There’s a type of “busy” that feels productive, and a type that feels like you’re just being pecked to death by tiny jobs. Most UK firms I speak to aren’t short on technical ability. They’re short on uninterrupted time.
It usually shows up the same way: someone asks a perfectly reasonable question: “Where’s that job up to?”, and suddenly three people are involved. One checks emails. One checks a spreadsheet. Someone says “it’s with the client,” but nobody’s sure when the last chase went out or what we’re actually waiting for. That’s not incompetence. That’s what happens when your workflow lives in people’s heads and inboxes.
That’s why workflow automation for accounting firms has stopped being a “nice upgrade” and started looking like basic operational hygiene. UK compliance doesn’t leave much space for winging it, either. Making Tax Digital for Income Tax starts on 6 April 2026 for sole traders and landlords with qualifying income over £50,000, and quarterly rhythms will punish inconsistent processes.
The thing nobody budgets for: The interruption tax
Let me be blunt: most firms don’t lose time in big chunks. They lose it in crumbs.
A status ping. A document hunt. A “quick follow-up” email. A reviewer note that sits unseen because it landed in the wrong place. You can absorb that when work is light. When the diary is full, those crumbs add up to hours and you start paying for it in the only currency that matters – late nights, missed margin, and a team that feels permanently behind.
What makes it worse is the second-order effect. When people don’t trust the system, they build their own. A personal spreadsheet. A private list. A “special folder” in Outlook. That’s how you end up with three versions of the truth and no easy way to tell which one is current.
Once you see workflow as a cost centre, automation stops feeling like a tech project. It starts feeling like how you protect capacity.
What workflow automation actually is
Workflow automation isn’t “we have some templates,” and it’s definitely not “we send nicer emails.”
In practice, it’s a repeatable set of stages for your work, with a clear owner at each stage, and a few triggers that move the job forward without someone having to remember. When a client hasn’t responded, the chase goes out on schedule. When a job is ready for review, it lands in the reviewer’s queue. When something is blocked, it’s obvious, so you can do something about it.
If you’re wondering whether your firm has real workflow automation, here’s my favourite test: can a manager answer “what’s stuck and why?” without messaging anyone? If the answer is no, you’re still managing work through interruptions.
Where to automate first (so it actually sticks)
I’ve seen firms try to “automate everything” and end up with a system nobody likes. The trick is to start where the friction is most expensive, where delays multiply and clients feel the wobble.
Start with onboarding and recurring requests. This is where the email ping-pong begins. A new client sends partial info. You ask again. They reply to an old thread. Someone files it, someone doesn’t. Automation turns that into a single path you can run: structured requests, predictable reminders, and a clear “next step” internally once information arrives. The difference isn’t cosmetic. It’s that onboarding stops depending on memory.
Once intake is cleaner, fix the handoffs. Handoffs are the silent killer in UK firms because the work itself might be fine, but it stalls between preparer and reviewer, or between reviewer and client approval. Automation helps by making the stage real and the owner obvious. Jobs don’t sit in limbo because the system nudges the next person and keeps the queue visible.
From there, get serious about documents and approvals. Clients will always send files in odd ways – email, portals, “here’s a photo of it.” You can’t control that. What you can control is where your team processes it. A structured collection and approval flow reduces the “where is the final version?” problem and makes review faster because reviewers aren’t playing detective.
And finally, tie billing to delivery. This is the one I feel strongly about because it’s where firms leak margin without noticing. If billing is an end-of-month scramble, you forget billables, miss scope creep, and have awkward conversations after the fact. When the workflow includes a clear “ready to bill” step, paired with a quick scope check, billing becomes routine instead of reactive.
Why clients care, even if they never mention automation
Clients don’t wake up hoping you’ve automated your workflows. They just want things to be easy.
They want to know what you need, where they should send it, and what happens next. They want fewer repeated requests and quicker answers. They want you to remember what was said last time without them forwarding old emails.
Automation helps you deliver that consistency. It also gives your team more time for the work clients actually value – explaining options, giving guidance, and helping them make decisions, because you’re spending less time being a traffic controller.
The objections I hear (and what I say back)
“We’re too busy to implement this.” I get it. But that’s exactly why you don’t do a big rollout. Pick one workflow slice – onboarding, VAT quarter cycle, annual accounts, then run a tight pilot. If you can remove even one category of follow-up, you’ve bought back real capacity.
“My team won’t adopt it.” They won’t adopt extra admin. They will adopt anything that removes pain from their day. Build the workflow around how they already work, then tidy it up over time. Appoint one person as the workflow owner (not the IT person – the person who understands the work) and let them improve it week by week.
“We already have tools.” Tools aren’t a workflow. A workflow is what happens when work moves from stage to stage without getting lost, and the truth lives in one place. If your stack still relies on people remembering what happens next, you don’t have automation – you have good intentions.
How to roll it out without melting the team
If you want a rollout plan that won’t trigger eye-rolling, keep it small and visible.
Choose one process with lots of chasing. Write down the stages as they exist today. Decide ownership at each stage. Agree where documents live. Then automate the repeatables: requests, reminders, handoffs, and a simple “stuck work” flag. After a month, look at the results in real terms – fewer chasers, fewer internal status pings, fewer idle WIP days, less rework at review. If those numbers don’t move, tweak the workflow before you add anything else.
The takeaway
UK firms aren’t moving toward automation because it’s fashionable. They’re doing it because the cadence of work is getting tighter, and the margin for disorder is shrinking – especially with MTD for Income Tax starting 6 April 2026 for the first wave of affected clients.
If you could eliminate one follow-up you send every week, just one, which would you choose, and what would need to change in your process for that follow-up to disappear for good?
