AI automation that gives your professional services firm its billable hours back

Your firm bills time, then gives half of it away to admin

Every professional services business runs on the same brutal math: revenue is billable hours multiplied by a rate, and every hour spent on admin is an hour you cannot sell. Yet look at where a consultant, a lawyer, an accountant, or an account manager actually spends their week and a shocking amount of it is unbillable friction. It is retyping a prospect's details from an email into the CRM. It is assembling a proposal by copying last quarter's deck and swapping the logo and the numbers. It is the Friday scramble to reconstruct what everyone did so you can invoice for it.

The reason this work never gets fixed is that no single task feels big enough to matter. Five minutes here, twenty there. But a firm of fifteen people losing even an hour a day each to admin is losing the equivalent of two full-time salaries to work that generates nothing. Worse, it is your most expensive, most senior people doing it, because they are the ones who own the client relationship. The partner who bills at a premium is also the one manually chasing an unsigned engagement letter.

This is exactly the kind of high-frequency, rule-based work our workflow automation practice exists to remove, applied to the part of a services firm where wasted time comes straight off the top line. The goal is not to make your team faster at admin. It is to take the admin off their desk entirely.

• Re-keying prospect and client details across email, CRM, and project tools
• Drafting proposals and statements of work from scratch every time
• Onboarding new clients across contracts, folders, invoicing, and access
• Chasing timesheets and reconstructing the week for billing
• Rebuilding client status reports and internal dashboards by hand

What we automate across the client lifecycle

We do not try to automate a firm all at once. We map the client lifecycle end to end, from first enquiry to final invoice, and we hit the stages where the same steps repeat on every single client. Intake is almost always first. A new enquiry arrives by form, email, or referral, and instead of a person copying it into your CRM, an n8n or Make workflow captures it, uses an LLM to pull out the company, the ask, the budget signals, and the urgency, enriches it against public sources, and creates a clean, scored record ready for a human to qualify. That is the same engine behind our lead qualification and CRM enrichment work, pointed at your top of funnel.

Proposals are the next big win. Most firms answer the same twenty questions in every proposal, so we build a workflow that takes the qualified brief, pulls the right case studies, service descriptions, and pricing from your library, and drafts a tailored proposal or statement of work that a human edits rather than writes. Once a deal is signed, onboarding fires automatically: the engagement letter goes out for signature through DocuSign, the client folder structure is created in Google Drive or SharePoint, the project is spun up in Asana, ClickUp, or Monday, the client is added to billing, and the kickoff email goes out, all from one trigger instead of a checklist someone works through by hand.

The back half of the lifecycle is where the quiet leakage lives. We automate timesheet nudges and billing prep so hours are captured while the work is fresh, assemble draft invoices from tracked time and push them into Xero or QuickBooks, and generate the recurring client status reports that eat a senior person's Friday. LLMs read the messy inputs, a project update, a call transcript, a folder of notes, and the workflow turns them into a clean, on-brand report, following the same pattern as our reporting automation builds.

• Intake and qualification: capture, extract, enrich, and score every enquiry automatically
• Proposal and SOW drafting: assemble tailored documents from your content library
• Client onboarding: contracts, folders, project setup, billing, and access from one trigger
• Time and billing: timesheet nudges, draft invoices, and sync to Xero or QuickBooks
• Status reporting: turn updates and transcripts into on-brand client reports on a schedule
• Meeting follow-up: transcribe calls, extract actions, and update the CRM and project board

Playbooks by firm type

The lifecycle is the same, but the highest-value first workflow changes with the kind of firm. For a marketing or creative agency, the biggest drain is usually the gap between winning work and starting it: proposals, onboarding, and the weekly client reports that clients demand and nobody wants to build. We automate the proposal-to-kickoff stretch and the reporting, and account managers get their week back for actual account management.

For a law firm, the pain sits in intake and documents. Conflict checks, client intake forms, engagement letters, and the endless assembly of standard documents from precedents all follow strict rules, which is exactly what makes them automatable. An LLM drafts from your templates and precedents while a lawyer reviews, so the firm stops paying senior rates for document assembly. For an accounting or bookkeeping practice, it is client onboarding, document chasing, and the monthly close ritual: automated requests for missing records, receipt and invoice extraction, and reconciliation handoffs, which connect directly to our finance ops automation work.

For a consultancy or recruiting firm, the leverage is in research and coordination. We automate the prep work behind engagements, company research packs, candidate screening and shortlisting, interview scheduling, and follow-up, so consultants and recruiters spend their time on judgement and relationships rather than logistics. Whatever the firm type, we plug into the tools you already run and connect the gaps, rather than asking you to adopt yet another platform.

• Agencies: proposal-to-kickoff onboarding and automated weekly client reporting
• Law firms: conflict checks, intake, engagement letters, and template-driven drafting
• Accounting and bookkeeping: client onboarding, document chasing, and monthly close prep
• Consultancies: research packs, engagement setup, and deliverable assembly
• Recruiting: CV screening, shortlisting, scheduling, and candidate follow-up

How we build it, and what you own

We start with one workflow, not a transformation programme. We pick the stage of your lifecycle with the highest volume and the clearest rules, sit with the person who does it today, and map every click, lookup, and copy-paste. Then we rebuild it as a pipeline that runs on its own. Simple app-to-app moves run on Make or Zapier. Anything with branching, document generation, or real data wrangling runs on n8n, which we can self-host so your client data stays in the EU, a point that matters when you are handling privileged or confidential information. Where off-the-shelf tools cannot do the job, we write custom code.

Everything ships with a human in the loop where judgement belongs. A proposal is drafted, not sent. An invoice is prepared, not fired off. The automation does the assembly and the chasing; your team keeps the sign-off. Every run is logged, and every exception routes to a person instead of failing silently, so you are never handing client-facing work to a black box. You get a dashboard showing what ran, what it saved, and what got escalated.

And you own what we build. The workflows live in your accounts, on your tools, documented so your team can understand and change them. We are not renting you access to a locked platform you can never leave. When the engagement ends, the machines keep running and they are yours. That ownership is deliberate: a professional services firm should not trade dependence on manual admin for dependence on a vendor.

The ROI on a billable hour, and when to leave it manual

The economics here are unusually clean, because in a services firm a reclaimed hour is not just a saved cost, it can become a billed hour. If a senior consultant billing 150 euros an hour gets back five hours a week from proposal and reporting automation, that is real capacity that was previously going to admin for free. Even valued purely as saved time, a firm of a dozen people typically recovers ten or more hours a week per person across the workflows we automate, and most first builds reach production in two to four weeks. Because we scope to the numbers before we start, and because our fee is tied to the automation actually running, you know the payback before you commit.

We will also tell you when not to automate, because that honesty is the whole point of the model. If a step genuinely needs professional judgement, the legal advice, the strategic call, the difficult client conversation, that stays with your people, full stop. If a workflow runs a handful of times a month or the rules change constantly, a machine to handle it costs more than it saves, and we will say so before you spend a euro. The right answer is almost always a mix: automate the repetitive scaffolding around the work, and let your experts spend their expensive, valuable hours on the work itself. That is the difference between a studio that ships and a consultancy that hands you a slide deck.

• A reclaimed hour in a services firm can convert straight into a billed hour
• Typical recovery of 10+ hours per person per week across automated workflows
• Most first builds reach production in 2–4 weeks, scoped to countable ROI
• Judgement work stays with your experts; we automate the scaffolding around it
• Low-volume or constantly changing workflows are not worth automating, and we say so