Centralizing collaboration to reduce engagement friction

Your advisory practice is growing faster than audit. Your best talent wants flexibility you could not offer five years ago. And your newest partner just lost three hours reconstructing context from a client file that lives across SharePoint, your practice management system, and someone’s inbox.

This is not a technology problem. It is a revenue problem.

While your firm bills for expertise and judgment, your people are spending 12 to 15 hours a week hunting for information, reconciling versions, and managing work across systems that were never designed to work together. The math is brutal. That is nearly two billable days per person, per week, going to administrative friction instead of client value.

The firms pulling ahead are not working harder. They have stopped tolerating systems that cost more in lost productivity than they would ever spend fixing them.

These realities were at the center of a recent webinar hosted by Boomer Consulting, Reimagining engagement: Build a firm that runs with less friction. Sponsored by Intapp, the session featured insights from Jon Hubbard, Shareholder and Chief Growth Officer at Boomer Consulting, Richard Barbour of Forge Software, and Intapp on how firms can modernize collaboration across the engagement lifecycle.

If you were unable to attend live, the on-demand recording is available. Below are the key takeaways from the discussion and why they matter for accounting firm leaders.

The core challenge: Friction is the hidden cost

The discussion opened with a clear diagnosis: most client engagements don’t fail due to lack of talent or expertise, but because of fragmented systems, scattered documents, and disconnected collaboration tools. Professionals spend excessive time searching for information, managing versions, and navigating email overload, which is work that adds motion but little value. This friction quietly erodes productivity, client confidence, and staff satisfaction.

Collaboration as the critical bottleneck

While firms often rely on multiple best-of-breed systems across CRM, practice management, compliance, and billing, collaboration remains the most complex and failure-prone part of the engagement lifecycle. Remote and hybrid work have amplified this challenge, introducing tool sprawl, inconsistent adoption, and growing non-compliance when systems are hard to use. The result is version confusion, slower client response times, and reduced visibility across service lines.

A three-pillar engagement lifecycle model

The presenters introduced a simplified but powerful framework for reducing friction through a centralized collaboration approach:

1. Engagement Setup: Automated creation of secure, templated engagement workspaces with consistent structure, governance, and role-based access, ensuring teams can start work immediately without improvisation.
2. Engagement Delivery: A centralized hub that brings documents, emails, tasks, and conversations together in context, enabling real-time collaboration, structured search, task-driven workflows, and secure client interaction through portals.
3. Engagement Close & Archive: Systematic capture of institutional knowledge (documents, communications, partner notes), automated retention and compliance, and cost-effective archiving to preserve value while preparing firms for future AI-driven insights.

What “Good” looks like in practice

A live demonstration showed how modern collaboration can operate directly within familiar tools like Microsoft 365, without forcing professionals to jump between systems. Tasks, approvals, document versioning, internal collaboration, and client portals are all connected to the engagement context, reducing email dependency and improving accountability, prioritization, and turnaround time.

Measurable business impact

Firms using this approach are seeing tangible results, including:

• Meaningful time savings for fee earners, partners, and IT teams
• Faster engagement setup through automation
• Improved compliance and auditability
• Better workload visibility and capacity planning
• Stronger foundations for future AI initiatives by ensuring clean, structured, and contextualized data

Leadership and mindset matter

A recurring theme was that technology alone is not enough. Successful firms align leadership, governance, and mindset around firm-wide collaboration, not just service-line silos. The shift is from “where do I store files?” to “how does the firm work together, securely and consistently, across the full client relationship?”

Bottom line

Reducing friction in engagement delivery isn’t about adding more tools; it’s about connecting work, people, and information around the engagement itself. Firms that get this right not only improve efficiency and client service today but also position themselves for scalable growth and AI-enabled innovation tomorrow.

Watch the on-demand webinar

If you want to see how centralized collaboration can help your firm work more efficiently and scale with confidence, watch the on-demand recording of Reimagining engagement: Build a firm that runs with less friction.

Watch the on-demand webinar here.