Professional services automation

What is professional services automation?

In the software sense it names a category of practice management system. In the operational sense it is something wider: deciding which parts of how a firm delivers its work still need to be performed at all, which can run without anyone present, and which need a qualified person.

Fund administration, law, accountancy and advisory firms differ in subject matter and are structurally similar in shape. Work arrives, is logged, is checked, is escalated where it is unclear, is decided by someone qualified, and is then recorded and reported. The recurring costs sit in the same places.

Why are timesheets the map?

Because a professional services firm already instruments itself. Timesheets record who did what, against which matter or fund or client, for how long, under which code. Across projects and over time that is a bottom-up description of the operation which no workshop can match.

The resolution is imperfect and the codes are gamed at the margins. It remains the best available basis, because it connects tasks to processes and to the measures the business already reports against.

What is chargeable, and what is not?

That is the first division the map makes. Non-chargeable effort is not automatically waste. Supervision, quality control, know-how and client management are unbilled and necessary. The question is whether the current level of it was decided or merely accumulated.

The second division falls within chargeable work: which of it depends on a qualified judgement, and which is preparation around that judgement. Preparation is where assist belongs, and it is usually the largest single opportunity in a professional services firm.

Why retire before you automate?

Because the recurring costs of a professional firm are dominated by steps that survive on habit. A reconciliation performed against a system that has been replaced. A second register maintained because someone once did not trust the first. A document printed so that a copy can be filed.

Automating those steps preserves them and gives them a maintenance budget. Removing them closes the path over the gap and reduces what everything downstream has to connect to.

What usually comes out first?

The duplicate records. Almost every firm of any size maintains the same fact in two places, because two systems were bought at different times and neither was retired. The reconciliation between them is work that produces nothing, and it is defended on the grounds that it has caught errors, which it has, most of them created by the duplication.

After that, the re-keying. Data typed from one system into another is both a cost and the most common source of the errors the checking steps exist to catch. Removing the re-keying frequently removes the checking step with it.

Then the preparation around a qualified judgement, which is where assist belongs, and where the largest recurring gain in a professional firm usually sits.

How does this apply to fund services and to law firms?

In fund services the volume sits in the periodic cycle. Data arrives, is reconciled, is checked against a document, exceptions are chased, and a person signs. Most of the cost is in the chasing and the re-keying between systems, and most of the risk is in the signing. Those are different assessments and they should not be merged.

In a law firm the shape is the same and the constraint is different. Quality is limited by the availability of experienced people, so assist steps that prepare work to a stated threshold release capacity where it is scarcest. In both, what must be gated from automation is written down before anything is built.