What an answering service for accountants covers, and what January changes.

Two kinds of enquiry reach a small accountancy practice and find nobody free. One is a call arriving while the only person who picks up is already on the line, or after the office has shut. The other is typed: somebody searched, read the services page, and wants to know whether the firm takes work like theirs. Answering services were built for the first kind. Much of what is now sold under that name is aimed at the second.

Two jobs sit under the label, and separating them makes every quote easier to read. Overflow cover means somebody answers while the practice's line is engaged or unstaffed. Message-taking means whoever answered writes down who rang and what about, then sends it on. Doing the work itself sits outside both. That matters more in accountancy than in most trades, because the work is advice.

So the first question is about the practice, not about suppliers, and the calendar matters as much as the count. Which weeks does the practice lose enquiries in, and do those enquiries arrive by phone or in writing? Answer that from the firm's own records and you can rule out three of the four.

Each row below is something a UK practice could buy this month. They differ on who answers, which enquirer they reach, and how much of the firm's published detail they can use.

What decides this is rarely a choice between a human and software. It is where the enquiry arrives: the first three wait for the telephone to ring, and the fourth is already on the page the enquirer is reading. Buy for the wrong one and the practice pays every month while the same enquiries carry on being missed. The same choice at a solicitors' firm is in the legal answering service guide.

Most comparisons leave out the thing that decides this for an accountancy practice. Enquiries do not arrive evenly across the year; they bunch. The run-up to the self-assessment deadline pulls a lot of them into a few weeks, and each year end does the same on a smaller scale. Every practice owner already knows which weeks those are.

That pattern hits the two billing models in opposite ways. Cover priced per call costs least in the quiet months and most in the busy ones, so the biggest bill arrives in the weeks a practice has least time to look at it. A flat monthly plan costs the same either way: the busiest week in January and the quietest week in August come to the same figure.

The rest of the year works the other way. Practices rarely win new clients during the busiest weeks, because everybody is buried in filing. The client who is thinking about switching gets in touch in the quiet months — after a fee note looks wrong, after a deadline slips, after somebody finally sits down with their own accounts. That person usually has three firms' websites open, so the enquiry often arrives in writing. Staffed cover bought for January is sitting unused in the month that enquiry arrives.

Per-call cover costs the most in January, the month it feels essential. New clients choose their accountant in the quiet months, when that same cover is barely used.

What Adoomi does is narrow, and easy to state. A website chatbot reads the pages the practice has already published: the services list, the fee page where there is one, the onboarding notes, the deadlines page word for word. It answers from those pages only. Accountants open with a configuration already set up for accountancy practices.

• "Do you act for businesses like mine?" The question that comes up most, and the one the services page already answers: sole traders, limited companies, partnerships, landlords, contractors. Answered in the services page's own words, in whichever language the enquirer typed in.
• "What do you charge?" Answered exactly as the fee page states it — fixed monthly, per return, hourly, whatever the firm publishes. A price for one person's own affairs waits until somebody at the practice has scoped the work.
• "When is the filing deadline?" Repeated exactly as the practice's own page words it. Where the date depends on the enquirer's own circumstances, the question goes to an accountant at the firm.
• "How does moving from another firm work?" Professional clearance, what the outgoing firm sends over, what the practice needs from the client, in the order the firm does it, and in the wording of the firm's own page.

The other half of the job is collecting details. A lead capture step asks what a partner would ask in the first few minutes of a call: which entity it is, when the year end falls, which services are wanted. It also asks whether another firm is already acting. The practice chooses those questions, and the enquirer's own words are sent on with the answers.

Where it all goes is decided at setup. An email alert goes to whoever the practice named for that kind of enquiry, or the conversation continues on WhatsApp with the first message attached. Booking appointments stays with the firm.

One rule applies to all four, and it belongs in the brief before anybody signs: whoever answers writes the question down, and an accountant at the firm answers it. That binds a bureau operator exactly as it binds software on a website. At the moment an enquiry arrives, the accounts are still unread and the engagement letter is still unwritten.

• Whether to incorporate. The question enquirers most want answered on the spot, and the one an intake step is least able to answer. Drawings, salary and the figures behind them decide it, so it goes to whoever the practice named.
• Whether an expense is allowable. It sounds like a simple lookup, and it is advice. The answer depends on how the thing is actually used, and no published page holds that.
• What a specific engagement would cost. Published fee structures get repeated as written. A price for one person's affairs waits until the practice has scoped the work, because a quote given blind is one the firm has to take back.
• What HMRC will do next. A letter, a compliance check, a penalty: each one ends the assistant's reply and goes to whoever the firm named. Software has no standing with a tax authority.

Two more questions come up before sign-off. First, where the conversations are held: inside the EU, exportable and erasable on a GDPR request, with message content kept out of the logs and a chat window that sets no tracking cookies. Documents stay outside the chat window: papers reach the team only if the client sends them over WhatsApp after a handover. Second, registration: ICAEW, ACCA and every other body sit outside this software. Compliance comes from the firm's own registrations, policies and procedures, and none of this makes a practice compliant with anything.

There are two ways of billing here, and they are hard to put side by side. Staffed time is priced per call, or per minute of talking, usually with a monthly minimum. Software is a flat plan with a set number of answers, so a busy fortnight and a quiet one cost the same.

Adoomi's own prices are quick to list. Free is £0 a month with 50 message credits, and one AI answer costs one credit; Local is £8 for 200 credits, Growth £20 for 500, and Scale £75 for 4,000. Every tier is set out on the pricing page. Setup takes about ~10 min — connect the practice website, read the answers it drafts, then add one line to the site.

Putting a per-call rate next to a monthly plan looks like a comparison, but the two cover different enquiries, so the totals mean different things. The better question to ask a salesperson is what one usable enquiry costs. A message saying somebody rang about VAT and a brief carrying the entity, the year end and the enquirer's own words both count as one enquiry on the invoice.

This takes an afternoon and uses records the practice already holds. Pull a year. Split it into calls nobody picked up and written enquiries that waited a working day or longer. Then mark which month each one happened in, because the month matters as much as the count.

• The calls bunch in the busy weeks. Those calls arrive on the phone line, which Adoomi leaves alone. Cover for the busy weeks is worth asking about as a seasonal contract, because paying all year for one busy month is the usual mistake.
• The written enquiries spread out. Buy the website side. It answers the same questions in the quiet months, when somebody thinking about changing accountant has three firms' websites open.
• Both columns are heavy. Run the two together. They reach different people, and plenty of practices end up with one of each.
• Both columns are short. Nothing here creates enquiries; each option answers the ones a practice already gets. The Free plan is £0, so the website side can answer the few that do arrive while the practice works on getting found.

Setup is about ten minutes of clicking. The reading is the part that matters: the firm is deciding in advance how much it will say to somebody who is not yet a client. Three replies are worth a second look. Send it "do I need to register for VAT?" and watch it hand the question over and take the enquirer's details. Ask what the firm charges and check the reply against the fee page. Describe an HMRC letter and see which inbox the alert goes to.