Add up the hours your firm spends each week writing the same letters, slightly differently — engagement letters, fee increases, records chasers. That's the bill AI can quietly halve. And it's the least glamorous thing it does.

When people picture AI in an accountancy firm, they picture the clever stuff — reconciling a year of bank statements, reviewing a file. And it does do that. But the thing that's given us back the most hours is embarrassingly dull. It's the writing.

Think about what you actually write in a week. The engagement letter for a new client. The fee-increase letter you've been putting off. The third records chaser to the client who never replies. The cover note on a set of accounts. The job advert. None of it is hard. All of it takes time — mostly because starting is the hard part. You sit staring at a blank page trying to find the right tone.

The fee-increase letter is the one that converted me. I used to dread it. Firm enough to hold the line, warm enough to keep the client — getting that balance took me half an hour of false starts every time. Now I give Claude the context (client, current fee, new fee, the reason) and our house style, and it hands back a draft that's ninety per cent there. Five minutes making it sound like me, instead of thirty finding the words. Multiply that across every letter the firm sends and the number gets silly.

Here's why the boring writing is the place to start, not the thing you get to last. The risk is low — it's a letter, not a tax computation — so you build trust without betting the firm on it. The volume is high, so the saving is real. And it's easy to check, because you already know what a good client letter looks like.

The one line I'll underline: this only works if it stays compliant. Your engagement letter isn't just words — it's scope, liability and AML/GDPR wording your professional body expects to see. AI drafts it beautifully, and will just as happily leave out a clause it shouldn't. So the human check isn't optional here. It's the whole job.

Get the words right first. It's the fastest way to feel what AI actually saves you — and the safest place to learn it.

Don't template everything at once. Pick the one letter you write most and enjoy least — for most firms it's the fee increase or the engagement letter — and do it properly this week.

Save the finished prompt into last week's library. That's another entry — and the letter you dreaded is now a five-minute job forever.

Keep a short "must-include" checklist for each document — the clauses your professional body and PI cover expect to see. Then let AI draft, and check the draft against the list (you can even ask it to check its own draft and flag anything missing). The clauses are yours to own; AI just gets you to the draft faster. Never let a compliance-bearing letter go out on the tool's say-so alone.

A reusable starting point — fill the brackets, paste your house style underneath, and always run it past your check step:

That last sentence turns the tool into a second pair of eyes on your own template — useful even when you're not drafting from scratch.

Template the one letter you write most and enjoy least, compliance clauses and all. Then hit reply and let us know how you got on — tell us which letter you picked and how close the first draft got.

We start a new run — Safe Hands, on using AI without the blow-up. First up: a simple traffic-light map of which jobs are safe to hand over, and which must never leave your desk.