Sarah's mornings,
in detail.
A phase-by-phase walk through the diagnostic for one workflow at one firm. What we surfaced, what we recommended, and what the report said it was worth.
The firm and the workflow.
One person, one workflow, six tools. The shape the diagnostic starts from before it surfaces anything.
-
The firm
A 20-person professional services firm. The owner is involved enough to recognize the problem when it surfaces, but not involved enough to see it from the inside.
-
The person
Sarah is the firm's only full-time accountant, and AR collections is her job. She handles it on her own, every morning before anything else.
-
The tools
Six surfaces, every workday. QuickBooks for the books of record, the firm's billing system, a separate AR tracking spreadsheet she maintains by hand, two email inboxes for client replies, and the project management tool she cross-references. Plus ChatGPT on a personal account, where she cleans up messy transaction exports before pasting them anywhere else.
Three findings.
Each one is observation, not proposal. The proposal comes next.
-
AR collections: 10 hours a week, mostly mechanical.
Sarah spends two hours every morning across QuickBooks, the AR spreadsheet, and the project management tool, identifying overdue accounts, drafting reminders, and logging outcomes. About 90 percent is pattern-matching. The other 10 percent is judgment, and stays with Sarah.
-
The spreadsheet runs the firm, not QuickBooks.
Sarah maintains a separate AR tracking spreadsheet by hand because QuickBooks reports do not show what she needs in the format she needs. When the spreadsheet and QuickBooks diverge, QuickBooks is correct. But the spreadsheet is what gets used in conversations with the owner.
-
Client data on a personal ChatGPT account.
Sarah pays for ChatGPT herself, expenses nothing, and has no formal approval. The data she pastes in to clean up includes client names, amounts, and account references. There is no record of what gets sent or how it gets used. Leadership did not know.
Path A: automate the mornings.
The Phase 5 report proposes a single Path A build, scoped to AR collections. The 90 percent mechanical part of Sarah's mornings becomes an automated draft-and-review workflow. The 10 percent judgment portion stays with Sarah. The spreadsheet folds in. The shadow ChatGPT exposure closes as part of the same build.
-
What gets automated
Pulling balances, drafting reminders, logging outcomes. The mechanical morning, end-to-end.
-
What stays with Sarah
Review and exception handling. The softer-touch clients. Sign-off on every send.
-
What folds in
The AR tracking spreadsheet disappears. The build reads from QuickBooks directly and the firm stops running against a separate document.
-
What gets closed
Sarah moves from a personal ChatGPT account to a sanctioned, managed AI workspace. The exposure becomes a policy decision instead of an unknown.
What the report quantifies.
The Phase 3 measurement attaches numbers to the proposal. Two carry dollars, one is calendar.
Two of those are dollars and one is hours, but the dollars are not all the same kind of dollars. Tool spend reduction is cash, money the firm stops sending out. The labor capacity recovered is hours. What those hours buy depends on what the firm reallocates them to. The report keeps the two separate.
And Sarah's mornings move to client work she finds more rewarding.
Tell us about your days.
Thirty minutes. We can tell you whether the diagnostic fits your team and what it would likely surface, the way the report surfaced things for Sarah.