Accountancy practices
One engagement letter.One signature.
Send the engagement letter, its schedules of services and your standard terms as one pack, and keep the signed record for future monitoring visits.
Letter of engagement 2026/27
From: R. Hartley, Hartley & Co
The three documents
See how the covering letter, the schedules of services and your 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 schedule of services
One schedule per thing you do: monthly bookkeeping, the annual accounts, a one-off company formation. It travels with the covering letter and is signed with it, so what the client agreed to is one document rather than two that drift apart.
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 engagement letter, the signature and the evidence behind both.
Build the letter once, send it all year
Keep the covering letter, each schedule of services and your standard terms as a template with the signature blocks already placed. January’s round goes out from that template rather than from last year’s file edited in a hurry.
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
- 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.
Templates
One letter per service line, holding its own schedule of services and its own signature blocks, so January's round goes out from a template rather than from last year's file edited in a hurry.
Build a document once with its fields, its signers and its reminders, then send it as often as you need without rebuilding it.
Sending for signature
Both directors of a limited company sign the same letter, in whatever order suits them, and the letter is not complete until the last one has.
One person or several, in a set order or all at once, with a deadline and a copy to whoever else needs one.
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, and every document you have sent each of them, with its date, its status and its certificate.
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 document is sent, signed and proved on the e-signature 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.
How it fits your documents
Send a document for signature, or sign one yourself. This is what each looks like in your line of work.
E-signature
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.
Sending for signatureSelf 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.
- Creating a templateSet up a document you send often, with the fields already in place.
- Sending, and what happens nextWhat we do the moment you press send, and how to follow progress.
- Choosing who signs firstWhen to send to everyone at once, and when order matters.
- The audit trailEverything we record about an envelope, and why it cannot be edited.
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.