Financial services
It's the twenty-ninth, and you're forty minutes into the agent line.
It takes the whole fortnight's calls at once.
It answers every line at once in the fortnight you cannot staff, writes down who rang, what they do and the date they're up against, and puts it in front of the person who is allowed to answer it. No view, no number, and no promise about a date you don't control.
Free for 14 days. No card needed.
“It's the twenty-ninth and I haven't done my return. Can anybody still take it on?”
Answers on the first ring in the two weeks your phone is unstaffed on purpose, takes what a preparer needs before deciding — trade, turnover band, whether they've ever filed — and pages a person while the caller is still talking. It says nothing about whether the date can be met, because it isn't the one who'd have to meet it.
It's the twenty-ninth, and you're forty minutes into the agent line.
Their words
Say it the way your callers say it, and watch what it reaches for
The agent has fourteen tools. It has the same fourteen on every one of these pages — what changes with your trade is which one a sentence lands on, and how much of the job is done by the time it puts the phone down.
It hears
“it's the thirtieth, am I too late”
It reaches for
notify_team
A date inside the window you set reaches a person mid-call. Whether it can still be done is theirs to say.
The words on those chips are the trade’s, not ours: UTR, payments on account, the 64-8, confirmation statement, CT600, SA302. Get one of them wrong on the phone and the person on the other end knows within a sentence.
Run it
Every line on the job card came from a second you can point at
One call, on a rail. Drag it forward and it fills in. Drag it back and it comes apart — the slot empties, the tool leaves the log, and the confirmation un-writes itself.
Agent
Brandreth Kyle — you're through to the answering assistant, and the call's recorded. What's it about?
Tools it ran
- Nothing yet — it is still listening.
File note
- The date he's up against
- Who rang
- Fee range, as you publish ityour documents added
- Who has it now
Timed, named, banded, and with Bronwen before he'd hung up. The one thing nobody answered is whether Saturday can be met — and he heard that at ten past four, not from a voicemail on Monday.
Played back in 14 seconds, or listen to the whole call (1:30) at its own pace. The clock on the rail keeps the written call’s time.
Build this agentThe wall
It will not tell you whether you're still in time
Lean on it. The words change as the caller pushes; the answer does not. Push all the way and the only thing that gives is that it stops arguing and fetches a person.
Pressure 1 of 4
Caller
“If I get the paperwork over to you next week, am I still alright?”
Agent
That's a date question, and dates are the one thing I'm not allowed to be nearly right about. What I can do is get it in front of Bronwen today rather than Thursday.
One thing does cross it, and it is not the loudest caller. A date inside three working days stops being a message and becomes a person's afternoon — it does not wait for Thursday's appointment and it does not sit in an inbox overnight.
The relay
The partner you named for complaints and for vulnerable callers, rather than whoever is sitting nearest the phone knows in 6 seconds
Three calls stop being calls the moment they start: a bereavement, or anyone frightened, ill or being leant on about money; a complaint, where the clock starts when you receive it and not when you get round to reading it; and any instruction to actually do something — file it, switch it, cancel the direct debit. None of the three is finished by a phone.
0.0s
The caller is still talking. They never hear a hold, and they are never told to ring back.
Your rules
It starts briefed for your trade. The brief is yours to change.
Your trade decides what it knows on day one. You decide the rest — and every line you change shows up in how the next call goes, not in a settings page nobody reads.
Anything with a date inside three working days comes to me, not the inbox
It sets the date the caller gives against today's, works out that it's inside the window, and pages you mid-sentence. On the twenty-ninth of January that is most of the phone.
Never confirm someone is a client — not to a lender, not to a spouse
A lender's office gets a message taken and nothing else, including whether the name it just said means anything here.
After five, put mortgage callers through to my mobile until eight
Off. The call goes ahead without it.
Same agent, your vocabulary. The trade seeds the prompt; everything after that is yours, and you can read the whole of it in the dashboard rather than guessing at what it was told.
Go live
A number of its own, briefed for your trade, this afternoon
Everything on this page works on some plan. Here is exactly which, so nothing you just watched turns out to be behind a wall you did not know about.
On any plan
Nothing to connect beyond saving a contact and adding your documents.
- Tells your team, during the call
- Takes a message, in the caller's words
- Writes down the details you asked for
- Puts the caller through to a person
- Answers questions from your own documents
- Knows the date, your hours and the caller's number
Starter — $49 a month
Needs a text-capable number on your account.
- Texts the caller a confirmation
Pro — $249 a month
Needs Google Calendar connected. Until it is, these calls become messages instead.
- Reads your real diary before it offers anything
- Finds an existing booking to change
Your agent gets a new number; we cannot port your existing one, so the new number sits alongside your line and you forward to it when you are ready. Local numbers only — no mobile or toll-free yet.
What you just proved
Six claims. You operated the ones that are filled in.
