Winning a new client at a Perth accounting practice used to mean eleven separate steps that never joined up: pricing the work, sending the engagement letter, opening the file, chasing documents over email. Nobody owned the whole thread, so leads went cold in the gaps between steps.
The problem
Each step lived in a different place, and a person had to carry the file from one to the next by hand. An enquiry came in by email or phone. Someone priced the work manually, against a fee schedule that lived in someone's head or a spreadsheet. Someone else drafted and sent the engagement letter. Someone opened the file in Karbon. Someone chased the client for documents, over email, one at a time. Eleven steps, no shared thread between them, and no way to see which enquiry sources actually turned into signed clients rather than clicks on a website.
What we built
One zero-touch run from first enquiry to a signed client sitting in Karbon. A quote form prices the work in real time, off the practice's own fee schedule, so a prospect sees a real number before anyone at the practice is on the phone. Capturing that lead fires the engagement letter automatically. An intake form looks the business up by its ABN on its own, rather than asking the prospect to retype details the practice can already pull. The client record lands in Karbon directly, with no hand-off where a staff member copies a file from one system to another. Every run is deterministic: rules and lookups do the routing, with no step in the chain left to a model's judgement.
How it runs
A prospect fills in the quote form and gets a price straight off the fee schedule. That capture triggers the engagement letter, so nobody has to remember to send it. The prospect completes an intake form that resolves their business by ABN instead of manual entry. The client is created in Karbon from there, and a dashboard rolls up every source that produced an enquiry, so the practice can see which channels actually convert to signed clients rather than which ones just get clicks.
Under the hood
The pricing step is a rule set built off the practice's own fee schedule, not a person eyeballing the scope and guessing a number. That's deliberate: the same enquiry produces the same quote every time, and the fee schedule can change without anyone touching the logic that applies it. The engagement letter is wired to the same capture event, so sending it isn't a task on someone's list, it's a consequence of the enquiry existing at all. The ABN lookup replaces a form field that used to ask the prospect to type out their own business name, address and structure, fields the practice can already resolve from a single public identifier.
None of the four steps, quote, letter, intake, file creation, needed a model in the loop. Each one is a lookup or a rule applied to data that already exists, which is why the run can be zero-touch without anyone having to trust a judgement call happening unsupervised. The dashboard sits on top of the same run: every enquiry that comes through is tagged with its source at the point of capture, so the rollup is a count of what actually happened, not a survey or an estimate.
What changed
Eleven separate onboarding steps collapsed into one zero-touch run. The team meets the new client instead of chasing forms and re-keying details across systems, and the dashboard means source decisions are made on which channels win work, not on a guess.
