Understanding the challenge
For a firm that sells accuracy, the back office ran on manual effort. Onboarding a new client meant collecting documents by email and re-keying them; every engagement meant pulling invoices, receipts, and bank statements into the accounting system by hand and reconciling line by line; and tax season turned all of it into a scramble of overtime. "My best people were doing data entry when they should have been advising clients," the firm's managing partner said. The firm knew automation could help, but its practice-management, document, and accounting systems did not talk to each other, and earlier attempts had stalled in the gaps between them.
Our approach
We started with a workflow audit, mapping where the hours actually went, then applied our Workflow Automation approach, automating the worst bottlenecks first and connecting the systems the firm already ran on:
• Automated client onboarding and document intake that reads incoming statements and receipts, extracts the data using AI where it arrives unstructured, and moves it into the accounting system without re-keying.
• Automated reconciliation that matches transactions and surfaces only the exceptions a person needs to review.
• Approval and hand-off routing between preparers, reviewers, and partners, so files move instead of waiting in an inbox.
• Status reporting that gives partners a live view of every engagement without anyone rebuilding a spreadsheet.
Technical innovation
The build connected the firm's document, practice-management, and accounting systems into one flow, so a client document entered once moved through intake, data entry, reconciliation, and reporting without being re-typed. Where documents arrived as unstructured PDFs or scans, an AI step read and classified them before the automation took over, which is the line to draw: simple automation for the repeatable steps, AI only where the data is unstructured or a judgment is needed. Every automated step is logged and the exceptions route to a person, so accuracy and the audit trail are never at risk.
Outcome
Time spent on manual data entry and reconciliation fell by 70%, and the firm moved through tax season without the usual wall of overtime. Onboarding that used to take days now takes hours, reconciliations surface only the handful of exceptions worth a person's attention, and partners finally have a live view of every engagement. "My team is advising clients again instead of typing their receipts," the managing partner said.
