This is the shape of what you receive. A real review of one of our own client-facing businesses, condensed for the web and shared with identifying detail removed. The document you pay for follows the same structure, written about your business. Prefer to see the documents themselves? Each problem gets its own written recommendation. Download both as PDFs, redactions and all: recommendation one, the document packs and recommendation two, the document checking.
What we reviewed
The firm in this example is one of our own client-facing businesses. That is the point. We were our own first client, and these are tools we still use every day. The review looked at the admin behind client work: how documents come in, how they are checked, and how packs of them go back out to clients.
What we found
Documents arrived in hundreds of different formats and were cross-checked by eye, an arduous job that took around eighteen minutes a case, roughly a hundred times a month. Sending a document pack out again took about six minutes of manual work every time: password protect the file, attach it to an email, then text the client the password, 75 times a month. The packs themselves were built with licensed software paid for per user, per year, twelve screens of features of which we used two, combine the documents and add an index. Two problems, then. The checking, and the pack chain with its licence.
Every finding gets the same three-way test
Each problem is priced at three levels before anything is recommended.
Cost nothing, change the process
Always considered first. Reorder the steps, drop the ones nobody needs, use settings that already exist in the tools you own. Here neither problem could be removed this way, because the work itself was the burden, not the order it was done in.
Buy something off the shelf
The next stop, and usually where we end up. For the document packs the obvious products each covered part of the chain, merging or secure delivery, and stitching them together brought back per-seat pricing for a narrow workflow. For the cross-checking, nothing on the market read our mix of formats.
Build a small tool
The last resort, justified only for a narrow, stable workflow that repeats often and never changes shape. Both of these findings fitted that profile, so this review, unusually, recommended two small builds.
Recommendation one, the document packs
Replace the licence and the manual chain with one small tool. Staff pick the documents for the pack and press one button. The tool merges them into a single file, adds a header and an index, and sends the client an email with a download link while the password goes separately by text. No attachment, no copying passwords about, no extra steps.
This is also safer, not just faster. The gain is not the text message, the password always went that way. The gain is what lands with the client. Before, a password-protected file sat in their inbox forever, where it could be copied and attacked at leisure. Now they get a download link with an expiry and brute force protection, and once it expires there is no file left behind. And every pack goes out looking the same, with a proper header and index, which is a small thing that clients notice.
Recommendation two, the document checking
A tool that reads the documents and cross references the information from each into one easy view table, so a person can see at a glance where things agree and where they do not. A human makes the final check and signs it off. Nothing is accepted on the tool’s word alone.
The AI is not in this tool for fashion. It ended up being non-negotiable, because extracting the right information from this many different document formats with conventional code alone is practically impossible, especially when providers change their documents as often as they do. AI does the messy, shifting part of the job. The human confirms the result.
The AI behind a tool like this can be set up in more than one way. In this case we chose on site hardware, so the processing of client information never leaves our internal walls. The same job can be done through an EU provider with zero data retention and a data processing agreement in place. Which is right varies from business to business, and that choice is part of the advice.
The outcome, stated honestly
The pack tool gave back six minutes on each of 75 packs a month, roughly seven and a half hours of admin, plus the annual per-user licence gone. The checking tool gave back around eighteen minutes on roughly a hundred cases a month, in the region of thirty hours. We own both tools outright, for life. No subscription, nothing to renew.
To be objective about it, builds like these would not have been worth it for every business. On the direct saving alone, the hours take quite a while to earn back the cost. The justification here was bigger than the one-to-one sum. We needed changes like this in a few places to avoid taking on another member of staff, and employing someone is a direct cost of thirty thousand pounds and more a year. Most businesses have several of these six-minute problems. On their own, none of them justifies much. Together, they can be the difference between hiring and not.
What your version includes
The version above is condensed for the web. The full reports are available as PDFs, one per recommendation, the document packs and the document checking, so you can see the actual documents before you spend a penny. Your full recommendation document sets out your situation and goal in your words, where your processes duplicate effort or lean on archaic manual steps, the options at each cost level with honest reasoning, a clear recommendation, the practical steps in order, what to check on data protection, and realistic costs where they are known. It is written so that anyone can act on it. You own the document outright and you are free to take it to any supplier, including nobody at all if the answer is to change nothing.
And to be clear about what the money buys. An Advice Call or a Technology Review Day buys the thinking and the written recommendation. What to change, what you can do with the tools you already have, what is worth buying off the shelf and in what order. In most reviews the recommendations stop there. Building a tool, as this review led to, is a separate piece of work with its own quote. Occasionally a fix is small enough to be built on site on the day, and when it is, we just do it.