Email triage for accounting firms
A firm’s inbox receives everything loose: client invoices to file, questions, letters from the tax authorities, platform notifications. Every misfiled document costs twice — at filing time, then at search time during the annual accounts.
In your day-to-day
- 01
Automatic attachment of received documents to the right client file in the document system, with duplicate detection.
- 02
Detection of sensitive letters — tax reassessment proposals, social-security formal notices, administration reminders — flagged to the staff member and the partner within minutes.
- 03
Automatic reminders to clients whose documents are missing as a VAT or filing deadline approaches, with the exact list of what is expected.
A typical scenario
This typical firm’s main inbox absorbs 200 messages a day in busy season: loose invoices, client questions, platform notifications, letters from the tax authorities — all in the same stream.
- 01
Through the morning, some sixty accounting documents are recognised, attached to the right client file and financial year in the document system — duplicates set aside on the way.
- 02
At 11 AM, a tax reassessment proposal turns up inside an unremarkable attachment: the partner and the staff member concerned are alerted within minutes, and the statutory response window starts being counted.
- 03
At 4 PM, clients missing documents for the month’s VAT return receive a reminder listing precisely what is expected — not a generic “please send us your documents”.
What changes
Filing mornings disappear, and no letter from the authorities ages in an inbox anymore: anything that starts a legal clock is seen the same day.
Order of magnitude
Working assumptions
- →200 messages a day in busy season
- →an average of one minute’s reading and filing per message
- →5 working days a week
In the region of 15 hours of sorting per week removed from staff mornings — close to two production days recovered weekly, at the firm’s charge-out rate. An order of magnitude you can measure on your own flow during the observation phase.
Indicative estimate built on average sector assumptions — it gets recalibrated on your actual volumes during scoping.
What eats your days
- →
Client documents arrive loose by email, and staff spend their mornings filing instead of producing.
- →
The firm’s own fees are chased last — the cobbler’s children go barefoot on receivables too.
- →
A file falling behind only becomes visible close to the deadline, when it is too late to smooth the workload.
How it works
- 1
Measure before sorting
We start by measuring the real flow: who writes, about what, what actually needs action. Sorting rules are built on that data — not on impressions.
- 2
Sort, extract, route
The agent classifies each message, extracts the useful data (references, amounts, deadlines) into your tools, and routes to the right person. Urgent items are flagged within minutes.
- 3
Answer the recurring
Acknowledgements, document requests, standard questions: the agent replies on its own within the approved fence. The rest lands pre-qualified in your team’s queue.
Typical results
95%
of messages classified and routed with no human involved
4 min
between an urgent message arriving and being flagged
0
client requests lost in the pile
Orders of magnitude observed in production; your diagnostic sets your own baseline and targets.
Frequently asked questions
Can the agent file directly into our document system and practice software?+
That is the goal: it identifies the client, the nature of the document and the period, then files into your existing structure. Anything it cannot attach with certainty goes to a validation queue instead of being filed at random.
Each staff member manages their own inbox — how does this fit?+
The agent can cover the firm’s general inbox and, if you wish, assist individual inboxes with the same rules. Sorting becomes consistent — the definition of “urgent” stops depending on who happens to be reading.
Is this the problem eating your team’s time?
Tell us how you work today — 30-minute call, then a free written diagnostic of what this agent would change for you, with numbers.
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