How to Automate New Client Onboarding at an Accounting Firm

When a new client comes on board at an accounting firm, there’s an initial stage that eats up a lot of time and doesn’t depend on professional judgment: requesting the necessary documentation, tracking what’s missing, and organizing it so it’s ready to work with. Doing this manually, client by client, is one of the most repetitive administrative tasks in the onboarding process.

Why this stage tends to be a bottleneck

Onboarding a new client depends on that person submitting a series of documents — and they don’t always do it on time. The firm ends up writing multiple times to request the same thing, with no system automatically tracking that. Meanwhile, the documentation that does come in piles up with no clear order until someone sits down to organize it.

How automated onboarding works

1. Initial checklist — as soon as a new client is registered, a message (via WhatsApp or email) automatically goes out with the list of required documentation.
2. Tracking what’s pending — the system automatically tracks which documents have already been received and which are still missing.
3. Automatic reminders — if the client doesn’t submit something within the expected timeframe, they get a reminder with no one at the firm needing to remember to write to them.
4. Automatic organization — incoming documentation gets automatically sorted into folders or the corresponding system, ready for the team to review.
5. Completion notice — the firm’s team finds out automatically only once all the required documentation is complete, with no need to manually check the status of every new client.

The expected result

The new client onboarding process stops depending on someone at the firm manually tracking what’s missing and who needs to be written to. The system handles the tracking and organization, and the team steps in only when there’s actually something to review.

This is part of what we work on in administrative automation, and you can see the rest of the solutions we apply to accounting firms in accounting firm solutions.