If you are auditing ten accounts for one client and you send ten separate records requests, you will get ten separate partial answers from ten different people, and six of them will contradict each other.
What has worked much better is splitting the request in two.
Section one is portfolio-wide. Rate schedules, adjustment factor histories, the authority behind any new surcharge, the method by which billed demand is determined, the treatment of contract demand. These questions have the same answer for every account, so you ask them once, in one letter, and you get one authoritative response you can apply across the whole portfolio.
Section two is account-specific and only account-specific. Interval data for this meter. The CT ratio on that installation. The deposit on this account. Anything that genuinely differs.
Send section one first and let it land before the account-specific letters go out. Half the account-specific questions dissolve once you have the portfolio answers, and you look organized rather than scattershot.
One more thing. If any account in the portfolio is favorable to your client — an exemption already applied, a lower tax rate, a correct classification — think hard before you put it in the request at all. Sometimes the clean account is the evidence that the others are wrong, and that evidence only holds while nothing on it is in dispute.
What has worked much better is splitting the request in two.
Section one is portfolio-wide. Rate schedules, adjustment factor histories, the authority behind any new surcharge, the method by which billed demand is determined, the treatment of contract demand. These questions have the same answer for every account, so you ask them once, in one letter, and you get one authoritative response you can apply across the whole portfolio.
Section two is account-specific and only account-specific. Interval data for this meter. The CT ratio on that installation. The deposit on this account. Anything that genuinely differs.
Send section one first and let it land before the account-specific letters go out. Half the account-specific questions dissolve once you have the portfolio answers, and you look organized rather than scattershot.
One more thing. If any account in the portfolio is favorable to your client — an exemption already applied, a lower tax rate, a correct classification — think hard before you put it in the request at all. Sometimes the clean account is the evidence that the others are wrong, and that evidence only holds while nothing on it is in dispute.