- Three kinds of call come in, and it knows which is whichTry it
- It understands how your callers actually talkTry it
- Every line on the paperwork came from a second of the callTry it
- It will not say the thing that would land you in troubleTry it
- When it can't finish a call, a person knows while the caller is still thereTry it
- The brief is yours to changeTry it
The one we did not demonstrate
About one call in five goes unanswered in staffed hours
Our figure, not a study. Our estimate, and worth saying plainly: nobody publishes a real one. The figures you'll find attributed to AICPA or Accounting Today sit on vendors' blogs with no study, no date and no sample behind them, and we're not going to repeat them. Ours comes from the shape of the week — the line held by your own thirty-to-seventy-five-minute call to an agent line or an underwriter that you cannot afford to drop, the closed-door meetings either side of it, and 13:00, reliably the worst answer-rate hour of the day, because the self-employed ring on their lunch break and so do you. In the last fortnight of January we'd say a third, and we wouldn't be surprised to be told it was worse. If you want a number that is actually about your practice, count a fortnight in January and a fortnight in June: the gap between the two is the thing worth knowing.
About £60 a recovered call in the UK, about $75 in the US
Our figure, not a study. Ours, and it assumes most recovered calls are worth nothing at all. Of a hundred missed ones, roughly twenty are a genuinely new enquiry rather than an existing client, a lender, a solicitor or somebody selling you R&D claims. About half of those book a meeting, because they are ringing three practices this morning; about half of those go on to engage. Five in a hundred, then, against a first-year fee of £1,200 for a small limited-company client — annual accounts, the CT600, the director's own return — which is £60. The US figure is built the same way from a $1,500 first year and comes out near $75; it is not the pound figure converted, and we would rather show both than average them. A mortgage case runs higher, since a procuration fee on a £250,000 loan does most of the work. Advice runs lower, because far more of an adviser's phone is people who are already clients. We've credited one year, not the seven these relationships actually run, and we are not multiplying any of it by your call volume. What none of it prices is the client who rang three times, got through on the third, and is now saying your name at a barbecue.
- This phone runs on a calendar the caller did not choose and cannot move.
- HM Revenue & Customs, press release, 2026-01-05. Self assessment for the 2024-25 tax year: 5.65 million of the twelve million-plus returns expected were still outstanding on 5 January, twenty-six days from the 31 January deadline. In the previous cycle 732,498 people filed on deadline day itself.
- How fast an enquiry is answered changes whether it ever becomes business — measured on web forms, not on telephones.
- Harvard Business Review — Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington, "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads", 2011-03. 1.25 million sales leads across 59 US companies, timed from web enquiry to the first contact attempt; the odds of qualifying a lead fell sharply between a five-minute and a thirty-minute response. It measured forms, not inbound calls, and we use it for direction only.
Questions
What financial services owners ask first
So it says one thing that sounds like advice, and it's my permissions on the line, not yours. Who's holding the file when the Ombudsman asks what was actually said on that call?
You are, and you always were — nobody can sell you out of that, and any vendor implying otherwise is telling you something that won't survive a visit. That is the only line of compliance this page is going to spend. What can be done is to make the thing structurally incapable of what you're afraid of: it holds no view on a rate, a product, a liability or a timing, it cannot be argued into one, and "should I" makes it stop and book rather than answer. Then weigh that against what you have now. The riskiest call in your practice this week is not the one an assistant took. It's the one that rang out at twenty to seven on a Thursday, went to a voicemail nobody transcribed, and comes back in three weeks as a client's recollection of a conversation you have no record of, because it never happened.
It's the last fortnight of January. Does it cope with that, or does it fall over like everything else?
It answers every line at once and nothing about it slows down on the thirtieth, which is the part your phone system cannot do, because your phone system is three people and one of them has been on the agent line since two. What it will not do is get better at the thing that fortnight is actually about: it cannot file anything, cannot tell a caller whether theirs is filed, and cannot say whether a penalty will stand. For those two weeks it is a machine for writing down who rang, what they do and the date they're up against — so that nobody is reconstructing it on 1 February.
Will it tell a client their return has been filed?
No, and this is the one owners argue with. It has no way of knowing that the voice on the phone belongs to the person whose file it is, and a voice is not identification — not to HMRC, not to the IRS, not to your own body. So a status check becomes a note for the preparer, who does know her, with the callback the same day. To a third party — a lender, a solicitor, a spouse, a bookkeeper — it will not even confirm that the name means anything to you.
What does it write down, and what won't it?
Name, number, what they're ringing about, the trade, whatever date they're working to, and a turnover band when there's a fee range to give — the band, never the figure, because the band is all the range needs. Not income, not debts, not date of birth, not a national insurance or social security number, and never bank or card details: it will not take them, confirm them or amend them, because invoice redirection runs down a telephone line. A reference read off the top of a letter, yes. The fact-find, no. The fact-find is the meeting.
Where do the calls end up? My compliance file needs them.
Every call is transcribed, and on Pro and above recorded too, with the time, the number, who rang whom and what was said — which is most of what an analogous note is required to contain, and more than survives of the call somebody took standing up last Tuesday. The transcript sits in our database in Ireland (eu-west-1) until you delete the call or close the account; a recording stays with the provider that captured it, as does any copy a voice provider keeps of the call. Twilio and ElevenLabs keep theirs in the United States; we have not confirmed Cartesia's country. Two honest caveats. The FCA's own finalised guidance treats an automated phone system with no route to a person as poor practice, so the route out is on every call and anyone who asks for a human gets one at the first attempt. And you remain responsible for us: a service provider under the FTC Safeguards Rule in the US, a processor under UK GDPR, someone of yours named to supervise it.
Start
Put it on your financial services line
Fourteen days free, no card. Point your calls at it when you are ready, and take them back the moment you are not.
It answers on the first ring and tells the caller it is an assistant.
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