Most of what slows a firm down
is waiting on somebody.
Not the return. The unsigned engagement letter, the client who has not sent the 1099, the onboarding checklist that stalled on step three. It is administrative, it is predictable, and it eats the weeks when you can least afford it. That part can run on its own.
Engagement letters that chase themselves
The letter goes out, the client means to sign it, and three weeks later work has started anyway with nothing on file. A system that knows which letters were sent, which came back, and which have been sitting unsigned for six days — and that follows up on its own — removes the whole category of problem.
Already running here as agreement-nudge
Source documents collected without a person asking twice
The bottleneck in most engagements is a client who has not sent the 1099, the bank statement, or the prior-year return. Requests that go out on a schedule, track what has actually arrived, and keep asking about the rest take that off whoever currently owns the reminder.
Document request + intake tracking
Transactions categorised and matched before anyone opens the file
Pulling a bank feed in, categorising it, matching entries against open bills and closing out the paid ones is work that a system does better than a person because it never gets bored on line four hundred. What is left for a human is the exceptions.
Already running here as a nightly bank sync
New client onboarding that advances on its own
Engagement letter, W-9, prior returns, portal access, software access, kickoff call. Six steps, each waiting on a different party, currently living in somebody's head. A run that advances one step at a time and chases whatever it is blocked on finishes the same list without anyone driving it.
Already running here as an onboarding sweeper
Client email filed against the right engagement
Attachments arrive in an inbox and have to be moved somewhere by hand. Mail pulled in automatically, correlated to the right client record and filed with its attachments is the difference between searching your email and searching your system.
Already running here as a mail sync
Deadline follow-up that does not depend on March
Extension reminders, estimated payment notices, missing-information chasing. All of it is date-driven, all of it is predictable a year in advance, and all of it currently competes for attention in the exact weeks when attention is scarcest.
Already running here as scheduled cadences
No accounting clients yet.
Here's what I'd point at instead.
You are the buyer most likely to check, so I would rather lead with it. What I can show you is a company running on twenty-six of these jobs — engagement chasing, bank reconciliation, document collection, client onboarding — because I built them for my own books before I ever offered them to anyone. Different vocabulary, same work.
Fair questions
to ask me.
- Have you done this for an accounting firm before?
- Not yet, and I would rather say so than invent a case study. What I can point at is that Matthews Automation runs on twenty-six of these jobs — the engagement chasing, the bank reconciliation, the client onboarding, the document collection — because I needed them to run my own operation before I ever offered them to anybody. The work is the same shape. The vocabulary is different.
- Does this replace my practice management software?
- No. If you are on Karbon, Canopy, TaxDome or a stack of spreadsheets that works, the automation connects to it. Migrating a firm mid-year to make an automation project tidier is a good way to lose a busy season.
- What about client data and confidentiality?
- A fair question and the right one to ask early. Anything touching client financial data gets scoped with access limits, audit logging and retention rules written into the build rather than added afterwards. My background before this was financial services operations and fraud analysis, which is where I learned to treat that as the starting point rather than a compliance checkbox.
- When should we start, given the calendar?
- Off-season, if you have the choice. Building through the busy period is possible but you will not have the attention to spare for testing edge cases, and edge cases are most of the work. May through October is when this goes well.
- What does it cost?
- Quoted per build after a call. A single workflow — engagement letter chasing, document collection — is usually one to three weeks. Something spanning several systems runs longer. You get the estimate in writing before committing to anything, and if an off-the-shelf tool already does what you need, the write-up says so.
Fifteen minutes.
Off-season is the time.
Walk me through how an engagement moves through your firm right now and where it stalls. You get a written view of what is worth automating and in what order, whether you hire me or not.
Video call · 15 minutes · nothing to prepare