Socket has rapidly evolved into a powerful system that allows practices to trust proposals as the source of truth for their client relationships. By making it super quick and easy to perform renewals, make small adjustments mid period, and do them in bulk across a portfolio, we’re ensuring practice profits remain intact, avoiding underpriced or out-of-scope work.
But with accountants and bookkeepers now being able to update their proposals with a few clicks, the more formal side of the equation - the Letter of Engagement - also needs to keep pace with this rapidly shifting environment. Modern practices have a need to support their proposal process with a streamlined way of issuing and maintaining Letters of Engagement that protect practices and their clients via a robust set of agreements.
This is where our newest module, Socket Engage, comes into play. A speedy and powerful proposal system deserves an equally speedy and powerful engagement letter system, and Socket Engage keeps both beautifully in sync.
Best In Class Template Library
We’ve teamed up with Ian Waters, an expert in the regulation and compliance space, to compile a set of engagement letter templates that are robust, best in class, and detailed enough to allow you to clearly define the relationship between you and your client.
“Compliance with the law and regulatory requirements is important, and best achieved with the minimum fuss; but engagement letters are needed to protect the interests of the accountancy practice, as well as its clients.”
Ian Waters
These templates have been carefully designed to cater to the requirements of professional bodies, satisfy legal disclosure requirements, and provide you with peace of mind, whether or not you’re regulated by a professional body.
Socket Engage will take you through a comprehensive questionnaire to gather information about the operating structure of your practice - this information is then used to tailor the content in the templates provided. Once configured, you’ll have access to templates for an umbrella engagement letter, terms of business, privacy policy and schedules for a wide array of services, cleverly linked to your active proposals.
Living, Breathing Terms & Conditions
Engagement Letters have been a requirement of most professional bodies in the UK for a long time and served the industry well. But in this era of the cloud, we no longer need to pass static documents between us and our clients. Some parts of an engagement letter must be tailored to each client, but some elements, once tailored to the firm, are broadly applicable to all clients. Your Terms of Business (sometimes known as Terms and Conditions) and Privacy Policy are good examples of these broadly applicable elements.
This is a big advantage of Socket Engage: with your policies referenced, but not baked into, your engagement letters, updates to your policies can be made without reissuing engagement letters to every single client!
Socket Engage provides the ability to host a live view of your current Terms of Business and Privacy Policy in the cloud, so that they are always accessible to you and your clients. Dynamic links in your engagement letters can reference these policies - meaning that all of the policy wording doesn’t need to be included in every letter. This reduces the perceived amount of content that the client needs to wade through, while breaking it up into more digestible segments.
Issue Tailored Engagement Letters, Independently
The approach that a lot of specialist software takes in this space is that engagement letters are issued and agreed as part of a proposal, which can constrain your onboarding workflow and how much detail can be included in the engagement letter.
Engagement Letters that are issued at the same time as Proposals are often, by necessity, relatively high level - they have to be, as often a lot of the detail in the “ways of working” between the client and the practice has not yet been discussed and established - while still in sales mode you want to be focusing on meeting the client’s needs.
With Socket Engage, you have the freedom to issue engagement letters in the way that best suits your needs and timing - either alongside proposals or with a fully independent review, approve and sign process for the client. This workflow allows for a multi-step onboarding process - first agree on the proposal, then agree on the engagement letter once you’ve gone a bit deeper. You can quickly produce your letter from Socket Engage’s templates, but you also have the option to fully customise the contents on the fly for each client at a later stage.
Gone are the days of manually adding or removing service schedules - let Socket build the schedule of services dynamically based on the services agreed in the client’s proposals, or quickly select what to include as you build out the letter independently.
Socket Engage’s templates offer a number of “dynamic tags” in the schedule of services that allow you to be more specific around the ways of working - these can be captured at the time of building out the letter of engagement for a client. This clearly outlines the boundaries of the work in the agreement and reduces the chance of misunderstanding or mismatched expectations.
Ready to supercharge your Engagement Letters?
Socket Engage is now available in Socket, ready for you to get started. You’ll be up and running in no time. Feedback from practices already using Engage has been fantastic - they’re loving the control, time-saving and peace of mind that it brings. We’ve got an introductory offer extended until Christmas 2024, so get in quick!
Jump in and get started.
Keen to find out more? See it in action.
