Five accounting workflows worth automating this financial year
A practical shortlist of high-return accounting workflows to automate, from client onboarding to recurring compliance and payment reminders.
The start of a new financial year is the natural moment to look at where your practice loses hours to repetitive work. Most firms know automation could help, but the question that stalls them is where to begin. The honest answer is that you do not need to automate everything. You need to find the handful of workflows that are predictable, frequent and tedious, then let software carry the load. Below are five accounting workflows to automate that consistently return the most time for the least setup effort.
1. Client onboarding and AML/KYC
Onboarding a new client is one of the most error-prone parts of running a practice, partly because it happens infrequently enough that no one remembers every step. You need to collect identity documents, run AML/KYC checks, gather prior-year information, set up the engagement and confirm scope before any real work starts. Done manually, it is a trail of emails and half-finished checklists.
Automating onboarding means a structured request goes out the moment a client says yes. Finye lets you send document and PBC requests, run AML/KYC onboarding and issue an engagement letter from one place. The client uploads what you need through the portal rather than emailing attachments that get buried. Because the steps are templated, nothing slips, and a new staff member can onboard a client correctly on their first week.
If you are reviewing how onboarding could work in your firm, our guides walk through the practical setup.
2. Engagement letters and e-signing
Engagement letters are a compliance requirement and a professional courtesy, yet they are often the slowest part of starting work. The letter sits in a drafts folder, gets emailed as a PDF, and then you wait for the client to print, sign, scan and return it. Days pass before you are properly engaged.
This workflow is well suited to automation because the content is largely standard and the bottleneck is signature collection, not drafting. Finye generates engagement letters and sends them for e-signing through Annature or DocuSign, with post-sign automation that moves the work forward once the client signs. The letter is signed in minutes from a phone, you have a clear record, and there is no chasing paper. For a recurring client base this removes a predictable annual delay before BAS or tax season even begins.
3. Recurring compliance and lodgment deadlines
Australian compliance runs on a calendar that never changes, which makes it the ideal candidate for automation. Quarterly BAS, monthly IAS, annual income tax returns and ASIC reviews all arrive on schedule. Tracking them in a spreadsheet works until the spreadsheet falls out of date or the person who maintained it goes on leave.
There are two parts worth automating here. The first is generating the work itself. Finye supports templated recurring jobs so a quarterly BAS or an annual return is created automatically for each client rather than added by hand. The second is deadline visibility. The compliance engine tracks lodgment obligations and due dates, including BAS, IAS, income tax returns and ASIC reviews, and surfaces them on a dashboard and a per-client view. You can see what is due across the whole practice and drill into any one client.
The payoff is that nothing depends on someone remembering. The obligations appear, the jobs generate, and your team works from a reliable list instead of reconstructing the calendar each quarter.
4. Turning inbound requests into trackable work
Plenty of client work arrives by email and then evaporates into an inbox. Someone reads it, means to action it, and it competes with two hundred other messages. The work that should have been a tracked job becomes a thing you hope you remembered.
Automating intake closes that gap. Finye turns inbound client emails into work items through email-to-ticket, so a request becomes a job on a board with a status, priority and assignee rather than a message someone might miss. From there, AI triage can suggest a priority, assignee and category for incoming requests, which means the routing decision is made for you and a person only confirms it. The effect is that the queue stays visible and accountable, and partners can see at a glance what is open and who owns it across the whole team.
5. Invoicing and payment reminders
Getting paid is the workflow practices most often leave manual, and it is also where manual effort quietly costs the most. Drafting invoices from scratch, remembering who has not paid, and writing polite follow-ups are all jobs that machines do without resentment or forgetfulness.
Finye lets you build invoices, take payment through Stripe or Square, and send payment reminders, with a public pay page so clients can settle a bill without logging in. If you track time, you can bill from the WIP ledger to produce a draft invoice from work already recorded rather than rebuilding it. Automating the reminder sequence in particular tends to improve cash flow simply because follow-ups go out on time, every time, instead of when someone gets around to it.
How to choose where to start
You do not have to tackle all five at once. The sensible approach is to pick the workflow that is both high-volume and currently painful in your practice. For many firms that is payment reminders, because the time saving is immediate and the cash-flow benefit is obvious. For others it is recurring compliance, because the risk of a missed lodgment is too high to leave to memory.
Whichever you choose, the principle is the same. Automate the predictable, repeatable steps and keep your team's judgement for the work that actually needs it. Reviewing your client requests, your deadlines and your unpaid invoices is the fastest way to see where the hours are going.
If you want to see how these workflows fit together in one platform, create a free Finye account or take a look at plans and pricing to find the right fit for your practice.