How many days does your client acceptance process take from partner yes to signed engagement letter?

Pick a recent new engagement and count the days between the partner’s yes and the client’s signature on the engagement letter. Then count how many of those days the engagement sat in someone’s queue.

Most accounting firms need a spreadsheet to answer the first question. The answer to the second is usually most of the first. The partner has agreed and the client is ready, while the engagement waits on intake review, conflicts clearance, and independence checks that people still run by hand. Your client acceptance process decides how long that wait lasts.

Where the days go in client acceptance

Consider a new audit client. The partner says yes on Monday. The intake form reaches the risk team on Tuesday with the ownership structure incomplete, so an analyst emails the engagement team for details. On Wednesday, someone re-keys the entity names into the conflicts system and works through every match, many of which belong to unrelated companies with similar names. On Thursday, independence confirmations go out to the professionals who might hold a restricted interest or share a relationship with the client, and replies trickle in over the following days. Risk signs off, and the engagement letter goes out.

This sequence is an illustration, and your own path likely has different steps. The pattern holds across firms: each step takes an hour or two of real work, then waits a day for the next person to pick it up.

Three questions that show where your clock runs

1. Which step has the longest wait? Measure the time between handoffs, not the work inside each one. The longest wait usually sits where one person’s output becomes another person’s input.
2. How many times does someone type the same client data? Each re-entry adds time and another chance for intake, conflicts, and independence records to disagree.
3. When does independence get checked? An independence issue found after the engagement letter is signed costs far more to resolve than one found before it goes out.

Why the clock matters more this year

Firms need to settle independence before work begins. At the same time, private equity investment, acquisitions, and new service lines keep adding engagements, and each one runs through the same manual path. The days between partner yes and signed letter grow with volume, and the audit trail gets harder to reconstruct.

Many firms know this and put off the fix because they assume it is a bigger project than it is.

What a shorter path looks like

Intapp Intake with Intapp Celeste, Intapp Conflicts with Celeste, and Intapp Employee Compliance work as one compliance fabric. Celeste is Firm AI for accounting: agentic solutions with professional compliance built in at the architectural level. Its agents handle intake pre-population, conflicts triage, and independence screening, so your analysts apply judgment to the decisions that need it instead of doing the work before the work. Conflicts clearance moves faster, and independence issues surface before the engagement letter is signed.

Today, 17 of the top 20 accounting firms trust Intapp, and BDO Canada achieved 38% more monthly acceptances with it. Keeping a record of every decision gives your head of risk a ready answer when someone asks how a call was made.

Count your own days

Run the count on your last five engagements and note where each one waited in your client acceptance process. The longest wait shows you the first process worth fixing. Firms that modernize now put themselves in a stronger position for the next few years, and Celeste agents take on the work before the work so your people spend their time on the decisions only they can make.

Walk through the engagement journey for accounting firms to see how intake, conflicts, and the acceptance decision connect, and to find where your own process loses time.