When the best service is self-service

How member firms in the US and Dominican Republic took the hard work out of paperwork.

Each year, Baker Tilly’s real estate advisory team handles hundreds of property acquisition projects for clients. Naturally, these involve the careful management of large volumes of documents – a time-consuming but vital part of the process.

Faced with a labour-intensive workload in areas ranging from data entry and email communications to tracking each project’s status and follow-up activities, the team responsible needed some way to manage a burgeoning workload.

Collaboration in action

Step in Baker Tilly in the US and the Dominican Republic. They teamed up to design, develop and roll out the solution – a custom, end-to-end, low-code application to streamline the process. This new application lets clients upload documents using a self-service portal – reducing back and forth email traffic, and providing on-demand access to each project’s status and progress.

A simplified workflow – for everyone

This new application reads documents as they’re uploaded. It pulls in relevant data and triggers various actions for the real estate advisory team based on each document’s contents. This reduces instances of human error around data and frees team members to focus on follow-up actions. For added value, the data gathered can be fed downstream to other systems – reducing manual work even further.

Time saved for clients and colleagues

The results? Our colleagues in real estate advisory tell us they’re seeing sizable reductions in time spent entering and analysing data, and dramatic cut in emails.

The new application extracts complex legal terminology accurately, automatically organising the data captured to improve searching, reporting and analysis. Such automation also greatly reduces human error throughout the process.

This change to our internal workflow has impressed clients, too: satisfaction levels have increased thanks to more transparency, improved communication, and a marked uptick in quality.