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Capacity engineering · Accounting firms · Netherlands

AI-native accountancy firms are automating the work your team still does by hand. Put the same automation behind the firm your clients already trust.

First step
A free half-day
Live in
90 days
Works with
The systems you run

Your people spend their week checking, chasing and reconciling around software that does none of it for them. The free half-day audit measures how much of your year that takes, and puts a figure on what a build could return.

01

The capacity problem

The same decisions, on every file, every month.

Categorisation, reconciliation and missing-document chasing come round again on every administration you carry. Each one needs somebody's attention, and attention is the thing you are short of.

Exact Online carries the day-to-day ledger, Basecone captures the purchase invoices, Nmbrs runs the payroll, Visionplanner builds the jaarrekening and Nextens files the tax. Figures move between them; judgement does not. Somebody still checks the coding line by line, runs down the accounts that did not map, and works out why a difference will not close before the period does. That is where the hours go, and it is where the errors enter the file that a senior reviewer has to find weeks later.

Hiring does not remove that work; it adds people to keep up with it. Fixing the handoff layer solves it at the root.

02

Where the hours sit

Four verdicts.

Some of this work can be automated outright, and some of it needs a rules engine with a person on the exceptions. Some carries a mandatory human sign-off. The rest is where the value of your service lives, and automating it would be the mistake.

WorkVerdict
Invoice and receipt entryAutomate
Missing-document chasingAutomate
Moving figures between your systemsAutomate
Transaction categorisation and BTW codingRules plus exceptions
Bank reconciliationRules plus exceptions
Management report preparationRules plus exceptions
Month-end closeHuman sign-off
Exception investigationHuman sign-off
Jaarrekening preparationHuman sign-off
Cross-border BTW analysisDo not automate
Financial cleanupDo not automate
Client advisoryDo not automate
ForecastingDo not automate
Senior file review and board adoption of the jaarrekeningDo not automate

03

What gets built, in what order

The transaction layer first, because everything else depends on it.

Everything built above the transaction layer inherits whatever that layer gets wrong, so T2 waits for T1 to be reliable. Review is T3, where a senior sees the exceptions rather than the whole file.

  1. 01 T1 Invoice and receipt extraction Removes manual data entry from the transaction layer
  2. 02 T1 Transaction categorisation A rules engine codes the routine and a person sees only what falls out
  3. 03 T1 Bank reconciliation Matching with a confidence score, exceptions flagged
  4. 04 T2 BTW anomaly detection Compliance risk surfaced before the return is reviewed
  5. 05 T2 Missing-document chasing Reminders and escalation that run without a person
  6. 06 T2 Workflow orchestration The right job triggered at the right point in the period
  7. 07 T3 Exception queues with triage Attention pointed at the highest-risk items first
  8. 08 T3 Bookkeeping review A quality gate before the accountant picks the file up

A 90-day build covers T1 and T2 in full. T3 is scoped in the audit and lands inside the build or inside the retainer, depending on how clean your transaction layer is on day one.

04

How the engagement runs

A free half-day audit, then a fixed-price build.

Step one · Free

The Capacity Audit

Half a day inside your firm. The roles get walked, the real volumes counted, and the handoffs between your systems read as they actually run. You leave with the model's figure for recoverable year-one capacity on your own measured numbers, the categories it sits in, and a scope you can act on. If the audit cannot find several times over what a build would cost, I will say so and we stop there.

Four things shrink what a build can recover, and the audit goes looking for them first.

  • Cross-border trade. Where OSS, IOSS, Intrastat and ICP dominate the BTW work, that analysis is specialist review and stays with your people. The routine coding underneath it does not.
  • An advisory-led book. Advisory is the most valuable work your people do, and a build should touch very little of it. The compliance work carrying it is still worth measuring.
  • Statutory audit clients. Transaction work for the clients your firm audits does not sit in your practice, so it is not in the number. That changes the size of what a build absorbs, and not whether the rest of your book is worth building for.
  • Capture already automated. If most purchase documents already arrive through scan-and-recognise, that reading time is not there to recover.

Step two · Fixed price

The 90-Day Capacity Build

The fee is set after the audit, against what the audit finds in your firm, and it does not move once the scope is written.

  1. The integration build. The T1 and T2 layers above, wired into your ledger, your bank feeds and your filing tools.
  2. Adoption sessions and playbooks. Your bookkeepers and accountants trained on the new flow, with a written playbook per role so the knowledge is not held in one head.
  3. Full handover. Architecture, credentials, runbooks and the rules files, documented and yours at handover.
  4. 90 days of support. Bug fixes, rule tuning and exception-queue calibration for the first quarter it runs against real client work.
  5. Client communications kit. The Dutch templates and upload flow your clients receive, so the change lands with them as a service improvement.

05

Capacity

One build at a time.

A build takes a quarter, and the support after it does not stop at handover. The next one starts as soon as an audit finds enough to build for. Firms are chosen for fit rather than to fill a list.

A retainer is available after the build, and it exists because this field moves faster than a practice can track while running itself. Exact Online changes its API surface, and document-reading models keep shifting the line between what a rule can decide and what still needs a person.

Start with the number.

The calculator runs the same model the audit runs, opening on a firm of forty fee-earners. Change the inputs to your own and it recalculates as you type. Every band, coefficient and unit time behind it is published, with its provenance marked.

Run the Capacity Audit calculator