Getting started: load your client book in 10 minutes

The whole point of FilingIQ is that your client book maintains itself. The register tells us when accounts land, when officers change and when deadlines move — but first you have to tell us which companies are yours. That takes about ten minutes, and here is the quickest route through it.

Before you start

You need two things: a FilingIQ account (the free plan is enough for this) and a list of your clients. The list can be as rough as a column of company names in a spreadsheet — company numbers are better if you have them, because a number is unambiguous where a name sometimes is not.

Step 1: add your companies

There are three ways in, and you can mix them:

• Search — type a name or company number into the client-book search and add companies one at a time. Best for a handful of clients.
• Paste a list — paste a column of company numbers straight from your spreadsheet and FilingIQ resolves them against the register in one pass.
• CSV import — upload an export from your practice-management system. We match on company number first, then registered name, and show you anything ambiguous before adding it.

Everything is matched against the live Companies House register, so as each company lands you immediately see its status, next accounts date, next confirmation statement date and risk score — no data entry.

Step 2: group by how your practice works

Groups are free-form labels: by partner, by office, by service line, by "payroll only" — whatever mirrors how work is actually divided. Deadlines and alerts can be filtered by group, which is what makes the book usable at fifty clients and essential at five hundred. A company can sit in more than one group.

Step 3: let monitoring take over

That is the setup done. From now on the book re-checks the register continuously: filings received, deadlines approaching, officers appointed or resigned, strike-off notices, identity-verification gaps. The default alert profile emails you a daily digest of anything that changed and escalates anything urgent immediately.

A client book is not a spreadsheet you update. It is a view of the register that updates you.

What to check after the first sync

• Companies flagged red or amber — these are your genuinely at-risk clients, worth a call this week.
• Any company you expected but could not match — usually a typo in the source list or a recently renamed company.
• Alert settings — the defaults are sensible, but see our guide to deadline alerts for tuning them to your workflow.

Ten minutes in, every statutory deadline in your book is being watched. The next partner meeting where someone asks "are we on top of filings?" gets a one-screen answer.