← Case studies · AI audit · Immigration services · 14 days
An immigration firm running cases on spreadsheets, with $208,000 a year of documented waste
waste priced, per year
largest single leak
areas examined
An immigration and visa firm: eight staff across two offices, running 30 to 40 active applications at any one time. This is a lighter entry in the library, an anonymised audit summary rather than a full deep-dive, so we will stick to what the record states. The whole operation ran on three tools: spreadsheets, notepads and an accounting package. That was it. No case-management system, no shared view of where any application was up to, and no automatic tracking of the dates that matter most in this business.
Every case lived in someone's spreadsheet or someone's notepad. Getting from client intake to lodgement took two to three weeks, and most of that was not professional work, it was chasing documents. Worse, because there was no central record of what had already arrived, staff were re-requesting documents the firm already had. Clients were being asked twice for the same paperwork, which is a poor experience for someone already anxious about a visa. There was no visa-expiry tracking either, so the most critical dates in the business lived in people's heads.
Findings & waste analysis
Immigration and visa firm · audited April 2026
- Document collection and redundant chasing alone$104K/yr
- Client intake to lodgement, most of it spent chasing documents2–3 weeks
- The whole firm running on spreadsheets, notepads and an accounting package3 tools
- Active applications managed with no centralised case visibility and no visa-expiry tracking30–40 cases
- Total documented waste across the audit$208,000/yr
figures verbatim, in the client’s own rates · names removed
The audit documented $208,000 a year of waste across the firm. The standout line: $104K a year going on document collection and redundant chasing alone. That is people paid for professional judgement spending their days asking for files, checking whether files had arrived, and asking again for files that were already in the building. The rest followed the same pattern, spreadsheet operations at a scale spreadsheets were never meant to carry, with no centralised case visibility to catch any of it before it cost time.
Free 30 min · one process priced live, like the lines above
How it ran before
- Document collection and redundant chasing alone
- Client intake to lodgement, most of it spent chasing documents
- The whole firm running on spreadsheets, notepads and an accounting package
The blueprint we handed over
- handed over puts one centralised case view at the middle of the firm, so every application, document and deadline lives somewhere everyone can see.
- Document collection becomes a checklist the client can see too: requested once, ticked off on arrival, never re-requested.
- Visa expiry dates get tracked automatically instead of remembered.
This audit's findings, laid out as the client received them, names removed. The full deliverable maps every process, prices every leak, and ends in a build plan in priority order.
Walk through a full sample audit →Kickoff
Team sessions, every handoff mapped
Every leak priced in their rates
Findings + blueprint, live
None of this was visible from the owner’s chair.
Found by mapping the operation person by person, and pricing what came up. Same method, your rates: 3× the fee in findings, or the audit is free.