ABOUT WILKINS KENNEDY

A top 20 accountancy firm in the United Kingdom, Wilkins Kennedy provides a full range of accounting and advisory services to a diverse range of clients throughout the UK and overseas. The company was established in 1882 as a single regional office and today has 75 partners, 17 regional offices and 600 members of staff.

PROBLEM

Wilkins Kennedy commonly used a combination of time-intensive manual changes and reformatting to create client engagement letters. This method of document generation typically involved printing off documentation and paper-based edits being made by Partners, which then required rekeying. Additional business pains included staff not using the latest versions of documents to generate their letters and unnecessarily printing drafts for review, amendments and approval.

Business risk was also heightened by key employee dependency – meaning that the employees who set up templates were identified as a single point of failure for ensuring successful creation of standardised engagement letters across the entire company.

SOLUTION

Wilkins Kennedy selected HotDocs to assist with error reduction, compliance and efficiency when generating client engagement letters. Additionally, the firm has gained control over document versioning and the sophisticated automation to streamline specific rules that are required to produce client documents. Wilkins Kennedy needed a solution to automatically allow for the storage and reuse of answer files when creating questions for fields and variables used in client engagement letters. These requirements were achieved through the use of HotDocs.

OUTCOME

The chartered accountancy and business advisory firm now uses HotDocs’ document automation technology across all of their UK offices. With some client engagement letters ranging in up to 20 pages, the amount of time spent creating each one has been vastly reduced by using HotDocs, with many now being produced in under ten minutes. The use of HotDocs has also moved the company away from methods that were reliant on “copy and paste” or “find and replace” to a fully controlled end-to-end process.

Key benefits from the use of HotDocs include:

  • Accurate document generation and reduced risk in creation of client engagement letters
  • Version control has been achieved with HotDocs, so staff are using the correct document templates every single time
  • Time savings of hours to minutes, inclusive of finding, modifying and creating new documents
  • Guaranteed cross-company standardization of business-critical client paperwork and documents

Wilkins Kennedy has achieved efficiency, control and error reduction are key benefits of a HotDocs solution for the creation of frequently used, customized documents and a powerful automation engine ensures that the firm can easily create HotDocs template for the client engagement letters that it issues on a daily basis.

Jenny Reed, Partner at Wilkins Kennedy, said: “We were looking for a centralized business solution for the production of critical documents across all of our offices that would allow us to become more digital in our approach to document creation. HotDocs has streamlined this entire process and we are delighted with results and return on investment in terms of time saved. HotDocs is an essential part of our business and we would highly recommend the product”.