By Mark Barrett, Data Science & Automation Consultant at Beever and Struthers

If you look on LinkedIn today, you will see post after post about AI. It’s true, AI is a game-changer, but it’s only one facet of the digital space right now. There are a lot of other things you can do that could add value to your business (and I say that as a Data Scientist).
Automation is one of those key areas where that can help your existing team to work smarter, not harder. The good news is that there are a range of tools out there that are easy to use and can help you become more efficient
The hidden cost of busywork

In any busy accounting firm (or indeed any business) there are routine tasks that must be completed no matter how painful, time consuming and monotonous they might be. For us, there can be a lot of manual work needed for entering data, cross-checking records between systems, applying password protection to files, logging into HMRC to confirm payments, deadlines – the list goes on. What often goes unnoticed is how these small tasks, repeated day after day, take up a significant amount of time and cost. Beyond the costs of manual tasks, teams have the mental strain of pressing deadlines, navigating through numerous systems, and ensuring the information collected is correct and up to date.

Why automation is achieveable

Automation tools are often called “no code” tools as you can drag and drop different apps and services into a flow to get them to work together. Zapier for example has a library of over 7,000 different apps that you can set up and together in less than a minute with no coding required. You can connect your Microsoft tools, to your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool, to your Marketing tools, to your Business WhatsApp account and so on.

Initial quick wins:

Automate meeting summaries

If you have an online meeting in your calendar with an external client, you can create a meeting summary and action list using fireflies.ai. With automation added, it can send the summary to everyone on the call,  add the summary to your CRM, and add your tasks to your to do list (I like ““Amazing Marvin”” but Trello is also excellent). Once it’s set up, it just runs in the background saving you time every time you have a meeting, and helping you stay focussed on the actions.

Automate project set up

Before automation, every new project request required manually reviewing a form, creating a card in Monday.com with all the details, setting up a folder in SharePoint, and sending a confirmation email back to the requestor. By buildings Zapier flow, we automated each of these steps to save roughly two hours per project and eliminated any confusion could arise by standardising the process.

Connect to APIs to get the latest information 

As an accounting firm, we are used to manually logging into HMRC to verify VAT returns have been submitted before their deadlines and have been paid by our clients on time too. By creating a script – we can check the HMRC API to understand if any of our clients have unpaid returns.

The team now receives an automated report each morning detailing anyone with a pressing deadline or if they have missed their deadline. This automatic reassures us that all clients are monitored so we can get in touch if there is a pressing matter that needs addressing.
Return on Investment

When you quantify the impact of an automatic there are several ways to calculate it – time saved, additional revenue generated, staff happiness improvements – the key is to measure it all and report it back to the business to show impact and to show how the team is using the time saved to add value in the other more productive areas of the business.

Getting started with automation

Try to create a simple automation for your own purposes first – you might want a WhatsApp message to trigger on your phone when five minutes before it is due to end so you can make sure you get some actions from it. Have a play with it, see what you can make, and then get to work on a business task.

For your first workflow, map out a manual task that your team dreads most. Identify the tools they use to complete the task and see if you can connect them to Zapier. Once connected, see how you can create a workflow that will help them – you’ll be surprised how easy it is and of course if you get stuck there are plenty of YouTube tutorials, and ChatGPT is good at advising too, and often suggests other tools that you may not have heard of before.

There are endless possibilities to creating simple automations, and with the tools being so easy to use, the only limit is your imagination…