Running a weekly firm review with Uku

The best-run accounting firms share a habit: a fixed weekly moment to look at the whole picture, not just their own client list. Not a long meeting. Not a status report. Just a structured 30-minute walk through the data that tells you what is overdue, what is going wrong, and what needs attention before it becomes a crisis.

This guide walks through a Monday morning review cadence using Uku. Monday works well because you can set the week’s priorities while there is still time to act on them. Friday works too — you review what was achieved and flag what carries over. Choose what fits your firm.

Quick answer

The weekly review covers five stops in sequence: (1) check overdue tasks across the firm, (2) look at monitoring status for at-risk clients, (3) review missed billing from last week, (4) check team capacity and time tracking, (5) identify and triage any carry-over items. Save your filtered views as bookmarks to make each stop one click away.

Who does this

• Company Admins and Company Owners — this is a firm-wide review requiring access to all clients and reports.
• This cadence can be adapted for team leads with Client Admin permissions on a subset of clients.

Setup — save your review bookmarks first

The weekly review should take 30 minutes, not an hour spent reconfiguring filters. The first time you do it, save a bookmark at each stop so future reviews start instantly in the right view.

In Uku, a bookmark saves the current filter state, view, and (where applicable) period. Click Save bookmark in the toolbar after configuring each view. See How to use bookmarks.

Stop 1 — Overdue tasks (5–8 minutes)

Start with the Dashboard. Set the Member filter to All members (Company Admins and Company Owners can do this) and add a filter for Status = Overdue or sort by due date with overdue items at the top.

For each overdue task, ask:

• Is this genuinely blocked, or just forgotten? A forgotten task gets a gentle nudge to the assignee.
• Is the due date still realistic? If not, reschedule rather than letting it sit as overdue indefinitely.
• Is there a pattern? The same person with overdue items every Monday is a capacity conversation, not a task conversation.

You do not need to resolve every overdue task yourself — identifying them and ensuring the right person knows about them is enough. See How to effectively use your Dashboard and Bulk actions on the Dashboard.

Stop 2 — Monitoring status (5 minutes)

Open Monitoring and check the current month. Filter by Status = Over to see clients where work is running above targets.

The question at this stop is not “why is this client over?” (that takes a full conversation). The question is “are there any surprises?” A client who runs 10% over every month is a known pattern. A client who suddenly jumps to 200% of target in one week is a signal worth investigating this morning.

Similarly, filter by Status = Under toward the end of the month. A client who should have 10 hours logged and has 1 by week 3 may have tasks that are not being completed, or work that is not being tracked.

See How to use Monitoring.

Stop 3 — Missed billing (5 minutes)

Open Missed Billing (yourcompany.uku.app/missed-billing) and set the date range to the last two weeks. This is the quickest way to catch any time entries that slipped into a locked billing period.

Most weeks, this stop takes two minutes — a quick scan, nothing recoverable, move on. When something does appear, the context is fresh and the decision is easy. See How to find and manage missed billing and The weekly missed-billing review for the full process.

Stop 4 — Time tracking check (5 minutes)

For the previous week, open Report > Time tab and look for team members with zero or near-zero tracked hours. This is not about surveillance — it is about catching the problem early. A team member who forgot to log time for three days last week can fix it now. If it is not caught until the billing period closes, the time is potentially lost.

Also check for unusually high time on any single client — this may indicate a task is harder than expected and could lead to an overrun conversation with the client. See Reports — Time tab.

Stop 5 — Carryover and priorities (5–10 minutes)

The final stop is forward-looking. Based on what you have seen:

• Are there tasks from last week that did not get done and need to be explicitly triaged? Assign them, reschedule them, or flag them as Important so they get priority this week. See How to mark tasks as important.
• Are there any clients who need proactive communication? If a deliverable is going to be late, it is better to tell the client now than wait until the deadline passes.
• Is there anything in this week’s schedule that needs resource adjustment? Check Calendar for any tasks with concentrated deadlines later in the week that might need redistribution.

Making the cadence sustainable

The review cadence works because it is predictable and bounded. 30 minutes, same time every week, same five stops. The moment it starts expanding (“while I’m here, let me also check…”) it stops being a review and starts being an ad hoc investigation. Protect the time box.

Over time, the review also becomes faster. Once you have bookmark-saved views at each stop, the navigation is instant. Once you have done it for a few months, you develop a calibrated sense of what is normal — so the genuine surprises stand out clearly.

Adapting for smaller teams

In a firm with fewer than five people, some stops may not apply. If everyone does their own billing, the Missed Billing stop may not need a separate review. If you have only 10–15 clients, the monitoring stop may take 2 minutes instead of 5. Scale the review to your reality — the structure is a starting point, not a rigid format.

The one stop that should never be skipped, regardless of firm size: overdue tasks. The cost of a missed deadline in client services is disproportionate to the time it takes to catch it early.