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How many W-9s do you still have to collect?
Turn a vague sense of vendor gaps into a daily request rate you can actually staff before January 31.
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What does chasing client documents cost your practice?
Put a yearly dollar figure on the follow up messages you send to get statements, receipts and signed forms out of your clients.
Chasing is the least visible cost in a bookkeeping practice because it never lands in one block. It arrives as four minutes here and six minutes there, spread across a month, mixed into email you were reading anyway. Multiply those minutes by a book of 30 clients and it stops being a rounding error and starts being a part time job you do for free.
This calculator uses four numbers you already know and one you can estimate. Count the documents a typical client owes you each month, be honest about how many times you ask before something arrives, and use your effective hourly rate rather than your headline rate. The result is what the chase costs your practice over a year, and what it costs per client per month, which is the number to hold next to your monthly fee.
Your result
Follow up messages per month
384
Every one of these is a message you write and then have to remember.
Hours per month spent chasing
25.6
This time lands in the same week as your close, which is why it hurts.
Yearly cost of the chase
$23,040
Unbilled time valued at what you actually collect per hour worked.
Chase cost per client per month
$60.00
Hold this figure next to the monthly fee you charge that client.
These are unbilled hours at your own effective rate, so treat the yearly figure as fees you never invoiced rather than cash you spent.
Why the per client number matters most
The yearly total gets attention, but the per client per month figure is the one that changes decisions. When a client on a modest fixed monthly fee turns out to cost you a meaningful slice of that fee in chasing alone, you are looking at either a pricing conversation or a process change, and you now have a number to bring to it.
Practices that measure this usually find the load is wildly uneven. Two or three clients generate a disproportionate share of the follow ups, often the ones with a commingled owner card or an account without a working bank feed. Fix those two accounts, or reprice them, and the average across the book falls without touching anyone else.
Turning the number into an action
Start by cutting follow ups per document rather than minutes per follow up. Shaving a minute off a message is small; going from three asks to one and a half by publishing a cutoff date and sending on a fixed day is a large cut, because the multiplier sits in the middle of the calculation.
Then attack the document count itself. Every account moved onto a working bank feed, every owner persuaded onto a dedicated card, and every recurring receipt captured at the point of purchase removes items from the standing list permanently. Rerun this calculator in three months with the new numbers and you will see the difference in the yearly figure.
Questions about this calculator
What should I use for my effective hourly rate?
Take the fees you actually collected last quarter and divide by the hours you actually worked, including admin. For most solo bookkeepers this comes out well below the rate they quote. Using the realistic number keeps the result defensible when you show it to a partner or a client.
Is four minutes per follow up realistic?
It is a common estimate once you count checking what is still open, writing the message, and updating whatever list you keep. If you chase by phone or you keep a manual spreadsheet across 40 clients, the true figure is often higher. Time yourself for one week and use the real number.
Does this include the cost of a late close?
No, and that is deliberate. This tool measures only the labor of chasing. The knock on effects, such as a delayed close, a lender deadline missed, or a client report going out three days late, cost more and are harder to price honestly.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The month end document chase checklist
The four stages that get statements, receipts and forms in before your cutoff, written for a book of 10 to 60 monthly clients.
Turn that figure into a shorter month end chase
Whether the result was a yearly chase cost or a stack of W-9s per working day, the lever is the same: fewer manual asks per missing item. A short demo sets one of your clients up end to end, from the standing document list through the nudge schedule to the exception page that ships with the report. The figure on this page stays yours whatever you decide.