Your client won't send their receipts — what actually works?
Every client base has its fixed group: the client who only moves after two e-mails and a phone call, then sends a zip with half the records, and is genuinely surprised something is missing. You can turn hard ("deliver by the 15th or I won't file your return") or turn resigned — but neither solves it, because next quarter it happens again.
Why insisting doesn't work
The client who doesn't deliver is rarely unwilling. What's actually happening:
- The receipt is already gone by the time you ask for it. Between the fuel stop in March and your e-mail in July sit four months and one coat pocket. The request is structurally too late.
- Delivery is a project for the client. Make a folder, hunt receipts, export the bank, mail everything — that's an evening of work they keep postponing. Not because it's hard, but because it never feels urgent.
- They don't know what "complete" means. You see instantly that a month of bank statements is missing. They see a folder with a great many PDFs and think: that must be everything.
Asking more sternly changes none of these three causes. The moment, the effort and the overview have to change.
What does work: three shifts
1. Move capture to the moment itself. A receipt photographed within a minute of the purchase never gets lost again. That requires an app on the client's phone where scanning is faster than pocketing the receipt — and where an invoice arriving by e-mail lands in the administration with a single forward. (The seven-year Dutch retention obligation is covered by that digital copy at the same time.)
2. Make "what's still missing?" visible — to both of you. As long as only you know what's missing, you remain the bottleneck and the bad guy. In BoekBrug the client sees per quarter what's still open, and you see the same thing on the werkboard: which client is complete and which still misses two things. Same facts, no argument.
3. Remind specifically, not generally. "Remember your administration" gets ignored. "2 things are still missing for Q3: the August bank statement and your phone subscription invoice" — that's something a person can act on, from their phone, in two minutes. In BoekBrug that message is one click from your werkboard.
What you can do this week
- Take your three most difficult deliverers — not your whole base.
- Put them on a delivery app and walk along the first week (or point them at the short in-app course). You request the mandate from your own screen; the client approves it.
- Measure one thing: how many reminders this quarter took, against the previous one.
If it works with those three, it works with the rest of the "never delivers" group — those clients resemble each other more than they resemble the rest of your base. And if a client does nothing even with a scan app, you've learned something else: it's not a convenience problem but a client problem, and that's a different conversation.
What the firm side looks like — werkboard, requesting documents, mandates, the quarterly package — is on BoekBrug for accountants.