Where accounting firms lose hours: notes from automating the back office
The slowest hours in an accounting firm are rarely the accounting. Six places where time leaks, what automation can realistically take on, and what should stay with the accountant.
Areza Digital
Ask an accountant where the week went and the answer is rarely “the accounting”. It went on the bank statement that arrived as a PDF, the tax authority letter that sat for days in the wrong inbox, and the client who sent the same invoice three times through three channels.
Over the past months we have worked closely with accountants in Lithuania on automating this kind of back-office work. These are our notes. They are deliberately general. We do not share anything about the firms or people we work with, and nothing here describes a particular client’s processes. We would treat your firm with the same discretion.
In short
- Most lost time sits around the accounting: getting data in, sorting what arrives, and pulling data back out of other systems.
- The best candidates for automation are frequent, rule-shaped tasks with a clear right answer, such as converting statements, routing mail and checking totals.
- Automation should prepare work for the accountant, not sign it off. Every step we build ends with a person who can see what happened and correct it.
- Start with one process, make sure it works within a few weeks, and only then choose the next one.
1. Bank statements that arrive as PDFs
Most banks can export statements in a machine-readable format. But clients often forward whatever they downloaded first, and that is usually a PDF.
Retyping or copying rows out of a PDF is slow, and mistakes are easy to make. The fix is not exotic: turn the PDF into a file your accounting software already knows how to import. In our case that was ISO 20022 camt.053, a public standard for account statements, so nobody had to learn a new format.
Two lessons stood out. First, build to the format the software accepts today rather than inventing a new one. Second, check every converted statement automatically before anyone relies on it. The opening balance plus the transactions must equal the closing balance, and no row may go missing. A converter that is almost always right, and silent about the rest, is worse than no converter at all.
2. Letters from institutions
Letters from VMI, Sodra and other institutions matter more than most mail, and they arrive through more than one channel: portal messages and email notifications. The risk is not reading them slowly. It is not seeing one at all until a deadline has passed.
This is well suited to automation. A system can watch the channels, recognise what came from an institution, record it, and put it in front of the person responsible for that client. The accountant still decides what the letter means. The system makes sure it was seen, and shows by whom and when.
3. The shared inbox
A shared info@ address is convenient for clients and hard on the team. Invoices, questions, reminders and requests all land in one place, and someone has to read each message to decide who it belongs to.
Language models now handle the first pass well: identifying the client, the type of message and the likely owner. They are not perfect. In our experience a classifier will occasionally file an agreement as a task, or a question as an invoice. That is acceptable only if fixing it takes one click and everyone can see the fix. Design the review step in from the start, not as an afterthought.
4. Getting data back out of state systems
Accountants spend a surprising amount of time retrieving what they have already submitted: VAT and other returns, confirmations, and receipts. Government portals were built for filing one document at a time, not for pulling a year of records for dozens of clients.
Automation helps here, but only within the portal’s rules. Some systems limit the period you can request at once, and a good tool works with those limits rather than trying to get around them. That takes longer to build, and it keeps working when the portal changes.
5. Client documents and access
Client folders tend to grow on their own: a shared drive per client, sub-folders by year, a few more by person. Over time nobody is quite sure what is complete, and access rights reflect whoever happened to set a folder up.
Two things help. First, a regular automated inventory of what exists and what is missing for each client. Second, making sure that access and automations belong to the firm, not to one employee’s personal account. When someone leaves, the work should not leave with them.
6. Reconciliation and recurring paperwork
Matching the general ledger against invoices, or preparing documents that are almost identical every year, is careful and repetitive work. It is also where small errors hide.
Here automation works best as a checker and a first draft. It flags the entries that do not match and explains why, or prepares a document so the accountant reviews it rather than retyping it. The judgement stays human. The legwork does not have to.
What we learned about doing this well
- Start from the formats and tools the firm already uses. New software is a cost the team pays every day.
- Make every automated step checkable. You want totals that reconcile, a record of what was processed, and a clear list of what was not.
- Keep the accountant in charge. Tools prepare, highlight and route. People approve.
- Keep client data where it belongs. Where possible, process it in the firm’s own environment, under a proper data processing agreement.
- Scope and price in small pieces. A fixed-price pilot on one process tells you more in a few weeks than a long specification does in a few months.
Where automation does not belong
Not everything should be automated. Tasks that come up a few times a year are usually cheaper to do by hand. Advice, judgement calls and client relationships are the work itself. And anything a firm signs, submits or is liable for needs a person who has looked at it. We wrote more about choosing what to automate in Is AI automation worth it?
If this sounds familiar
If you run an accounting firm and recognise these hours, we would be glad to compare notes. We help finance and accounting teams with exactly this kind of back-office automation, starting with one process and a fixed price. Get in touch and tell us which task costs your team the most time each month.