[ INDUSTRY / ACCOUNTING FIRMS ]

Advise the clients. Automate the chasing around them.

Your practice sells judgement — and loses it to document chasing, unanswered phones and low-margin compliance admin every busy season. We design, build and run the automation layer around your fee-earning work, mapped below to the exact workflows we automate.

Book a strategy call See the use-case map

Works with your practice softwarePartner review stays yoursRecovery rate goes up

chasing · unbilled · January nights

captured · automated · recovered

[ 01 / SOUND FAMILIAR ]

Busy season isn't a season anymore. It's the whole year.

Most practices don't have a client problem — they have a chasing problem. The gap between fees quoted and hours actually spent is mostly admin, and admin automates.

Busy-season overtime

January and year-end mean evenings and weekends of returns, reviews and rework for the whole team.

Cost · Burnout is now your biggest retention risk — and locum cover costs more than the fees it protects.

Document chasing

Half of every job is waiting: bank statements, invoices, P60s, that one missing receipt.

Cost · Jobs stall at 80% done, WIP piles up, and the deadline pressure lands on your staff instead of the client.

Unbilled admin

Partners and seniors spend hours on chasers, status emails and shuffling files between systems.

Cost · Every admin hour at partner level drags your recovery rate down on work you already quoted tight.

Deadline risk

Filing dates for self-assessment, VAT returns and accounts are tracked in heads and spreadsheets.

Cost · One missed deadline means penalties, an awkward client call and an insurance conversation nobody wants.

Phones unanswered at peak

When the whole team is heads-down in January, calls ring out and enquiries go to voicemail.

Cost · New clients sign with whoever picks up — peak season is exactly when you can least afford to miss them.

[ 02 / THE USE-CASE MAP ]

Where automation earns its keep in a practice.

Select a workflow to see what the automated version does — and follow the link to the full solution page for the build we'd run.

Front-line calls

Every call answered, qualified, booked.

What happens here

Calls answered in two rings, all year — including the depths of January
New enquiries qualified consistently: entity type, services needed, deadlines looming
Meetings booked straight into the right partner's or manager's calendar
Every call logged against the client or prospect record with a summary

In practice

A limited-company director calls at 5:50pm on 28 January asking if you can take them on. By 5:55 they're booked with a partner for next week, and the enquiry is in your CRM with notes.

Explore the solution: AI Receptionist

[ 03 / HOW WE GET YOU THERE ]

Strategy first. Then architecture. Then the build.

The same disciplined path as every Elemra engagement — scoped to the workflows above that hurt your practice most.

01
PHASE 1 / STRATEGY
Map the leakage
We map where your practice's hours actually go — chasing, phones, bookkeeping, onboarding — and put a number on each.
02
PHASE 2 / ARCHITECTURE
Design around your stack
The automation layer is designed into your existing practice software and ledgers — signed off by you before anything is built.
03
PHASE 3 / BUILD
Build and rehearse
We build the highest-value workflow first and test it against real clients, real records and real edge cases.
04
PHASE 4 / LAUNCH
Launch in stages
One workflow at a time, with the manual process running alongside until you trust the automated one.
05
PHASE 5 / OPERATE
Run and extend
We monitor, tune and extend the layer — reporting in recovered hours and recovery rate, not vanity metrics.

[ 04 / WHAT CHANGES ]

What the practice looks like afterwards.

The point is simple: compliance work that runs itself to 90%, and a practice that gets January back.

Busy season flattened

Records arrive earlier, jobs start sooner, and January stops costing your team their evenings.

No missed enquiries

Every call answered and booked, even when the whole team is heads-down at peak.

Recovery rate up

Less unbilled chasing and admin inside fixed fees — the margin you quoted is the margin you keep.

Deadlines never in heads

Self-assessment, VAT and accounts deadlines tracked in systems, with chasers working backwards from each date.

Seniors doing senior work

Partners advise and review; the layer handles the chasing, keying and relay work between systems.

Growth without bloat

Take on more clients without a proportional rise in admin headcount.

[ 05 / QUESTIONS ]

Common questions from accounting firms.

Everything runs against your systems with scoped credentials, under a data processing agreement. Client data stays in your practice software and ledgers — nothing is used to train models, and every automated action is logged so you can show exactly what touched a client file and when.

Yes, in most cases. The layer is built around the tools you already run — ledgers, practice management, document portals, calendars. Xero and QuickBooks have strong APIs; IRIS, TaxCalc and similar suites vary by module, so we confirm exactly what integrates during architecture, before you commit to a build.

The strategy phase answers that with your numbers, but the pattern is consistent: practices drowning in busy season start with document chasing; practices missing new business start with the phones; practices with bookkeeping backlogs start there. One workflow first, proven on real volume, then extend.

They'll notice faster answers and fewer chasers arriving at the wrong moment. Anything client-facing runs on your approved wording and tone, and anything needing judgement — tax positions, fee conversations, bad news — routes to a person. You set that line explicitly during architecture.

There's a build engagement, then a monthly run cost. In the strategy phase we cost your current leakage — unbilled chasing, busy-season overtime, WIP lock-up — so the business case is explicit before any build. If the maths doesn't clear for your volume, we'll say so.

[ BOOK A STRATEGY CALL ]

Find out what busy season is really costing you.

A 30-minute call: we look at where your practice's hours leak, show you which of the workflows above would pay back fastest, and give you a straight answer on the maths. No obligation.