Accounting firm (18 employees): 91% of clients complete on time

Example case · anonymized · figures are illustrative

The situation

An accounting and tax advisory firm in The Hague has 18 employees and about 420 clients: freelancers, stores, restaurants, and a few construction businesses. It works in Exact Online and Twinfield, with Microsoft 365 for email and documents, and a client portal that far from every client uses.

The job is keeping the books and filing the VAT return on time. But before anyone can post an entry, the documents have to be in. And every quarter, that is a fight all over again.

The process before Optimi

1. At the start of the quarter, an employee pulls a list of clients and open items from the accounting packages.
2. She puts the list in an Excel tracker and emails each client a standard request: bank statements, purchase invoices, sales invoices, payroll documents.
3. The documents come back by email, by WhatsApp on the account manager’s phone, and sometimes through the portal. Each one is put by hand in the right client folder in SharePoint.
4. After two weeks, someone calls or emails the clients who have sent nothing yet. And again after three weeks.
5. In the last week before the deadline, 30% of the documents still come in, all at once.

Collecting and chasing cost the team about 12 hours a week, averaged over the quarter. The real pain was in the final week.

Where it failed

The tracker was never right. Documents that came in through WhatsApp were not in it; documents that were already in the folder had not been checked off. Employees called clients who were already complete. Clients who were late sometimes got no reminder, because the account manager assumed a colleague was handling it.

The result: 30% of clients delivered late, and preparing each client file took 55 minutes, much of it spent searching for what was already there.

What Optimi did

Scan. Two weeks in the office, with four employees and both partners. We counted the collecting, the filing, and the file preparation, and looked at the GDPR side: which data goes where, and what a system may do with it.

Workflow automation. The collection flow:

• Every month, an automatic list from Exact Online and Twinfield: which client is missing which documents for which period.
• An employee approves the list once. After that, the personal reminders go out by email automatically, naming the exact documents that are missing.
• An intake inbox where clients send their documents. An AI step recognizes the document type (bank statement, invoice, payslip), links it to the client, and puts it in the right folder in SharePoint.
• After two reminders without result, the client goes to the account manager, with a short summary.

Custom apps and legacy bridge. The Excel tracker became a small web app: per client the status, what is in, what is missing, and who took the last action. Everyone in the office looks at the same picture. WhatsApp documents are forwarded by the account manager to the intake inbox in one step; the app picks them up.

Everything runs inside the firm’s Microsoft 365 environment in an EU region. A data processing agreement is in place, and client data is not used to train models.

A person stays in the loop for: the monthly approval of the reminder list, every escalation, and every document the AI step cannot place with confidence.

The result

Indicative results for this scenario, after two quarters:

• Collecting documents: from 12 to 3 hours a week.
• Clients complete on time: from 70% to 91%.
• File preparation: from 55 to 20 minutes per client, because everything is already in the right place.
• One Excel tracker replaced.

The last week of the quarter is still busy. But it is the busyness of bookkeeping and advising, not of calling.