How Passman Leonard Replaced Two Tools With One - And Handed Back 80+ Hours A Year

Challenge

Passman Leonard is a 10-person chartered certified practice in Uxbridge, serving around 950 clients across Greater London - sole traders, limited companies, SMEs and landlords. Before Workiro, every client document journey ran across a stack of tools that didn't talk to each other.

Key challenges included:

❌ A document journey split across separate platforms:
To get a return signed, the team built it in TaxCalc, saved a copy into SmartVault, sent it to the client through Signable, saved the signed copy back, then refiled in TaxCalc.

"Separate platforms had separate roles in every process, and we had to go between each one repeatedly."

❌ Time lost saving and refiling by hand:
Every signed return carried at least five minutes of manual saving and refiling between tools - repeated two to three times a day on average, and up to ten a day through the January self-assessment peak.

❌ No proof of what the client had seen:
Checking whether a client had opened a document in Signable meant digging into the envelope's notes. When clients claimed they hadn't received something, there was no fast way to show otherwise.

❌ Room to send to the wrong client:
Documents went out as standalone envelopes rather than from the client's own file, leaving room for a return to reach the wrong recipient.

❌ Onboarding and tasks lost in email and Microsoft Teams:
New-client onboarding ran on emails back and forth and messages in Teams. With several onboardings live at once, it was easy to lose track of who was at which stage - and requests to clients would stall or get forgotten.

Solution

Passman Leonard brought document management, client communication, e-signatures and task management into Workiro, sitting alongside TaxCalc for creating and filing returns and engager for tracking what's due. A return is now created in TaxCalc, saved straight into Workiro, sent to the client in a single task thread, signed and filed back on the client file automatically - with no copies saved between tools along the way.

"Basically, we've skipped an entire step. We don't have to save the documents and make sure they're filed everywhere before we file them. Workiro does that for us."

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‍Key features that made the difference

⚡ One thread for the document and the conversation: The signature request and the client conversation sit in the same thread. Clients sign, ask questions and get answers in one place - and the signed document stays exactly where it is, ready to file.

⚡ Proof of delivery on every document: The team can see the moment a client opens a document.

"There have been times where clients have claimed not to have accessed documents, but in Workiro you can easily see when a client has opened and seen it."

⚡ Documents sent from the client's own file: Because every document sits under the client it belongs to, there's far less chance of a return going to the wrong recipient.

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⚡ Tasks that keep onboarding on track: Onboarding and internal work run on tasks tied to each client, so the team can see who's still outstanding and at what stage - instead of chasing threads across email and Teams.

⚡ Filed straight from Outlook: The Outlook add-in saves client emails - and every later reply in the same chain, automatically - straight into Workiro, so nothing has to be remembered and re-saved.

⚡ Find any return by tag, not folder: Signed returns can be filtered by document type and year in seconds, replacing folder trees.

The Results

Since moving to Workiro, Passman Leonard has tightened its whole client-document process - from first onboarding through to filing with Companies House and HMRC.

🟢 Over 80 hours of admin handed back a year

The save-and-refile step between tools is gone. The team signs two to three returns a day for most of the year, rising to around ten a day through the November-to-January self-assessment peak - close to 1,000 signed returns annually.

At five-plus minutes saved on each, that is roughly 80 to 100 hours of admin time returned a year, on the signing step alone.

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🟢 One platform instead of two vendors

Wórkiro brings document management, a branded client portal and unlimited e-signatures into a single plan. Two vendors, two contracts and two logins become one. SmartVault and Signable are kept only as backups while the team finishes the transition, with the goal of dropping both.

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🟢 A full history on every document

Each return sits in Workiro from creation to signature to filing, giving the team the complete audit trail in one place for any client or HMRC query.

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🟢 Onboarding that no longer slips

With every client's stage visible on a task, requests stop getting lost in email - and the team plans to standardise onboarding further with Workiro's workflows tool.

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🟢 Better client uptake than expected

"It's actually been better taken than I expected. I expected more clients to struggle with it, but for the most part they haven't struggled at all."