Accountancy practices
One priced engagement letter.One signature.
Build the fee proposal and engagement letter from your service catalogue, send them as one pack, and keep the signed record for future monitoring visits.
No credit card required.
PROP-004
Letter of engagement 2026/27
Prepared for Okafor Design Ltd by Hartley & Co
One-off fees
charged once
| Service | Fee |
|---|---|
| Annual accounts and corporation tax | |
| Subtotal | |
| VAT | |
| Total |
Fees are shown per billing period. Amounts for different periods are listed separately and are not added together.
Ready to go ahead?
The three documents
See how the proposal, schedule of services and standard terms form one signing pack.
The letter of engagement
A covering letter, a schedule of services for each thing you do and your standard terms of business. Sent as one pack, signed once, and completing as a single record with one certificate.
The fee proposal
Priced per service and per cadence, which is how practices actually charge: monthly bookkeeping, an annual accounts fee, a one-off company formation. Each is quoted with its own period attached and they are never added into a single number.
The reissued letter
When the services, the fees or the terms change, the letter is reissued from the template rather than edited from last year’s file. It goes out as a new document with its own signature and its own certificate.
Where this sits in your onboarding
Not at the front of it.
The engagement letter is not the first thing a new client sees from you, and it is not the last. It comes after your client checks and before the work starts, and it is the document that sets out what you will do and what it will cost.
Your client checks and your onboarding workflow stay where they run today. This carries the fee proposal, the engagement letter, the signature and the evidence behind all three.
Price the work from your own service list
Keep the services you sell in one list with a fee and a cadence against each. Building a proposal is picking from that list, so the letter and the priced services are one document rather than two that drift apart.
Send the whole pack at once
Covering letter, schedules and standard terms go out together, in the order you set, to the people who need to sign and the people who only need to receive. One signing session for the client, not five.
Reissue when something changes
A new service, a fee change or revised terms: reissue from wording you have already had checked. It goes out as a new document with its own signature, its own history and its own certificate.
Put your next engagement letter through it.
What you can produce when someone asks
ICAEW’s 2026 Practice Assurance monitoring report, covering reviews carried out in 2025, recorded findings on engagement letters in 19% of reviews, mostly letters that were out of date or did not cover the services actually provided. ICAEW is the UK institute, and the point travels: a letter built from the list of services you sell is easier to keep current than one edited from last year’s file.
A history that cannot quietly change
Sent, opened, signed, declined: every event is hashed and linked to the one before it, with the time, the IP address and the browser recorded inside the protected record. Alter one and re-checking the chain names the point where it broke.
A certificate for the client file
Produced automatically when the last signature lands. It lists each signature with its time, actor and IP address, a fingerprint of every document in the pack, and a QR code linking to an independent check.
Checkable without you
A client, their bank or their solicitor can verify a completed document themselves, with no account and no login. It confirms the document, the signers and that the chain is intact, and it does not disclose what the document said.
Verify a document →CecurSign
Certificate of Completion
Envelope information
- Envelope ID
- 9c1f2a34-5b6d-4e71-8f90-2ad4c6e13b58
- Subject
- Letter of engagement 2026/27
- Created
- 04/06/2026 09:12 UTC
- Sent
- 04/06/2026 09:14 UTC
- Completed
- 05/06/2026 16:41 UTC
Documents
Engagement letter and schedules.pdf (7 pages)
SHA-256: a4f1c9e0b7d3
Signers and recipients
- R. Hartley (Signer)Signed 04/06/2026 11:02 UTC
- J. Okafor (Signer)Signed 05/06/2026 16:41 UTC
Scan to verify
Envelope ID
9c1f2a34-5b6d-4e71-8f90-2ad4c6e13b58
What you would actually be using
The parts of CecurSign that matter to accountancy practices, and what each one does here.
Your service list
Compliance work, payroll, VAT returns, company secretarial and the ad hoc jobs, each with the basis it is billed on. A letter is then built by picking from the list rather than by editing last year's and hoping the fees were updated.
Every service you sell with its fee, how often it is charged and its VAT treatment, held in one place rather than in three versions of a spreadsheet.
Priced documents
The letter and its schedule of services go out as one priced document, with monthly, quarterly and annual fees each keeping their own period, which is how a client reads a fee they are actually going to pay.
Build a priced document from that list, send it as a branded page, and have the client agreeing to it be the signature on it.
Supporting material
Your standard terms, your privacy notice and your fee protection details travel beside the letter to be read rather than signed, and you can see afterwards which of them the client opened.
The things that are read rather than signed, sent alongside the document instead of stapled into it, with a record of who opened what.
Client records
Which clients hold a current letter, which have one coming to an end and which have quietly fallen out of engagement, worked out from the letters themselves rather than from a spreadsheet somebody remembers to update.
Your clients, their documents, and whether each one is currently under an agreement, worked out from what they actually signed.
Certificate of completion
What a practice assurance visit actually asks for: which letter, agreed by whom, on which date, and a copy that has not been open to change since.
Produced when the last signature lands: every signature with its time, the person who made it and their IP address, and a fingerprint of each file.
What practices ask before they buy
The usual questions, answered briefly.
Is an engagement letter signed this way legally binding?
What happens when fees or services change?
Can we send it to many clients at once?
Does it replace our practice management system?
More detail on how a priced letter is built and what the client sees on the proposals page, or see how other companies use it on the sector index.
See the document itself
The whole thing, section by section, with the priced schedule attached. Free to read, and nothing to sign up for.
These show structure rather than wording, and where your professional body publishes model wording you should use theirs. Every one we publish is in the specimen gallery.
The four things it does, in your documents
The product does the same four jobs for every firm. This is what each one looks like in yours, and each page describes the job in full.
Proposals and engagement letters
Sent the week the client says yes, priced from the same list every partner quotes from, and accepted on a phone before the first piece of work is booked in.
Proposals and engagement lettersClient onboarding
The new client reads your terms, your privacy notice and your fee protection details in the same sitting as the letter, and you can see which they opened before the first meeting.
Client onboardingContracts and renewals
A fee rise in January, a new service in June: each is a fresh letter from the template, signed again, with last year's left exactly as it was agreed.
Contracts and renewalsSelf sign
A confirmation for a client's lender, a declaration on a filing, or a partner's sign-off: signed by you alone, in one sitting, and filed with a certificate.
Signing something yourselfWhat to read next
The parts of the help centre this page assumes, in the order you would meet them.
- Building your service catalogueSet up the services you sell once, and reuse them on every proposal.
- Building a proposalAdding services, writing the letter, and previewing what the client will get.
- Sending a proposal, and what the client seesWhat is fixed at the moment you send, and the page your client opens.
- When a client accepts or declinesWhat happens on acceptance, the signature it produces, and what to do next.
Everything else is in the help centre.
Put your next engagement letter through it
Build one from your own services, send it to a real client, and look at the certificate that comes back.
No credit card required.