How fast do bookkeepers reply to new enquiries?
Nearly two-thirds of the 32 firms we tested never replied at all. Among those that did, the typical reply landed inside the hour, but a long tail in York stretched from a single day to over a week, dragging the average past eleven hours. The fastest reply of any kind took six minutes; not one firm answered inside the five-minute window.
The two towns side by side
| Hull | York | Both | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Enquiries sent | 15 | 17 | 32 |
| Firms that replied | 3 | 9 | 12 |
| Reply rate | 20% | 53% | 38% |
| Typical wait (median) | 8 min | 1 h 4 min | 49 min |
| Fastest reply | 6 min | 6 min | 6 min |
| Slowest reply | 49 min | ≈3 days | ≈3 days |
| Firms that never replied | 12 | 8 | 20 |
The two towns fail in opposite ways. In Hull, only one firm in five replied at all, but the three that did were genuinely quick, every one inside the hour and a median of just eight minutes.
In York, about half replied, yet the responses split into two camps: a fast group answering within roughly an hour, and a slow group taking one to three days. One York firm's only reply was automated, and even that took about eight days.
Speed figures use human replies only (automated-only excluded), measured as elapsed wall-clock time from enquiry to first reply.
What it means for owners and practice managers
Of the 32 firms approached, twenty never replied at all. For a prospective client, those firms simply didn't exist. Two things stand out.
The first is the sheer scale of the silence: more than three in five legitimate enquiries hit a wall, a markedly higher miss rate than you'd expect from businesses whose entire offer is being organised and on top of things.
The second is the split among those that did respond. A small fast group replied within minutes, which shows it's clearly achievable, but York's long tail, replies arriving a day or three later, is where deals quietly leak away to whichever competitor answered first. The two questions worth asking: would we have been one of the silent twenty, and if not, would our reply have arrived quickly enough to matter?
Harvard Business Review, 2011. Across 1.25 million leads at 42 companies, firms that made contact within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify a lead, which the study defined as having a meaningful conversation with a key decision maker, as those that tried an hour later. Against firms that waited 24 hours or more, the gap was more than sixty times.
Lead Response Management, 2007. A separate study by the same lead researcher put the odds of qualifying a lead 21 times higher at five minutes than at thirty.
Two studies, two different windows. What they agree on is the shape: the first hour matters enormously, and inside it the first few minutes matter most.
Not one firm in this study replied inside five minutes. The fastest took six, and the typical one forty-nine. The HBR sample had 23% who never responded at all. Ours had 62%.
In the age of AI, a system can read an incoming enquiry and draft a reply instantly, leaving the person only to check it and hit send.
