You’ve finally landed that client you’ve had your eye on for a while and you really want to move things along and give a great first impression.
Until something starts slowing you down and you find yourself stuck at your desk drafting the letter of engagement, when you should be serving the needs of the client.
You’re having to dig through old templates, tweak clauses, reformat sections and double-check details.
What should take minutes often ends up taking far longer and becomes a real administrative drag.
Summa Tech was founded and has been developed by accountants in practice and so we know that this is something that many accountancy firms struggle with time and time again.
Opting to manually create letters of engagement is doing nothing but draining your time, leaving room for errors and delaying your onboarding, whilst using other software, that isn’t part of the wider onboarding process, just creates complexity.
This is where automating the process as part of a single client onboarding platform becomes invaluable.
What are the challenges of manual letters of engagement processes?
The traditional approach of manually drafting letters of engagement often involves copying information across systems, from different platforms and spreadsheets into a clunky template.
This increases the risk of mistakes and slows down what should be a simple process.
If you are having to draft the letter, review it and chase clients for signatures, this could take days or weeks, especially if you are working with busy clients.
All the time, you aren’t able to start work and charge for your services and you increase the risk of a new client being snatched by the competition.
It’s not just your internal efficiency that manual processes affect, but your client’s first impression of your firm.
A messy onboarding experience can undermine your client’s confidence in you even before the relationship begins.
Five reasons you should automate letters of engagement
Automating letters of engagement can give your firm that competitive edge in the onboarding process and remove that repetitive bottleneck.
Alongside this, there are so many reasons why automation is the way to go and we’ve highlighted our top five.
- Faster turnaround
Automation allows you to generate professional, ready-to-send letters of engagement in minutes.
There’s no more starting from scratch. You just need to select a template, and click send, the key details being prepopulated from the onboarding process.
- Increased accuracy
Standardised templates make sure every letter includes the correct clauses, terms and conditions, services and the responsibilities of you and the client.
Automating the process also means you don’t need to worry about human error and a lack of consistency or quality across your client communications.
- Reduced risk
Automated systems help ensure every letter of engagement meets both the regulatory and your own internal standards.
There are built-in controls and audit trails that help keep you compliant and protect you from disputes arising later on.
- Systems that scale with you
Automation can help keep your onboarding process efficient as your client base grows.
You can take on more clients without increasing the administrative workload on your team and this makes it easier to scale effectively.
- Better client experience
Automation frees you up from another administrative task taking up your day and allows you to focus on giving your clients the best experience you can.
With automated letters of engagement, built within a dedicated client onboarding platform, you can feel confident that all your clients are receiving the same high-quality onboarding each and every time.
It’s also a much smoother process for your clients and all in one place. All they have to do is review and sign the documents digitally and they can often benefit from a friendly automated reminder to do so.
So, you don’t need to worry about feeling as though you’re pestering them to sign forms.
Keeping a personal touch
A big concern from some firms is that automation means sacrificing quality or the personalisation of letters for clients.
The best solutions should combine efficiency with customisation. Templates can be tailored to different services or client needs and ensure that every letter still feels bespoke.
Once you have the right automation in place, it is as simple as a quick click of a few buttons to get your client correctly and compliantly onboarded and signed up.
How can Summa Tech help your automation?
Automating engagement letters is all about saving time, reducing risks, improving client experience and we want to support this.
Our automated system is made for accountancy firms like you who are looking to streamline onboarding and improve efficiency, but unlike other solutions on the market, it can all be done on a single platform.
It can automatically generate and send engagement letters to clients using custom templates and allow your clients to easily e-sign.
You can also feel some relief that duplicate data entries are eliminated and documents are stored securely in a single client portal.
Additionally, our system can maintain full audit trails and support your GDPR requirements with secure data handling.
The engagement letter tool is fully integrated into our broader onboarding solution and we can help keep the fun in taking on a new client.