An accounting practice with around fifteen active clients, run by the owner and one assistant. Good tools, loyal clients, and absolutely no capacity left.
- Before
- Not one written process — the owner confirmed it outright. What actually ran the business was a spreadsheet only she knew how to use. One whole process was broken: access to the proper tool had been lost, so each case got handled by editing an old document.
- The system problem
- It wasn’t a software gap: three accounting programs were running fine. It was that no part of the system existed outside one person’s head. No naming convention, duplicate files, and no way to tell which one was current. If she stopped for two weeks, the technical work stopped with her.
- What we built
- We mapped the whole business: the three real operating cycles, the calendar of hard deadlines, who does what, and what breaks first as it grows. On that map we built a new document structure, wrote up the critical cycles as procedures, and stood up a single source of truth to replace the spreadsheet, with the old history carried across.
- What changed
- The system stopped living in one head and got written down. The assistant now has a written procedure to consult instead of having to ask. The practice is now in a state where someone new could join without being talked through everything from scratch.
Evidence and scope
A full operational diagnosis, a document structure and four written procedures, delivered April 2026. We then stayed through a complete operating cycle to test it against real data.
We publish this case without naming the firm: we don’t have written permission to name them, and we’re not assuming it. For the same reason there are no screenshots — the system holds their clients’ information.
DiagnosisDocumentationSource of truthProcesses