Over the last year we have seen the perception of automation in legal and accounting firms shift radically. For years, our workshops and meetings consisted of educating representatives from various business functions, on the capability and value of automation to help identify processes and tasks that could be automated. Often there was a level of resistance to automation, that has recently been replaced with a desire to use automation across business functions to help with increasing workloads and recruitment challenges.

This shift has been consistent across legal and accountancy firms, both having similar business processes and challenges. Automation, that replicates and repeats human interaction with applications and data, based on predefined rules, is being embraced as a tool to reduce the repetitive, releasing staff from tasks that be spent on more interesting and rewarding work.

Here are 5 examples of tasks that can be rapidly automated to deliver near immediate value that have been proven to benefit not only fee earners but all stakeholders including staff and clients.

1. Time billing. One consistent and extremely important task across professional services organisations is billing for time. The collation of recorded time, costs and disbursements can be automated, consolidated and entered into the billing system. This not only gives back a large amount of time to focus on other important areas, automation reduces mistakes, which benefits both the firm and clients.

2. Client set-up. Often, client information needs to be entered into multiple systems then several tasks completed to effectively set up and enable engagement with the client. Depending on the type of engagement there are different items of information that need to be provided as well as compliance checks that need to be completed. This can be a complex, time consuming and potentially frustrating activity for clients, who lack familiarity with engagement processes. Automation can reduce internal workload while greatly improving the customer experience with guidance, updates, and useful information as its needed.

3. E-forms and web portals. More information and systems are being held online with HMRC and legal submissions involving e-forms and web-based portals. A lot of the information used in entering and extracting information through web-based systems is often held in internal systems and is a case of re-entry or following repetitive processes to update and download. Often the majority, if not all the required actions, can be automated greatly reducing the administrative burden for both administrators and fee earners.

4. Document generation. In nearly every type of client engagement there are multiple types of documents and forms that require completing and processing. Similar to e-forms and web portals, there is often a lot of information to be entered that is already available in the existing data held on clients. Pre-filling these documents with the available information not only helps to reduce time and effort, it can also provide a much better customer experience for clients.

5. Compliance and AML/KYC. Anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer rules impact many different types of services organisations, not just legal and accounting firms. Often seen as part of the client set up process, in many cases compliance with the required regulation involves on-going and regular checks that can be triggered by events or different amounts of time lapsed. Keeping on top of these tasks with the varied and contextual requirements can be difficult to do and easy to miss. Automation removes the potential for human error as well as reducing the effort involved in a highly repetitive and rules-based process.

We all do things differently, even when using the same systems, and all these processes can vary greatly in complexity and effort across organisations and specialities. Rapid benefit in time saved and resources released, can be achieved by automating end-to-end processes, or just specific time-consuming tasks within a larger process. Bottlenecks can be removed, and capacity greatly increased, while focussing on more human orientated interesting work.

These are just a few examples but there are many opportunities to automate in nearly every professional services organisation. Get in touch if you would like to learn more about what you can automate, or if you have a specific challenge you would like to discuss.