---
title: "Client onboarding at Regional Business Services"
description: "A worked example for a $3.5M accounting practice: a 23-step onboarding build, a 10-day onboarding target, and the cancellation math it would have to hit."
doc_version: "2026-05-20"
last_updated: "2025-01-15T11:00:00.000Z"
canonical_url: https://www.lightforgeworks.com/blog/regional-business-services-case-study/
---

# Client onboarding at Regional Business Services

# Client onboarding at Regional Business Services

Regional Business Services is a composite company: a $3.5M accounting practice with 280 clients across bookkeeping and payroll. The workflow and the failure points are real patterns; the company and the numbers are illustrative.

## The problem

Onboarding a new client takes three to six weeks. Nobody wrote the sequence down, so each staff member runs it their own way, and steps fall through: the engagement letter goes out, the payroll tax forms never do. Clients wait. Fifteen percent of them cancel during onboarding, at about $5,250 each. Staff spend roughly 240 hours a month on the manual parts.

## The build

A 23-step onboarding workflow, one sequence per service line. A client portal collects documents against a checklist and shows each client their own progress and next step. Reminders run on a schedule; staff work the exceptions, not the checklist. The workflow writes into the practice's accounting systems. Ten weeks to build. The practice's team spent about ten hours on it.

## The numbers it would have to hit

- Onboarding time: three to six weeks down to five to ten days
- Cancellation rate during onboarding: 15 percent down to 3
- Document completion: 34 percent up to 92
- Staff time: about 156 hours a month back

At those numbers the practice recovers about $63,000 a year of the $78,750 the cancellations were costing, and takes on roughly 25 percent more new clients without adding staff.

**[Read the full walkthrough →](/blog/regional-business-services-case-study-full)**

## Interactive Demo

<div class="solution-embed">
  <iframe src="/static/demos/regional-business-services/regional-business-services-demo.html" width="100%" height="600" frameborder="0" style="border-radius: 8px; box-shadow: 0 4px 12px rgba(0,0,0,0.1);"></iframe>
  <p style="text-align: center; margin-top: 10px; font-style: italic; color: #666;">Interactive demonstration of an automated client onboarding system approach</p>
</div>

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