The manual path, step by step
An email arrives with an attachment — a client statement, an invoice, a signed engagement letter. A staff member downloads it, renames it to match the firm's convention, uploads it to the right SharePoint folder, logs it in QuickBooks Online or Xero, and emails whoever needs to know it arrived. That's four to six discrete steps, done by hand, for every single document, every single day.
Why this is where turnover shows up first
Intake is usually the highest-volume, most repetitive piece of back-office work in a firm, which makes it the first thing to fall behind when the person doing it is out, behind, or newly hired and still learning the filing conventions. It's also the most visible: a missed or misfiled document doesn't stay hidden, a client or partner notices within days.
Four to six manual steps per document doesn't sound like much — until you multiply it by every document, every day, for a firm that never stops receiving them.
What changes when it's automated
Outlook receives the email. The attachment is filed to the correct SharePoint folder, coded and logged in QuickBooks Online or Xero, and the relevant staff member is notified in Teams — without anyone touching it. The routing logic (which client, which folder, which exceptions get flagged for a human) is built once, specifically for how your firm actually works, and then it runs the same way every time.
What it actually takes to build this
The hard part isn't the filing or the logging — it's specifying every routing rule and exception precisely enough for a system to execute it without guessing. That's work most firms haven't done, because the current version of the process lives in a person's judgment, not a document anyone could hand to a developer. Building the automation forces that judgment to get written down accurately, once — which is also exactly what protects the process the next time someone leaves.
Related: Automating period-end reporting without losing control →