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Case study · mid-market firm

Ravenscroft & Hale Got 1,900 Hours Back

A twelve-partner firm in Leeds put one bookkeeping cycle on Autopilot, then eleven more. Eighteen months later nobody there reconciles a bank feed by hand.

12 partners · 140 staff Leeds & Manchester Bookkeeping, tax, advisory Live since February 2025
1,900
hours returned to fee-earning work in the first year
12
WorkStreams running, from one taught in two weeks
9 days
from first demo to signed off by their IT lead
The problem

Growth was eating the juniors

Client numbers had grown by a third in two years without a matching rise in headcount. Reconciliation and sales tax prep were absorbing most of the junior week, and the advisory work the partners had sold was being done in evenings.

What they did

One cycle, taught properly

They started with bank reconciliation on five clients and refused to add a second cycle until it ran unattended. Their practice manager spent two hours a week on it for two weeks; corrections went in the thread as they came up.

Where they are now

Twelve cycles, one reviewer

Reconciliation, sales tax, month-end packages and client chasing all run on schedule with a single approval queue. Two juniors moved onto advisory work, and the firm took on 40 more clients without hiring for the back office.

“I stopped checking every run at about week six. Not because I was told to — because I had read forty traces and they were all right.”

Alice Bennett · Practice Manager, Ravenscroft & Hale
What runs there today
Bank reconciliation
62 clients · unattended
VAT preparation
48 clients · gated on submission
Month-end packs
31 clients · partner review
Client chasing
all clients · unattended

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