A 6-person accounting practice retires the month-end all-nighter.

The composite this case is drawn from: a six-person accounting practice in Tanjong Pagar, eighty-odd SME clients on monthly or quarterly cycles. The week before every filing deadline, the practice turned into a chasing operation — bank statements not sent, invoices missing, the same reminder emails written by hand forty times, escalating in politeness-decay from "gentle reminder" to "URGENT: final notice." Meanwhile the practice's own billing slipped, because invoicing clients was the one job that could always wait another day.

The Walkthrough sat in on a month-end. The diagnostic line that made the partners wince: of the 31 hours the team logged that week on "client work," 11 were spent asking clients for documents and 4 were spent invoicing — 15 hours of overhead to do 16 hours of accounting.

Two builds. The Email Triage watches the practice inbox, matches incoming documents to the right client file and checklist item, and drafts the chase emails for whatever is still missing — escalating on the practice's own schedule, in the practice's own tone, with a human glance before each send. The Invoice Engine reads the month's timesheets, drafts invoices with plain-English narratives per engagement letter, and queues them for partner approval on the 1st, every month, without anyone remembering to start.

Month-end stopped being an event. Documents now mostly arrive before anyone would have chased them, because the first reminder goes out the day the item becomes due rather than the week it becomes urgent. And the practice's own receivables improved by eleven days — the firm that invoices everyone else's clients finally invoices its own on time.