Nobody can read your sent items.

You can’t stop it by talking to each other more. Not while the only record of what was asked lives in one person’s sent items, where nobody else can read it.

That is the actual fault. The two of you didn’t fail to communicate. You each had a reasonable question — has anyone asked this client for the bank statements? — and no way to answer it except by interrupting a colleague. When the answer is expensive to get, people skip the asking and send the email. Across four clients that costs nothing. Across sixty it happens repeatedly, however careful everyone is.

A daily stand-up turns the question into a meeting. It works for a fortnight. Its length grows with the number of open matters, so the week you most need it is the week it gets dropped.

A shared inbox is better, and still only half of it. You can see that your colleague emailed the client. You cannot see whether the client replied, whether what came back was the right document, or whether the thing is still outstanding. A shared inbox shows messages. Your question is about state.

If you’re FCA-regulated there’s a sharper edge. The consumer support outcome in the FCA’s Consumer Duty guidance (FG22/5, July 2022) expects firms not to put unreasonable barriers — “sludge practices” — in a customer’s way. Being asked twice for the same payslip is a small one, but it is one.

Keep the record where the client is

Move it out of mailboxes and onto the client’s file, with a status on it. Then “has anyone asked for this?” is something you read in ten seconds rather than something you ask someone.

At low volume a shared spreadsheet or a per-client checklist does the job — one row per outstanding item, one column for status. If that holds, build nothing else.

What breaks first is updating it by hand. That’s where a tool holding the request itself earns its keep: in ClientLoop each request sits on the client record with a lifecycle — pending, submitted, approved, overdue — that moves when the client acts, plus an activity log of who asked for what. Content Snare and FileInvite work the same way.

The test isn’t whether your team communicates well. It’s whether someone who has never touched that file can tell, without asking anyone, what the client has already been asked for.