Most practices have a deadline list. Fewer have one they would bet on. The difference is whether the list maintains itself.
Step 1 — put the client at the centre
Deadlines belong to clients, not to services. A list organised by service will always miss the client who takes three of them.
Step 2 — capture every obligation per client
For each client, record which recurring obligations apply: annual accounts, VAT, payroll, self assessment. This is the part worth doing carefully, once.
Step 3 — stop maintaining dates by hand
A date that somebody has to type in every year is a date that will eventually be wrong. Recurring obligations should roll forward on their own.
Step 4 — attach the work to the deadline
A deadline with no job against it is just an alarm. Once a job is allocated to a member of staff, the deadline becomes something you can act on: you can see whether it is started, who has it and whether they have the capacity.
Step 5 — check the view weekly, not in January
The test of the system is whether looking at it is boring. If reviewing deadlines requires assembling anything, it will not happen often enough.
What good looks like
- One view, whole client base
- Rolls forward without maintenance
- Every deadline has an owner
- Workload visible against it