuck it out when we were struggling with questions to start with. And thank you to everyone that's asked questions. And sorry, I'll apologize on behalf of whoever asked me about AML and stuff. I do apologize about that. Well, that was actually me talking about this, wasn't it? But yeah, hope everyone found use out of that. If anyone's got any questions for me, you can reach out to me uh in the Facebook group or via LinkedIn message or anything like that. Um and I will see you all here same time next week for another engager live session. Thank you very much guys. Have a wonderful I've lost lost me. Where's me Zoom instructions gone? Uh thank you very much. Have a wonderful week guys and I'll see you all next week. Goodbye.