The will your accountancy clients never wrote — and your cue to refer

An accountant occupies a rare vantage point. You watch a client's affairs change year on year: a business grows, a second property appears, children are born, a spouse dies, a divorce settles. Each of these is a moment when an existing will becomes obsolete or a missing will becomes a serious problem. The client rarely notices. They are focused on the tax return, the management accounts, the VAT quarter. You, by contrast, see the whole shape of their estate assembling in front of you.

The uncomfortable reality is that a large share of adults in the UK have no valid will at all, and many of those who do have one signed it years or decades ago, before their circumstances shifted. When someone dies without a valid will, the intestacy rules decide who inherits — and those rules routinely produce outcomes the client would never have chosen, including unintended exclusion of unmarried partners and avoidable inheritance tax exposure.

You do not need to interrogate clients to spot the cues. They surface naturally in the work you already do. Watch for:

• A client incorporating, selling, or acquiring a business interest
• The purchase of a second home or a buy-to-let property
• Marriage, remarriage, separation or divorce — a marriage can revoke an earlier will entirely
• The birth of children or grandchildren
• An inheritance received, changing the client's own estate value
• A client crossing the inheritance tax threshold for the first time
• Ageing clients, or a health scare mentioned in passing

Any one of these is a legitimate reason to raise the subject. You are not diagnosing a legal need; you are noticing a life change and pointing the client toward someone qualified to help.

The introduction is simple and stays firmly within your role. You might say that, given the change you have noticed, it would be sensible for the client to make sure their will and estate arrangements still reflect their wishes, and that you can introduce them to vetted specialists who handle exactly this. That is the whole of it.

What you must not do is draft, review, or opine on the will itself, or tell the client how their estate should be structured. Will-writing and estate planning sit outside your remit as an accountant. Your value is the introduction and the timing, not the advice. Keeping that line clean protects both you and the client, and it is precisely what a referral network is built to support.

The mechanics matter. A vague 'you should sort your will out' tends to be forgotten by the next meeting. A structured introduction lands. Note the trigger event on the file, raise it at the natural review point, and — with the client's agreement — pass the introduction to a vetted, regulated specialist through your referral arrangement. The specialist does the qualified work; you retain the relationship and, where the arrangement provides for it, a share of the resulting fee.

This is where a referral network earns its place. Rather than maintaining a patchwork of informal contacts, you refer into a panel that has already been checked for competence and standing, and the introduction, consent and fee-share are handled through a documented process. Your reputation travels with every referral, so the vetting is not a nicety — it is the point.

The firms that do this well build the cue into their existing rhythm. The annual accounts meeting, the tax-planning review, the onboarding of a new client — each becomes a checkpoint where estate arrangements are briefly considered. Not laboured, not turned into a sales pitch, simply noted and, where relevant, acted on with an introduction.

Over a year, those small moments add up. A handful of clients whose wills you nudged into existence, families spared an avoidable intestacy, and a referral relationship that quietly rewards you for being observant. None of it requires you to step outside your competence. It requires only that you notice what you already see, and that you have a trusted route to hand the client onward when the moment arrives. That is the whole discipline: see the trigger, make the introduction, let the specialist advise.