Engagement Budgeting Checklist

Identify whether this is a tax return, compilation, review, audit, advisory, or fractional-CFO engagement — each carries different scope, independence implications, and deliverable formats. Pull last year's file if recurring; note any change in entity type, ownership, or jurisdictions since the prior engagement.

For tax engagements, work backwards from the filing deadline (Mar 15 for 1120-S / 1065, Apr 15 for 1040 / 1120). For audits, anchor on board-meeting or lender-covenant dates. Flag any client-promised dates that fall inside busy season when the firm's capacity is already booked.

SSARS for compilations and reviews; SAS for audits; Circular 230 for tax preparation; SSTS for tax positions. Independence requirements differ across services — bookkeeping for a review-engagement client breaches independence under most state-board interpretations and is a common peer-review finding.

Phases typically follow planning → fieldwork → review → wrap-up. Use prior-year actuals as a baseline for recurring engagements. Map each task to the underlying deliverable so nothing untracked sneaks in (rep letters, K-1 distributions, e-file confirmations).

Match task complexity to staff level — partner for sign-off and judgment calls, manager for review and client communication, senior for preparation, staff for data entry and tie-outs. Over-staffing partner hours destroys realization; under-staffing them creates review-note loops that destroy it more slowly.

Use the firm's productivity benchmarks. For recurring engagements, take last year's actuals adjusted for known scope changes and an efficiency assumption. Add a first-year buffer for new clients — onboarding always runs longer than the standing-engagement baseline.

Multiply hours by role against the firm's standard rate card. Document any blended-rate or discount assumptions in the budget memo so the partner sees them at sign-off rather than at billing.

Include UltraTax / Lacerte per-return fees, state e-file fees, courier costs, and any third-party reports (credit, valuation, actuarial). Allocate Bill.com, Avalara, or Suralink seat costs by usage when shared across clients.

Typical reserves: 10–15% of base hours for compilations and reviews; 15–20% for audits and first-year engagements; 5% for repeat 1040s. Document the assumption in the budget memo so it reads as a risk-priced reserve, not padding.

Fixed-fee shifts overrun risk to the firm but is predictable for the client; hourly puts risk on the client; value-based ties to deliverable outcomes; retainer suits ongoing fractional CFO and bookkeeping. Practice Ignition supports all four — pick before drafting the engagement letter.

Pull the firm-approved template for the engagement type. Include scope, fee, payment terms, examples of out-of-scope work, and a termination clause. AICPA peer review flags missing or stale engagement letters as a deficiency.

Partner reviews scope, hours, rates, and contingency before the engagement letter goes to the client. Capture any deviations from the standard rate card and the rationale — this is the audit trail when realization is reviewed at year-end.

Configure the engagement in Karbon, TaxDome, Canopy, or Jetpack Workflow. Tag budgeted hours by phase so the variance report rolls up correctly. Without this tagging, the weekly variance review degrades to a single engagement-level number that hides phase-by-phase drift.

Pull actual hours by role multiplied by rate, against budget. Most firms run this Monday morning for the prior week. The point is to catch tasks pacing over budget mid-engagement — not after the deliverable goes out the door.

An 80% threshold catches drift before it becomes overrun. Common triggers: client document requests delayed, prior-year working papers missing, or scope expanded informally over email without a change order.

Roll the variance report up into one status using the firm's thresholds — typical bands are within ±5% on track, 5–15% at risk, more than 15% over budget. This status drives whether the change-order steps fire below.

Identify the root cause — scope creep, client delay, staff inefficiency, or scope underestimated at budget time. Only client-driven scope changes warrant a change order; the others are absorbed and feed into the next-year budget.

Use Practice Ignition's change-order feature so the original engagement letter remains intact. Specify the added scope, the incremental fee, and the revised deliverable timeline. Don't bury it in an email thread — collection problems at billing trace back to undocumented scope changes.

Get explicit acceptance — countersignature in Practice Ignition or DocuSign — before continuing the work. A verbal "yes, go ahead" creates A/R disputes when the invoice arrives 90 days later and the client claims the additional work was always in scope.

Pull the engagement WIP report and tie it to invoices issued. Identify unbilled time that should go on a final invoice versus time that needs to be written down. Stale WIP carried past the engagement close is one of the most common bookkeeping defects in small firms.

Realization equals collected revenue divided by (standard rate × hours worked). Above 90% is healthy; below 80% signals a budgeting, scope, or staffing problem worth a postmortem before the next engagement cycle.

Note in the client file what hours and rates actually held, where the budget was off, and which change-order triggers fired. This becomes the baseline for next year's budget — recurring engagements that re-budget from scratch each year repeat the same misses.