The 9 PM enquiry
It is a Tuesday in March, a little after 9 PM. Someone whose previous accountant retired, or whose business just outgrew a spreadsheet, sits down and writes to your firm: a short message asking whether you take new clients and what a corporate return would involve. Your firm is closed. The message sits there until morning, or until Monday.
What happens to that message, at your firm, is a number you can measure yourself. This page is the measurement: fifteen minutes with your own inbox, before anyone tries to sell you a fix for a problem you have not counted yet.
Your last month, in three steps
- 01
Count
Go through last month's WhatsApp, your email inbox and your website's contact form. Count every message from someone who was not already a client, asking about becoming one: a tax return, bookkeeping, a corporation to set up. Write the number down. Count only those; existing clients are a different problem.
- 02
Clock
For each enquiry, note when it arrived and when it got its first real reply. An automatic 'we received your message' does not count as a reply; a person deciding whether to trust a firm can tell the difference. Pay attention to the ones that arrived in the evening or on a weekend, because that is when a firm of one to ten is least likely to be watching, and tax season is when the most arrive.
- 03
Score
Count how many waited more than one business day for that first reply, and how many never got one at all. Add them together. That is your missed enquiry count for the month, and it cost you nothing to learn except fifteen minutes: it is measured from your own inbox, not quoted from a vendor's brochure.
If your missed count is zero, this page has done its job and you can stop reading: your evenings are covered, and no tool will improve on that. If it is not zero, the next two sections are about what that number is worth and what a fix has to do to earn it back.
What the wait costs
A person looking for an accountant rarely writes to exactly one firm. They write to the two or three that look right, and the first firm that answers with something useful usually gets the call, and the call usually decides who gets the client. A reply sent the next morning is not competing against silence; it is competing against whoever answered at 9:40 PM.
None of this needs a statistic to check. You have been that client yourself: for a plumber, a dentist, a lawyer. The firm that answered treated your problem like it was already theirs, and the one that replied two days later never really had a chance, no matter how good they were.
That is the whole arithmetic of the missed enquiry. Your audit count, times the value of one client relationship to your firm, is roughly what slow evenings cost a year. The count is yours; the multiplication is yours too.
Where the 9 PM enquiry lands
Some of those evening messages arrive by email or a contact form. A growing share arrive as WhatsApp messages, because that is where people already talk. In Canada, 45.3 percent of the general population uses WhatsApp, and among newcomers the figure is 62 percent: the channel is ordinary, and in the communities many British Columbia firms serve it is often the first one a new client reaches for.
Those population figures do not tell you what happens at your firm, and they are not offered as proof that your next client arrives on WhatsApp. Your audit already told you your own split, channel by channel, and that split is the only one worth planning around. The population numbers only settle a narrower question: whether a messaging channel is worth covering at all, or a niche you can ignore.
What a fix has to do
Whether the answer is a person on a rota, a better form, or an assistant like ours, hold it to the same five tests:
- It answers within the hour in the evening, not the next morning.
- It collects the three things a first call needs: what the person needs, their name, and their nearest deadline.
- It leaves the owner a summary they can act on in the morning, not a transcript to dig through.
- It never gives professional advice while doing any of this. Collecting facts is the whole job.
- It stops and hands over the moment a human should take over.
Then run the audit again a month later and compare the count. A fix that cannot move your own number is a subscription, not a solution.
Mandato's fix is called Sofia
Sofia is a WhatsApp intake assistant for accounting firms of 1 to 10. She answers the evening enquiry, collects what a first call needs, and leaves the owner a summary by morning. Do not take this page's word for her: read a real conversation she had, with the summary it produced, and then try the demo as if you were the client.