Anonymised client engagement · Finance & accounting
From fragmented files to a governed company brain
A finance and accounting business had important information spread across folders, drives, Slack and people's own AI tools. The same questions kept being asked, the answers didn't always match, and nobody could say which version was current.
01
The challenge
Policies, brand assets, procedures and the everyday how-do-I knowledge were spread across folders, drives and whoever happened to remember. People asked the same questions again and again, and there was no reliable way to get to the current answer or the approved version of a file.
02
What we built
We built a governed company knowledge system: one controlled, shared source of truth, with a Slack route for asking everyday questions and getting back the approved answer. Operational knowledge, who owns what, marketing assets and current brand materials were brought into a clear structure. We also wrote them an AI policy and trained the team on it.
03
The change
People stopped asking each other and started asking the system, and got the same answer every time, with the owner's name and the date on it. Everyone worked from the same governed sources, and pasting a question into a private AI tool stopped being the path of least resistance. More on how we work with professional services firms.
The system, in short
One sourceOwner namedDate on it
Which expenses policy applies to a contractor working on site?
The contractor expenses policy, updated in March, applies. Subsistence is claimable; travel to a client site is not. Expenses policy v4Owner: OperationsUpdated 12 March
Answers carry their source, owner and date
This is an anonymised Woodlark client engagement. Client identity, sensitive data and identifiable materials have been withheld.
An answer nobody can trace is an answer nobody uses.
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