About Acennan.

Quality data drives every business decision. Poor data hygiene is the single biggest blocker — and the people best placed to use that data are the ones least suited to manually fixing it.

Acennan exists to close that gap: automation for the heavy lifting, human judgement for the nuance. We're system-agnostic, which means we work with multiple data sources at the same time rather than forcing you onto a new platform.

I'm Chris Proczkowski. I spent years developing data management systems and processes inside the operations and finance division of a global document technology and services business, working with client databases that ran into the thousands of records. I later formalised that grounding with an AAT Accounting Technician Diploma in 2016.

I watched, repeatedly, the same pattern: talented people forced to manually verify data they couldn't trust, doing the work once, then doing it again six months later when the same records had drifted out of date. The cost is invisible until you add it up — and by then it has compounded across every system the business runs on.

Acennan is the platform I wanted to be able to hand those teams.

I run Acennan as a one-person operation by design. Every audit, every cleanse, every engine review has my personal attention. When the volume requires it, I'll grow the team carefully. Until then, you're talking to me.

Most of the businesses we look at carry the same handful of problems, and they all compound.

The dissolved-company drift. Companies House dissolved 726,735 UK companies in the 2024/25 financial year — up nearly 10% on the year before, and the first time on record the total register has shrunk. You don't get a notification when a client company is struck off. The record sits in your CRM, in your accounting platform, in your marketing list, in your AML file. Six months later somebody runs an outbound campaign or a fee-renewal notice and the bounce-back rate tells you something is wrong. By then the data is already out of date in five other places.

Year-end churn that nobody books. Industry research puts annual client attrition in accountancy and advisory firms at 10–15%. In a 400-client practice that's 40–60 records a year shifting status — disengaged, gone to a competitor, sold their business, retired, deceased. The disengagement letter goes out. The practice management system gets a tag. The marketing list, the bookkeeping software, the AML file, the email distribution list — those don't get the tag. Each year a layer of stale records is added on top of the last.

The dormant-versus-gone distinction. UK GDPR's storage-limitation principle says you don't hold personal data longer than necessary. CCAB's anti-money laundering guidance says you keep client due-diligence records for five years after the relationship ends. Both are true. Both apply to the same record. The practical question — is this client dormant (might come back, lawful basis to keep marketing) or gone (relationship ended, retention clock running, must not market) — is the one the regulations turn on, and it's the one your systems almost certainly can't answer because nobody flagged the transition when it happened.

Quiet duplicates. Mrs Smith at 14 Acacia Avenue. Mrs A Smith at 14 Acacia Ave. Anne Smith, ASmith Ltd, same postcode. Your systems treat them as three clients. Outbound treats them as three contacts. Fee analysis double-counts. None of this is exotic — it's the standard residue of fifteen years of staff turnover, system migrations, and "I'll tidy this up later."

None of these are catastrophes on their own. They're a slow tax — on outbound conversion, on senior time, on regulatory defensibility, on the valuation when a buyer's due-diligence team opens the client list. The work is finding them, fixing them, and then keeping them fixed.

Every engagement starts with a discovery call. We take time to understand your trusted data sources, the problems you face keeping them current, and how your data will be transferred to us — including the encryption and security controls that apply to it. We then walk you through how we identify and verify the records in each source.

Because we're system-agnostic, we can work across whatever combination of platforms you actually use — practice management, CRM, accounting, spreadsheets, or all of them at once. The reconciliation happens upstream of those systems, which means none of them needs to change for us to do our job.

Acennan is built around a single principle: nothing changes in your systems until you've approved it.

Every record we propose to update is flagged for your review. You accept or reject each change. No system is updated without your sign-off.

Once you've seen the same kind of change handled correctly over a period you define, you can choose — field by field — to automate that change going forward. You keep control of what gets automated and when. You can pull it back at any time.

A summary dashboard showing the health of your data, broken down by system. A detailed report of every change we recommended, which ones you actioned, and which remain open. The same cadence, every month, so your data sources stay current and the decisions you make on top of them stay sound.