Meridian is a mid-size accounting firm serving franchise operators across the Southeast. In 2025, their intake queue was buckling.
The situation
Three partners. Eleven staff accountants. Roughly 900 clients, a lot of them franchise groups with a half-dozen entities each. The work was straightforward on paper — ingest invoices, reconcile to purchase orders, book to the GL, generate the monthly package. In practice, the firm's best people were spending four hours a day in data-entry purgatory.
They'd tried the usual patches: a document-scanning vendor, a "smart" OCR tool, an offshore BPO contract. Each helped a little. None of them closed the gap, and all of them introduced a new step a human had to double-check.
We weren't against automation. We were against owning a process that wasn't ours anymore. Our partners still had to sign off — we needed tooling that made the sign-off fast, not tooling that tried to remove us from the loop.
— Jordan Reese · Managing Partner · Meridian CPA
What the partners asked for
The brief was unusual for an AI engagement. It was not "how much headcount can we cut?" It was: keep every partner-level sign-off, and make it take ten seconds instead of ten minutes.
That constraint shaped the whole build. Helpyr's agents would handle extraction, matching, classification, and drafting. Humans would still click "approve" on anything that touched a client's ledger.
The engagement
We started with two weeks in their office — literally sitting next to the staff accountants, watching how invoices actually flowed. Not the flow on the SOP doc; the real one, with the sticky notes and the special-case vendors and the "Beth handles those" exceptions.
By the end of week three, we had an annotated map of every decision in the intake process, tagged by frequency, risk, and "does this need a partner?" We used that map as the blueprint for the first workflow.
What we built
One agent stack, three workflows: invoice intake → PO matching → GL posting, monthly reconciliation, and client-letter drafting. All three shared one operator console and one audit log.
Every document landed in a unified review queue. The agent wrote its reasoning and confidence next to each row. The partners could batch-approve the 0.95-and-above rows with a single keystroke and spend their actual attention on the exceptions.
Results
After 12 weeks, the firm was processing 3.6× the baseline volume with the same team. Partner review time dropped from 42 minutes per batch to under 8. No client saw a change in output quality — Meridian's standard of care stayed intact because Meridian's partners were still the ones signing.
The review checkpoints are the thing. Our team trusts the output because they're still in the loop. That's the part other vendors missed.
— Jordan Reese · Managing Partner
What's next
Phase two, in flight: a drafting agent for client quarterly letters, trained on five years of Meridian's own writing. Phase three on the whiteboard: tax-season triage. The operator console stays the same — the workflows multiply.