WordPress and accounting firm
Writing that is correct for a fortnight and published for years
A practice site is small and its content is almost entirely time bound, which is an unusual combination. The pages carrying the volume are deadlines, thresholds and what a package costs, and every one of those is true for a period and published forever. WordPress is built to keep what you write, at a permanent address, with a date on it that says when it went up rather than when anybody last checked what was in it.
Why this pairing is its own job
The WordPress install guide covers the tag, and the accounting firm guide covers what the assistant has to know. What follows is the part that belongs to neither.
- Reminder writing is relative. There are three weeks left, the deadline is at the end of this month, if your records are not with us yet. Those sentences are correct for a fortnight and stay published for years, and they match a panicking search better than anything else on the site because they were written in the same hurry.
- A figure quoted in this trade is not read as a tip that has aged. It is read as advice. A threshold, an allowance or a rate lifted out of a post from two tax years ago arrives in the practice's voice with a citation to the practice's own site, and a sourced number is the kind people act on.
- The date the theme prints is the publication date. Nothing on the page and nothing inside the sentence says when the figures in it were last checked, so neither the reader nor the assistant has any way to age what it just read.
- The weeks that generate the questions are the weeks nobody is watching. In the run up to a filing deadline everyone who could spot a wrong answer is filing, which means this review happens in the quiet part of the year or it does not happen.
What changes about the install here
<script src="https://cdn.askably.xyz/w.js" data-key="pk_live_YOUR_KEY" defer></script>The tag is the same one on the WordPress guide. Everything below is about where it goes on a accounting firm site specifically.
Settle what happens to the reminder writing, and settle it out of season
There are two honest options. Keep those posts published for whatever they do in search and out of the material, or go through them and turn every relative phrase into a dated one. The second is more work than it looks, because a reminder post is mostly relative time held together by a heading.
Most practices should take the first. The archive is also a record of what the practice told clients and when, which is a reason to keep it published and not a reason to let it answer.
Do it in a quiet month. This is the one piece of setup that cannot be done during the period it protects you from, because the people who would have to read those posts are the people filing.
Write the check date into the text, since the theme will not
Anything carrying a figure needs a sentence saying which year the figure belongs to, in the body rather than in the heading or the byline. Answers are made of sentences, so a sentence that carries its own year goes on carrying it when it is quoted alone with no page around it.
That single line also does the work a published date cannot, which is to distinguish a page written three years ago from a page written three years ago and checked last month. One of those is safe to quote and the other is the reason this page exists.
Get the onboarding requirements out of the email attachment
Identity verification, proof of address, the authority you need in order to act as agent, and the letter that goes to the outgoing accountant. On most practices all of that exists as a document sent once somebody has said yes, which is a fortnight after they wanted to know.
Upload it, then make sure the material says plainly that nothing starts before the checks are done. A prospect asking in the last week before a deadline is not asking what the process is, they are asking whether you can start tomorrow, and a supervised practice cannot.
Where the answerable material lives
| One deadline calendar you maintain, with the year in every sentence | Personal returns, corporation tax, payroll submissions, sales tax periods and the filings that recur. Kept as a page you edit rather than a post you replace, and written so each date names the year it belongs to instead of relying on the address or the heading to carry it. |
|---|---|
| Fee packages with the client each one assumes | A sole trader, a landlord with two properties and a limited company with payroll are three prices, and a prospect cannot tell which one they are. Publish the profile beside the number, and publish what falls outside the fee, because the dispute in this trade is about scope rather than about price. |
| Onboarding and identity requirements, uploaded from wherever they are emailed | The checks, the evidence, the agent authority and the clearance letter, stated as mandatory steps with the time each one takes. This is the material that stops a new client blaming the practice for a delay they created by underestimating it. |
| Explanations rather than this year's numbers | How a threshold works, what triggers a registration, what an allowance is for. Material written that way does not expire, which matters more here than anywhere else on this platform, because the thing that expires is the thing that reads as advice. |
The first thing to get right
Take the posts that carry a figure or a countdown out of the crawl, in a month when the practice is not filing anything.
It removes the only answers on the site that are wrong in a way clients act on, and it is the one job that genuinely cannot be done later. Later is January, and in January nobody at the practice has an afternoon to spend reading three years of reminder posts.
The failure that belongs to this combination
A threshold from two tax years ago, cited to your own website
Somebody asks what the registration threshold is, or what an allowance comes to. There is a post that says, written the year the figure changed, accurate on the day and still published at the address it has always had. The reply gives the number and cites the page.
In another trade that is a stale answer. Here it is the practice stating a figure, in writing, with a source attached. The client relies on it, and when it turns out to be the previous year's number the conversation is not about a website, it is about what the practice said. The citation is the part that makes it hard to walk back, because it really is a page you published.
The defence is to prefer material that explains a rule over material that states a number, to keep the numbers that are unavoidable on one page somebody owns, and to leave the rest out of the corpus. A figure that was never indexed cannot be quoted, however well it matches the question.
Before you go live
- The origin the page is served from has to be on the allowlist for that assistant, or nothing renders and the browser console says which origin was refused. An apex domain and its www are two different origins to a browser, so list both, along with any staging or preview host you want it to work on.
- Open the site as a visitor would, on the pages a accounting firm visitor actually lands on, and ask it something only your own material could answer. A widget that renders is not the same as a widget that has read anything.
Questions
- Should we delete the old posts then?
- No. They may be the only record of what the practice told clients in a given year, and that is worth more than the traffic. Keeping them published and keeping them out of the material are two separate decisions, and what you want is the first without the second.
- Can it tell a caller what their return will cost?
- It can give the published package price and say which kind of client that package assumes. What moves a fee is unfiled years, income from abroad and the state of the records, and none of those get mentioned in a first message. Give the range, say the fee is confirmed once somebody has seen the position, and take the details.
- When should we recrawl?
- When the numbers change, and once more before the busy period starts. A monthly rhythm is the wrong shape here, because nothing moves for months and then several things move at once, usually on a political timetable rather than a convenient one.
Keep reading
- Installing on WordPressHook the tag into wp_footer with a snippet plugin, keep it out of the theme, and stop optimisation plugins from deferring it away.
- Everything for a accounting firmDeadlines drive the volume. What an accountancy practice can automate, and why no answer may touch a caller's own numbers.
- One network, one checkbox, and every site under itNetwork activation puts the tag on every departmental site at once, including a conference microsite from years ago and a lecturer's personal blog.
- A veterinary practice on WordPress, and the pages the snippet should skipA vet site on WordPress hangs half its material off other origins: the practice management form, the out of hours provider, and a fee list nothing links to.
- Two shared layouts, and the one that belongs to the client portalThe client portal is usually an area with a shared layout of its own. That file is where the boundary of this whole exercise actually sits.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.