3 Things Your Accountancy Practice Can Automate This Week Using Microsoft 365

If your practice is on Microsoft 365, you are already paying for one of the most powerful automation toolkits available to small businesses. Most practices use about 20% of it.

The rest sits there, unused, while your team manually chases documents, copies information between systems, and spends the first hour of every Monday morning on things a well-configured workflow could handle in seconds.

This is not a technology problem. It is a clarity problem. Nobody has shown you what is actually possible inside the tools you already have.

Here are three things you can start automating this week, without any technical background, without buying anything new, and without a lengthy IT project.

1. Client document requests

Every accountancy practice sends the same document requests repeatedly. Tax return information. Bank statements. Payroll records. The list is the same every year, and every year someone on your team is chasing it manually by email.

Microsoft 365 lets you build a simple automated flow using Power Automate that sends a document request to a client, tracks whether they have responded, sends a reminder after a set number of days if they have not, and notifies your team when everything is received.

No more manual chasing. No more checking spreadsheets to see who has and has not sent their information. The flow runs in the background and your team only gets involved when action is needed.

Time saved: practices typically recover 2 to 4 hours per week per team member on document management alone.

What you need to set this up: Microsoft 365 Business Standard or Premium, Power Automate which is included in your subscription, a list of your standard document request items, and roughly 2 hours to configure the first time.

2. New client onboarding

When a new client signs up, what happens next? In most practices, someone manually sends a welcome email, someone else sets up a folder, a third person adds them to the billing system, and a fourth sends the engagement letter.

Each of those steps depends on the previous one being done. If someone is on leave, it stalls. If the process is not written down, it is done differently every time.

Using Microsoft 365 and Power Automate, you can build a simple onboarding checklist that triggers automatically when a new client is added. Each team member gets notified of their specific task. Nothing falls through the gaps. The client gets a consistent first experience every time, regardless of who is in the office.

This is not complicated to set up. It is a sequence of notifications and task assignments. But the impact on client experience and team clarity is immediate.

3. Routine internal reporting

How much time does your practice spend preparing internal reports? Weekly billing summaries. WIP updates. Client status reviews. In most practices these are assembled manually, usually by a senior person who has better things to do with their Friday afternoon.

Microsoft 365 and Copilot can pull data from your existing files and systems, summarise it, and have a draft report ready for review before you sit down. You review, adjust if needed, and send. The assembly work disappears.

Even without Copilot, Power Automate can be configured to pull data from shared spreadsheets and populate a report template on a schedule. The senior person stops being the bottleneck and starts being the reviewer.

Where to start

The mistake most practices make is trying to automate everything at once. They read an article like this one, get enthusiastic, and then spend three weeks in a planning meeting that goes nowhere.

Pick one. The one that costs your team the most time right now. Build that first. Get comfortable with how it works. Then add the next one.

If you are not sure which one to start with, that is exactly what the AI Readiness Audit is designed to answer. In 3 to 4 hours we look at how your practice currently operates, identify where time is being lost, and give you a prioritised list of what to automate first, in plain language, with no technical jargon.

You do not need an IT background. You do not need to change your existing systems. You just need clarity on where to start.

Want to know which of these applies to your practice? Take the free AI Confidence Assessment at techmediaeire.involve.me/ai-confidence-assessment or book a free 20-minute discovery call at techmediaeire.com/book-appointment.

Natalie Lambert is the founder of Tech Media Eire, a Microsoft 365 and Copilot advisory consultancy based in Limerick. Tech Media Eire works with Irish SMEs across accountancy, legal, HR and professional services to help them get real value from the tools they are already paying for.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​