For professional services
Software for professional services firms
A practice sells time and judgement, and then spends a surprising amount of both on admin that nobody is paying for. Onboarding, chasing documents, telling clients where things are.
How these businesses run
Work is either a matter with a start and an end, or a recurring obligation with a deadline that arrives whether or not anybody prepared for it. Most firms run both at once.
Almost every step needs something from the client, which means the firm's timeline is really the client's timeline, and chasing is the hidden job underneath all of it.
Confidentiality is not a preference. Documents have to move without ending up in a forwarded email chain, and who saw what has to be answerable later.
Where it usually goes wrong
- Onboarding a client is a chain of emails that stalls whenever one person is away
- The same document is requested twice because nobody can see it already arrived
- Deadlines are tracked in a spreadsheet that one person maintains
- Client questions about progress are answered by a person, one at a time
- Sensitive files are sent as attachments because that is the only easy route
- Nobody can say which recurring jobs are at risk until the week they are due
What we can build for this
What we can build for this kind of business. The work already delivered is further down the page.
- Client onboarding that runs itself, with the chasing built in
- A secure portal where a client sees their own matter, documents and next step
- Document requests and uploads without the client creating an account
- E signature on engagement letters, filed against the client automatically
- Recurring work tracked by deadline, with early warning rather than a late surprise
- Approvals with a record of who agreed to what and when
- Reporting on capacity, work in progress and what is actually at risk
- Permissions, so staff see their clients and partners see the practice
How a project would work
The first question is which part of the process the client is actually holding up, because that is usually where the time goes and it is rarely where firms look first.
Everything is built to be defensible afterwards. In a practice that advises on compliance, an audit trail is not a feature request, it is the reason the system can be trusted at all.
Work we have delivered in this market
Things we have already built
Live in software we have delivered, and relevant to this kind of business. Part of the 123 things we have built.
A login where your client can see their own job
Clients answer their own questions at eleven at night, and the team stops being a lookup service.
Token link client intake forms
Everything needed to start a job comes in through one link, instead of a long back and forth of emails.
Send a document without making anyone create an account
Far more people finish what you sent them, because there is nothing in the way but the thing itself.
Sharing a document without putting it on the internet
The people who should see a document can, and it is not sitting on a public URL a competitor can find.
Auto contract e-sign on close
Contracts get signed as part of closing, so nobody chases paperwork or emails PDFs back and forth.
The follow-up that happens whether you remember or not
Nobody has to be the nag, and nothing stalls for a fortnight waiting on one form.
A record of who changed what, and when
When something looks wrong you can answer who did it in a minute, rather than reconstructing it from memory.
Every page ends in the same single next step
An enquiry does not depend on somebody scrolling back to the top to look for a contact link.
Accountancy practices
The narrower page, and the one with the delivered work behind it. Accountancy practices.
What that usually means building
Tell us how your business actually runs
We build around the way the work already happens rather than fitting a business to software that was written for somebody else. Describe the part that costs you the most time and we will tell you what we would build and roughly what it would cost.