AI automation for accountants: the chasing, done without you.

Between the work a practice bills for and the work it does sits a large amount of following up: documents that have not arrived, signatures outstanding, queries nobody answered, and clients waiting to hear where things are.

None of that requires a qualified person and all of it lands on one. In a small practice the partner ends up doing it, because they are the one who notices, which is the most expensive possible arrangement.

It also concentrates. In February this is background noise. In the last fortnight before a lodgement deadline it is a full-time job somebody is doing on top of their actual work.

The reason it never gets fixed is that no single instance of it is big enough to notice. It is four minutes, thirty times a day, for six weeks, and it only shows up as an exhausted July.

The chasing can. Document requests, signature reminders, status updates and onboarding questions all run on rules a practice already follows. Anything requiring judgement about a client's position cannot and should not.

The line is clearer in accounting than in most industries, which makes this easier rather than harder. Work goes out under a registered agent, and everything on the wrong side of the line is obviously on the wrong side of it.

What surprises practices is how much sits on the safe side. The document chase alone is usually the largest single block of unbillable time in the year, and it is entirely rule-based.

What runs without a person

• The document list before a lodgement.

  Out on the same day each period, with reminders continuing until the last item arrives.

• Signature and engagement chasing.

  Who has signed, who has not, and a reminder to the ones who have not, without anybody assembling the list.

• Onboarding questions for a new client.

  Structure, software, prior agent, who approves what. Asked and checked before the work starts rather than over a fortnight of emails.

• The status update clients ring about.

  Where a return is up to, sent before they ring rather than after.

Anything with a number in it, anything that could be read as advice, and anything that goes to the Tax Office. Those three are absolute, and a build that blurs any of them is a liability rather than an efficiency.

This is the part worth being careful about because the failure mode is quiet. A wrong reminder is an annoyance. A message that appears to tell a client something about their tax position is a complaint, and it went out under a registered agent's name.

So everything a client can receive is written by the practice and approved before it is built, and anything unexpected stops and waits for a person rather than guessing.

Where it stops, deliberately

• No advice of any kind.

  Not general, not preliminary. Anything with tax in it is routed to an accountant.

• Nothing lodged and nothing submitted.

  It chases and it assembles. What goes on a return and when it is lodged stays entirely with the practice.

• Client data stays inside your systems.

  Nothing is handed to a public AI tool, and what it may read is agreed in writing before anything is built.

The chasing gets written down, the job costing the most time goes first, the wording gets approved, it connects to what the practice already runs, and it runs watched for a fortnight before it runs alone.

The writing down is the slow half and it is the half that gets skipped. Most practices have never put on paper what actually happens when a client sends half the documents, because the answer lives in one person's head.

The connecting is easier than practices expect. Xero, MYOB and every practice management system in use can already tell another system when something happened. Nothing is replaced and nothing is migrated.

The watched fortnight is not a formality. It finds the client situations nobody predicted, and it finds them before a client does.

The order it happens in

• Write down how the chasing actually works.

  Half a morning, and most of the value is in the conversation itself.

• Put a number beside each job.

  The pre-lodgement document chase almost always wins, and it wins by a distance.

• Build one, watch it, then start the next.

  A job is finished when nobody in the practice is thinking about it any more.