Managing work in progress across all client administrations

From inboxes and heads to a visible overview per file: status, deadline, owner and blockers. How to introduce it without a heavy project tool.

The short answer

Managing work in progress means that for every client administration you can see, at any moment, what the status is, who is working on it, when it is due and what it is waiting on, without anyone having to ask around. In most firms that information does exist, but it sits scattered across inboxes, calendars and the heads of staff. As long as everything runs smoothly, nobody notices. It starts to hurt with illness, staff turnover, peak periods or a client calling to ask why their return has not been filed yet.

Why work in progress lives in heads and inboxes

A firm with forty administrations does not have forty files but hundreds of running workstreams: VAT returns in different periods, year-end work in different stages, loose questions, documents still to arrive. Those streams grow organically. Client A's VAT return sits in the memory of the employee who always does it. The question about client B's car sits in an email thread from three weeks ago. Client C's year-end is waiting on a bank statement, but only the person who asked for it knows that.

That works as long as the team is small and stable. It stops working with:

• Absence. Nobody can take over a sick colleague's work without first digging through their inbox.
• Growth. At ten administrations the workload fits in one head; at sixty it no longer does.
• Peaks. In the last week of April, nobody is quite sure anymore which VAT returns have been filed and which are still waiting on the client.
• Accountability. A client or a new colleague asks about the status and the answer starts with "let me look into that".

So the problem is not that there is no overview. The problem is that the overview only exists as the sum of what everyone happens to know.

What a good work-in-progress overview makes visible

Work in progress is not a task list per person but a status overview per file. Per administration and per type of work, you want to see four things:

That fourth column is the one most often forgotten, and it is exactly where the gain sits. A file marked "in processing" that has in reality been waiting two weeks for a client's answer is not work in progress but a blind spot. Only once the blocker is visible can you act on it: remind, escalate, or close with a recorded exception.

Managing by exception instead of by list

The goal is not for the practice owner to go through two hundred rows every morning. The goal is the opposite: a list that stays quiet as long as everything is on schedule, and only demands attention where things go wrong. In practice, three signals are enough:

1. Deadline approaching and the status is not far enough along. A VAT return still marked "delivered" five working days before the deadline belongs at the top.
2. Blocker older than a week. Anything that has been waiting on the client or a colleague for more than a week deserves a decision: ask again, escalate, or proceed without.
3. File without an owner. Work that belongs to nobody gets done by nobody.

The weekly meeting changes character as a result. Instead of walking through every administration, you only discuss the exceptions. That saves time and it removes the false comfort of a round of "all fine" across the table.

Flattening the peaks

VAT deadlines four times a year, and the year-end once a year, produce the same peak every time. A visible work-in-progress overview does not remove that peak, but it does make it manageable.

For VAT: start immediately after the end of the period with the administrations that are already complete by then. In practice those are the administrations with a bank feed and automated invoice processing, see Processing purchase invoices automatically. What remains for the final week is the small group still waiting on documents, and with a blocker list that group can be chased in a targeted way instead of in a panic.

The same principle applies to the year-end over a longer horizon. If in February you can see which files are waiting on the firm and which on the client, you can spread the year-end across the months instead of pushing everything towards summer. The overview also shows which administrations run into the same delay every year, and that is usually not a capacity problem but a delivery problem you need to solve with the client.

Introducing it step by step, without a project-management monster

The trap in workload management is starting too big: a project-management suite with subtasks, hour estimates, dependencies and Gantt charts. That system demands more maintenance than it returns and is abandoned within three months. Starting small works better:

1. Start with one type of work. VAT returns are the best candidate: repetitive, deadline-driven and the same for every administration.
2. Limit the number of statuses. Five or six is enough. Every extra status is an extra chance that two employees label the same file differently.
3. One owner per file. Not the team, not "whoever has time".
4. Record blockers on the file, not in email. A question to the client belongs on the administration as an open item, so everyone sees it, see also Client portal and collaboration.
5. Change the weekly meeting. Discuss exceptions, not the whole list.
6. Only then expand to year-end work, income tax returns and one-off engagements.

The lead time for such an introduction is weeks, not months. The discipline is not in the system but in the agreement that the status is updated the moment the work changes, not retroactively on Friday afternoon.

Mistakes that make the overview worthless

• Statuses that are too fine-grained, so that updating becomes a chore and everyone stops doing it.
• The system next to the inbox instead of in its place: if questions and deliveries still run through email, the overview is out of date within a month.
• No clean-up discipline: completed files that stay on the list make it unreadable.
• Confusing work in progress with time tracking. This is about status and progress, not hours spent. Try to capture both in one system and you often end up with neither done well.

Next step

A work-in-progress overview is strongest when it comes straight from the administrations rather than from manually updated lists. The status of a monthly close should follow from the close itself, see Setting up the monthly close. Also see how the practice overview in Giroo brings the filing and file status of all your client administrations together on one screen, so the exceptions report themselves.

Content reviewed: August 2026.

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