A back-office agent that watches every deadline so the partner doesn't have to.

The brief

A seven-person accountancy practice with about 340 active client engagements: corporation tax filings, VAT returns, payroll RTI, Companies House confirmation statements and self-assessment. Statutory deadlines lived in Karbon. Workload routing (who actually had time this week to clear the deadline list) lived in the partner's head.

Deadlines were still missed in busy weeks. The practice knew about them. What slipped was the daily reconciliation between deadline pressure and fee-earner capacity, a 90-minute manual exercise the partner kept skipping when client work spiked.

The build

An autonomous back-office agent reads Karbon's deadline data and engagement statuses every morning. It cross-references upcoming deadlines against each fee-earner's open-matter workload (with rough hours-to-completion estimates per matter type) and posts a five-minute morning digest in Slack: today's at-risk deadlines, who has bandwidth, and which client reminders are queued.

The agent drafts client reminder emails for the partner to review and release with one click. It never sends a client-facing message on its own. It also flags drift: clients whose reminders have been queued for more than seven days, engagements where the fee-earner has gone quiet, and matters where the deadline keeps moving without a written reason.

Stack

• Python
• LangChain
• Karbon API
• Postgres
• Slack webhook
• Claude Sonnet