Partners learn that an engagement is over budget or a team is overloaded only when the hours are already written off. Partners see scope, staffing and quality risks while an engagement is still running, and can fix them with the client.
A worked example for a typical Malaysian Audit, Tax & Advisory Firm, not a description of any real company. Go through the six stages in order: paste each prompt into Claude, check the answer against how your business really works, then continue. Change the profile at the start to match yours.
Stage 1 of 6
Map how the operation really runs
Act as an operations consultant. I run a Audit, Tax & Advisory Firm in Malaysia. Profile: A Malaysian audit, tax and advisory firm — ~30 partners, ~400 staff, offices in KL, Penang and Johor, with busy seasons around year-end audits and tax filing.
Interview me, one question at a time, to map how decisions actually get made today. Cover: the recurring meetings and reports, who decides what, which numbers people trust, and where decisions are late or made on gut feel.
Known friction: Billable hours vs. Burnout; Agreed fee vs. Extra work; Careful review vs. Filing deadlines; New clients vs. Independence rules; Partner attention vs. Delegating.
After 8 to 10 questions, summarise the five decisions that cost us the most when made late, in a table: decision, current owner, current delay, cost of delay.
Stage 2 of 6
Design the specialist agents
Using the decision map above, design 5 specialist AI agents for our Audit, Tax & Advisory Firm: Proposal, Fee Control, Team Capacity, Review Quality, Service Line.
For each agent give: the one question it answers every day, the data it reads, what it may recommend, what it must never do alone, and the format of its output.
Starting points for what each should watch:
- Proposal: proposals, renewals, fee realisation, client concentration
- Fee Control: budget vs. actual hours, scope creep, fee-recovery risk
- Team Capacity: utilisation by grade, busy-season capacity, overtime, leave
- Review Quality: review backlog, independence checks, CPD status
- Service Line: margin by service line, partner capacity, new-service cases
Keep every agent narrow. If an agent covers two jobs, split it.
Stage 3 of 6
Wire up data and compliance
For the agents above, list the data feeds needed. Likely systems: Practice-management and timesheet system; Billing and WIP; CRM; Quality-review and CPD records.
Output a table per agent: field, source, how often it refreshes, data-quality risk, and what the agent should do if the feed is stale or missing. Mark every personal-data field and say how to minimise it.
Rules we operate under: MIA by-laws, AOB inspection expectations, auditor independence rules, client confidentiality and PDPA 2010. Client data must never leave approved environments.
End with a short list of actions that always need human sign-off.
Stage 4 of 6
Design the morning brief
Design the single daily brief that pulls the 5 agents together for the Managing Partner, ready before the first meeting of the day.
Specify how the brief merges overlapping or conflicting recommendations, how it ranks items (impact, urgency, reversibility, confidence), and the exact fields per item: what to decide, recommended action, evidence, owner, deadline, and the cost of doing nothing.
Then write a realistic sample brief of five items. Items might resemble: Re-staff the manufacturing audit: two seniors are over 110% utilisation / Issue a variation request on the engagement running 35% over budget / Hold new-client acceptance on one prospect pending an independence check.
Stage 5 of 6
Build and automate it
Turn the design into a working automation for our Audit, Tax & Advisory Firm.
Needs: a scheduled daily run; the 5 agents run in parallel and each saves structured JSON; a final step reads them all and sends the brief by email or chat; every run is logged with inputs, outputs and cost.
Propose the build with Claude plus a workflow tool (for example n8n or the Claude Agent SDK). Give the steps in order, what happens when a data feed fails, and a human-approval step before anything that spends money or makes a customer commitment.
Stage 6 of 6
Roll out and measure
Write a rollout plan for the Audit, Tax & Advisory Firm agent team that starts small and earns trust.
Stage 1: one agent, advisory only, run alongside the current process. Stage 2: add the other agents. Stage 3: switch on the daily brief. Stage 4: let agents prepare low-risk actions for approval.
For each stage give duration, owners, what "ready to move on" means, and the metrics to track: time to decision, how often recommendations are accepted, hours saved, and errors caught. Close with the three biggest risks and how we contain them.
