Yes — think about client onboarding. It’s not magic. It’s steps: send a Docusign agreement, send an email to the client asking for their documentation, upload those documents to your systems, create a contact in the CRM, set up a folder in Google Workspace or Teams, notify the team about the new client — each step requiring a human to jump between systems.

Not really. Preparing a tax return or monthly close still follows a set process: gather documents, enter figures into your accounting system, reconcile accounts, review with a manager, generate reports, send to client. It’s just as dependent on people moving between systems like email, Excel, tax software, and document storage.

Not completely. Xero and QuickBooks are great at handling parts of the process — like recording transactions or generating reports — but they don’t manage everything around those steps. Your team still has to collect info from clients, chase missing documents, check email threads, update spreadsheets, switch to task managers, and communicate with others. The process around the accounting software is still mostly manual — and that’s where the real inefficiencies live.

Usually more than we realize. Even something as simple as sending an invoice can involve time-tracking software (to log billable hours), an accounting platform (like Xero or QuickBooks), a CRM (to find the right client contact), a document or proposal tool (for formatting), and email (to send it out). None of those systems are natively connected — it’s your team manually jumping between them to make it all work.

And that’s just for your core activities.

Behind the scenes, your firm is also juggling dozens of other processes across:

Marketing – Managing social posts, email campaigns, website updates, and lead tracking.

Sales – Qualifying leads, scheduling calls, sending proposals, following up.

Client Delivery – Onboarding, document requests, project updates, reviews.

Operations – Internal meetings, reporting, HR tasks, software subscriptions, IT support.Each of these areas is running on separate tools, often managed by separate people — and all of it is being held together by manual effort.

Yes, and it’s costing you (and them) more than you think.

Your most skilled people aren’t just doing high-value work — they’re spending hours every week bridging the gaps between disconnected systems. Chasing clients for missing documents. Copying data from one platform to another. Reformatting reports. Managing the chaos. It’s invisible work that eats time, drains energy, and adds no real value.

The more manual your setup, the more your team becomes the glue holding everything together — instead of focusing on the strategic, advisory, and analytical work you hired them to do. And that makes them at risk of leaving, to find a Firm that has removed these pain points to make their work more impactful.