Why

Under 10 inquiries/month from referrals, phone, and a web form is roughly two leads a week — you can hold that in a single view without any pipeline tool. The real pain in your message is "client statuses and open items" — that's practice/workflow management for existing clients (tax deadlines, RIA review cycles, document chasing), which is a different category than sales CRM. As a solo operator running both a CPA and an RIA, you also have compliance trails to keep clean, which most generic CRMs handle badly.

What you actually need

1. Notion or Airtable database (free tier) — one table for *Prospects* (Lead → Discovery Call → Proposal → Won/Lost) and a separate table for *Client Open Items* with columns: Client, Service Line (CPA/RIA), Task, Due Date, Status, Waiting On. Kanban view by status.
2. A web form that lands somewhere structured — point your existing web form to Tally or Fillout (free) so every inquiry becomes a row in the Prospects table automatically, not an email you forget.
3. A habit — the Friday 30-minute close-out — every Friday before you log off, open the Client Open Items board and move every "Waiting on client" item older than 7 days into an email or call you send before you leave.

Do this today

Go to notion.so, duplicate the free "CRM" template, then add a second database called "Client Open Items" with a Select field for Service Line (CPA / RIA) and a Date field for Due Date — switch its default view to Board grouped by Status. Spend the remaining 20 minutes dumping every open item currently living in your head or your inbox into that board. By tonight you'll see — for the first time — exactly how many balls are in the air across both practices.

What to ignore

Skip HubSpot Sales Hub, Salesforce Financial Services Cloud, and Wealthbox at this stage — Wealthbox especially gets pitched hard to solo RIAs at ~$45/user/mo, but at under 10 inquiries/month and one person, you'll use 5% of it. Redtail and any "advisor CRM" sales call is solving a problem you'll have at 50 clients, not now.

What doing nothing costs you

At under 10 inquiries/month the sales-side leakage is small, but the reputational cost of a dropped client open item — a missed RIA review, a late tax document chase — is what actually kills a solo CPA/RIA firm through referral channels. One forgotten deliverable from your top referrer can dry up the channel that feeds you.

When to revisit this

When you hire your first staff accountant or paraplanner and you're no longer the only person touching client work.