Client intake and document chasing
The onboarding checklist that lives in somebody's head, and the four emails asking again for the same statement. Frequent, unglamorous, and a real drag on the first impression a new client gets.
Bellevue, Washington
Workflow automation for Bellevue firms
The short answer
I'm Bryan Piard, based in Renton, and for Bellevue firms that bill for time I make systems for client intake, chasing documents, recurring client reports and scheduling. Where the work touches client money or client records, the system prepares it and a person approves it before anything goes out. What it's allowed to touch gets agreed in writing first.
In a practice that bills for time, the admin around the work is the most expensive thing in the building. That is usually where I start.
Written by Bryan Piard · Published · Updated
Free, no account, and it will tell you to leave the work alone if that is the right answer.
What the work looks like here
Bellevue is not a generic market, and this is not a generic page.
Bellevue's business base leans professional: law, accounting, wealth management, real estate, and a wide layer of consultancies and small firms serving the tech economy around them. The repetitive work in those firms has a specific shape — client intake, document collection and chasing, engagement paperwork, scheduling, recurring client reporting, and the compliance trail underneath all of it.
It also has a specific constraint. A firm handling client money or client records cannot hand a process to something that acts on its own, and should not want to. Everything I build has a setting for how much authority it gets, and for most of this work the honest answer is: it prepares, a person approves, then it sends.
Where I would look first
Three jobs worth checking in a Bellevue business
These are the patterns I see most often in this part of the county. Not a promise that yours is one of them — that is what the Fit Check and the Map are for.
Recurring client reporting
The same report rebuilt monthly or quarterly from the same three sources. Worth building when the cadence is fixed and the format rarely changes.
Scheduling and the follow-up trail
Booking, confirming, reminding, rescheduling, and the note that has to end up in the file afterwards. The reminder part is easy; the part that keeps the record straight is the part worth designing.
How it goes
Four steps, and you can stop after any of them.
Start with one recurring problem in your Bellevue business. The first two steps are free; the Map gives you a plan to act on before any implementation is scoped.
Step one
Free · 60 seconds
The Workflow Fit Check
Five questions on your own screen. You read the answer before I ask you for anything, and one of the possible answers is that you should not automate this yet.
Step two
Free · 20 minutes
A fit call
A conversation about whether this is a fit, not a free solution design. If it is not, you will hear that on the call.
Step three
$750
The Workflow Opportunity Map
One customer or operational workflow: the steps, ownership, likely causes, and a practical first improvement. Procedures, communication, and team guidance come before tools where that is the better fix. Credited toward a build signed within 30 days. What is in a Map
Step four
From $2,500
The build
When software is the right fix, most builds land between $3,500 and $9,000. Process guidance and team enablement are scoped separately. For systems, take the keys, choose maintenance, or ask me to run it.
I will not quote a build price off a web form. Ranges point at the Map, and the Map is where a real number comes from.
Before you hire anyone
Should you buy a tool instead?
For the workflows that come up most in Bellevue, I have written out the honest version of that decision — including when the right answer is an off-the-shelf product and you should keep your money.
The part most people worry about
Nothing gets authority by accident.
Every workflow I build has a setting for how much it is allowed to do on its own, and you pick it per workflow rather than once for the whole business.
It drafts, you send
The system does the assembling and the remembering. A person reads it and presses the button. Where most work should start, and where a lot of it should stay.
It runs, you get told
It acts on the rules you agreed and reports what it did. Suitable once a workflow has proven itself and the cost of a wrong move is small.
It runs, you can stop it
Fully hands-off with a switch you own and a record of every action. Appropriate for high-volume, low-judgement work, and not much else.
Whether I can actually build
Practical work, with its scope made clear.
My experience includes improving service journeys, preparing frontline teams for new products, and creating tools that remove repetitive work. My own AI-assisted projects show the implementation side: approvals, reporting, content preparation, and workflow controls. The examples distinguish prior internal work, prototypes, and historical project results. They are evidence of the work, not a forecast for your business.
What I will not do is show you a number from a business in Bellevue that I have not worked with. If I have not done it, it does not go on the page.
Straight answers
Questions Bellevue owners actually ask
We handle confidential client information. What does the system actually touch?
That gets settled in writing before anything is built, workflow by workflow: which systems are read, which vendors are involved, what is retained and for how long, and what is explicitly excluded. I will not give you a one-word promise that everything is safe — I will give you a specific list, and anything you are not comfortable with stays out of scope.
What if the answer is that we should not automate this?
Then that is the answer, and you get it for free in about a minute. The Fit Check genuinely returns “do not automate this yet” when the work is infrequent or a miss costs nothing, and I have not tuned that away to win more business. A build on the wrong workflow is worse than no build: you pay for it, then you maintain it, then you work around it.
Are you going to replace someone's job?
That is not what this work is for and it is not usually where the money is. The jobs worth building are the ones nobody's title covers — the retyping, the chasing, the reconciling that gets done at seven in the evening by whoever is still there. Taking that off a person's plate is the point.
How long before something is actually working?
A Map takes about a week from the call. A first build is usually two to four weeks after that, depending on how many systems have to agree and how quickly I can get access to them. I would rather ship one workflow that works than four that half-work.
Nearby
I work across south and east King County
Same work, different local shape. Every one of these is close enough that a first meeting can happen in person.
Start with one recurring problem
Find a useful place to start.
No account, no calendar, no waiting for a reply. Run the Fit Check and you get the read on your own screen. If the workflow looks worth exploring, the next step is a free 20-minute call about the problem, its impact, and whether I can help. The result is a starting point, not a diagnosis or a build quote.
Or just write to me: bryan@perseidechocreations.com · or call 425-243-3473