All Industries
Professional Services

Client-Ready Operations. Internally Efficient.

OpenSME helps law firms, accountancies, consultancies, and professional service businesses digitise client-facing processes, matter tracking, and compliance management, presenting a more credible and responsive face to clients while freeing fee-earners from administrative overhead.

The Client Experience Is Professional. The Back Office Is Not.

Professional service firms invest heavily in the quality of their advice and the calibre of their people, but often the operational processes surrounding client delivery are still manual, fragmented, and disproportionately burdensome. Client intake on paper or email. Matter status tracked in someone's inbox. Time capture on spreadsheets completed at month end from memory.

Clients increasingly expect the digital responsiveness from their professional advisers that they experience from every other service provider. The firms that close this gap build stronger relationships, reduce write-offs, and win more referrals.

Common Pain Points
  • Client onboarding handled via email and paper forms, slow, error-prone, and difficult to track
  • Matter or project status visible only to the lead fee-earner with clients and management often out of the loop
  • Time capture completed from memory at month end, leading to write-offs and billing disputes
  • Compliance and regulatory checks managed in spreadsheets with no automatic monitoring
  • No structured client satisfaction feedback with NPS or satisfaction data absent or anecdotal
  • Practice performance reported from Finance data only with no operational leading indicators
Recommended Components

The Right Tools for the Job

These components from the OpenSME catalog are most relevant to your industry. They work standalone or combined — configured to your specific workflows, not adapted from generic software.

Client Portal

A branded digital portal where clients submit instructions, access matter updates, share documents, and communicate with your team, reducing inbound calls and email chasing while improving the perceived client experience.

White-labelRequest trackingClient-facing
Capture & Fieldwork

Field Forms Builder

Create structured digital intake forms for new client onboarding, matter scoping, conflict checks, and client satisfaction surveys, replacing email threads and paper forms with structured, searchable data.

Custom fieldsConditional logicExport-ready
Intelligence & AI

Compliance Monitor

Track KYC refresh schedules, AML review dates, CPD completion requirements, regulatory submission deadlines, and internal quality assurance obligations with automated alerts before each deadline.

SLA trackingAuto-flaggingAudit-ready
Dashboards & Reporting

KPI Analytics Console

Track matter pipeline, billing realisation rates, client satisfaction scores, and team utilisation in a single configurable view, giving practice managers operational visibility beyond Finance reports alone.

Custom KPIsTrend chartsDrill-down
Dashboards & Reporting

Automated Report Builder

Generate matter status reports for clients, practice performance summaries for leadership, and compliance evidence packs for regulators, automatically and on schedule.

Scheduled deliveryPDF / webData-driven

Schedule Orchestrator

Manage resource allocation across client engagements, matching fee-earner availability, expertise, and capacity to active matters, reducing conflicts and improving utilisation visibility.

Resource allocationSkills-basedConstraint engine
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Four-Week Deployment

From Brief to Live in One Month

Using our component delivery methodology, a standard deployment for your industry follows this four-week arc — small, focused, and live before the momentum fades.

Week 1
DISCOVER

Map Client Lifecycle and Compliance Obligations

  • Document the current client onboarding journey from first contact to engagement letter
  • Identify all regulatory compliance obligations and their current tracking methods
  • Map matter management process: how is status tracked and communicated to clients?
  • Agree on priority use case: client portal and onboarding digitisation
  • Confirm integration requirements with practice management or billing systems
Week 2
CONFIGURE

Build Client-Facing and Compliance Workflows

  • Configure client portal with your branding, document sharing, and matter status views
  • Build digital onboarding and intake forms for new client and matter setup
  • Set up compliance monitoring for KYC, AML, and CPD requirements with alert schedule
  • Configure practice dashboard with pipeline, utilisation, and satisfaction KPIs
  • Build automated matter status report template for client delivery
Week 3
TEST

Pilot with an Active Client Account

  • Onboard one active client to the portal and run parallel communication for two weeks
  • Test onboarding form flow end-to-end: completion, routing, and downstream actions
  • Validate that compliance alerts trigger correctly for an approaching KYC renewal
  • Test automated matter report generation and have a client review the output
  • Incorporate feedback from fee-earners and the pilot client before wider rollout
Week 4
DEPLOY

Go Live Across the Practice

  • Roll out client portal to all active clients with a communication explaining the benefit
  • Brief fee-earners on the portal and matter update workflow
  • Activate compliance monitoring for all clients against the full regulatory calendar
  • Generate first practice performance dashboard with baseline metrics established
  • Plan next phase: client satisfaction programme or expanded billing integration
Want the full methodology breakdown? Read the Blueprints page →
Use Cases

How It Comes Together in Practice

Typical operational scenarios for your industry — and how OpenSME components address each one in a real deployment.

01

Digital Client Onboarding for a Law Firm

Scenario

A mid-size law firm's new client onboarding process takes an average of 9 days from first contact to engagement letter, involving 4 email exchanges, a paper conflict check form, a PDF ID request, and a manually typed engagement letter.

Components

Field Forms Builder creates a digital new client intake form collecting all required information including ID document uploads and conflict check disclosures in one submission. Compliance Monitor tracks KYC and conflict check completion. The partner approves digitally.

Outcome

Onboarding time drops from 9 days to 2.5 days. Partner onboarding administration time drops from 45 minutes to 10 minutes per client. New clients cite the digital onboarding experience as a positive differentiator in post-matter feedback.

02

Client Portal That Reduces Partner Interruptions

Scenario

Partners and senior associates at a consulting firm receive an average of 12 client status enquiry emails per week per active engagement. Responding takes 2 to 3 hours of fee-earner time that is not billable.

Components

Client Portal provides clients with a live view of their matter status, upcoming milestones, and shared documents. Automated Report Builder sends a weekly matter update to each client without fee-earner intervention. Notification Hub alerts clients when a deliverable is ready or a milestone is reached.

Outcome

Client status enquiry emails drop by 78% in the first month. Fee-earner time recovered from email administration is approximately 2 hours per week per partner, returned to billable work or business development.

03

Compliance Monitoring That Does Not Fall Through the Cracks

Scenario

An accounting firm must track KYC refresh requirements, annual conflict re-checks, and partner CPD obligations across its 18-person team. These are managed in a shared Excel file last fully updated 6 months ago. A regulatory inspection finds three overdue KYC records.

Components

Compliance Monitor holds every client's KYC review date, conflict check schedule, and the responsible partner. It flags upcoming reviews 60, 30, and 7 days before each deadline. The compliance partner sees a live dashboard of all upcoming obligations.

Outcome

All three overdue KYC records are remediated within 48 hours of deployment. The next regulatory inspection finds no compliance gaps. The compliance partner's time spent on tracking drops from 4 hours per week to 30 minutes of dashboard review.

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Ready to See This for Your Operation?

We will walk you through the components most relevant to your specific workflows — no commitment, no generic demo script.

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