How RR Accountants runs its AML on Certivus every day

RR Accountants was founded in Birmingham in 2010 by Iftikhar Rashid, who still leads the client work as Managing Partner. The practice looks after around 550 clients, mostly landlords, limited company directors and contractors. Iftikhar's specialist areas include property and landlord tax, IR35 and research and development claims.

Like every UK accountancy practice, RR is covered by the Money Laundering Regulations 2017, and its AML supervisor is the Institute of Financial Accountants (IFA). Two people handle the practice's AML work. Before it takes on a client, it has to identify and verify the people behind the business, screen them against sanctions and politically exposed person lists, assess the risk, and keep a record of all of it for at least five years after the relationship ends.

For years RR did all of this by hand, with spreadsheets and client folders.

The checks themselves were done. The difficulty was proving it. When the evidence for one client sits partly in a folder and partly in a spreadsheet, a simple question takes too long to answer: was this client screened, when, and who signed off the risk rating?

Mehmood describes the worst of it as the "did we screen this one?" feeling the day before an HMRC visit. The work was there, but the practice could not show it quickly or consistently across the team.

RR did not run a normal software selection, and it would be misleading to present this as one. Mehmood owns the practice, and he built Certivus because the tools he found did not fit a practice of RR's size. The cheaper ones felt like tick-box exercises, and the serious ones were quote-priced platforms built for much larger firms.

That history matters to a reader for one reason. Certivus was designed around the day-to-day AML work of a real UK practice, and RR's own team still uses it every day. When something in the product is slow or unclear, a working practice notices, not only the customers who report it.

RR's AML work now runs through Certivus. For each client, the identity evidence, screening results, risk decision and the notes behind it are recorded together, rather than spread across a folder and a spreadsheet.

With two people handling AML for a practice of around 550 clients, there is no room for each person to keep records their own way. Because files follow the same steps, it matters much less which of them handled a client. The record looks the same, and it can be pulled together without searching.

The clearest change is time. Completing AML on a new client used to take 20 to 30 minutes of working across the folder and the spreadsheet. The team now puts it at under five minutes.