From 25 minutes to 4: what changes when the lodgement handoff is one workflow

The return is finished. The partner has reviewed it. The job is ticked off in XPM.
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Then it sits.

What happens between that moment and the lodgement being signed, paid and closed is the part most firms have never mapped. It gets handled by the support team, it happens in the background, and it rarely shows up in a workflow review. But it is where a surprising amount of your firm's capacity goes, and it is the first thing to break in a peak period.

What the handoff actually involves

Write out the steps for a single standard lodgement and most firms land on something like this:

1. The accountant sends the completed documents downstream to support
2. Support opens the PDFs and finds the right Word template for the cover letter
3. Client name, entity details, amounts, PRNs and due dates are copied across by hand
4. Everything is merged into one binding
5. The binding is uploaded to the signing platform, signatories are added, and it goes out
6. The client gets an email and, often, does nothing for a fortnight
7. Support follows up manually. Partial signatures create a second round of chasing
8. The client signs but forgets to pay, or pays against the wrong PRN
9. A penalty notice arrives. Support chases the client, contacts the ATO and reconciles
10. Every one of those steps is logged across three or four systems that do not talk to each other

Nine of those ten steps involve no accounting judgement at all.

Where the time actually goes
When firms time this properly, the cover letter is usually the single biggest block. Roughly fifteen minutes of manual assembly per lodgement, before the document has even reached the client.

The rest is spread across:

• Chasing signatures. Email-only delivery is slow. Grouped entities with multiple signatories are slower again, because a partial signature restarts the follow-up.
• Payment errors. A wrong PRN is a small mistake that generates a long tail of work, and support usually finds out about it weeks later through a penalty notice.
• Status hunting. Answering "where is the Robinson group up to?" means checking the signing platform, the inbox, the practice management system and sometimes the ATO portal.

The arithmetic that makes it worth looking at
Take a firm doing 400 lodgements across a compliance period, at 25 minutes of admin handling each. That is roughly 167 hours, or more than four full weeks of one person's time, spent on document assembly and follow-up.

The number itself is not the problem. The timing is. That work does not spread evenly across the year. It lands in the same weeks your team is already stretched, which is when firms start talking about hiring another admin resource.

Five questions to pressure-test your own handoff
These are worth running through with your support team, regardless of what software you use.

1. How many separate tools does one lodgement touch between internal sign-off and final lodgement? Count the logins, not the vendors.
2. Who builds the cover letter, and how long does it take? Time it properly across ten jobs rather than estimating.
3. How are clients notified? If it is email only, you are relying on the slowest channel you have.
4. What percentage of your documents are executed within 48 hours? Most firms cannot answer this, which is itself the answer.
5. When a client pays against the wrong PRN, how do you find out? If the answer is "the ATO tells us", the feedback loop is months long.

What a tighter handoff looks like
The target state is not complicated. One intake point for the completed document. The cover letter produced from that document rather than rebuilt from a template. Signature and payment sitting in the same flow, with the correct PRN already attached. Reminders that escalate on their own. One screen that shows every lodgement, who has signed, who has paid and what is overdue.

Firms get part of the way there by tightening templates and standardising who does what. The remaining gap is usually the number of disconnected systems the process has to cross.

Where Admiin fits

Admiin is built for this layer of the firm: the support team sitting between completed compliance work and the client who needs to sign and pay.

Here is the same lodgement, run as one workflow.
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1. Intake. Drag and drop the completed document into Admiin, import it from XPM, or forward it to a custom inbox.
2. Cover letter. Admiin reads the document, pulls out the client and entity details, and generates the letter in the right format. No Word template, no copying figures across.
3. Send. Signature fields and the correct payment amount and PRN are attached automatically. The client receives it by email and SMS, and signs on their phone.
4. Follow-up. Reminders escalate on their own: ahead of the due date, on the day, and after it passes. Around 75% of documents are executed within 48 hours, largely because of the SMS delivery.
5. Payment. The client can pay at the point of signing by card, bank transfer or PayTo, or schedule it for two days before the ATO due date. Identity checks can be triggered from the same workflow.

Ten steps becomes five, and after intake nobody has to drive it. Support watches one dashboard showing every lodgement, who has signed, who has paid and what is overdue.

What one ​firm measured. Across a full month of lodgements, admin handling time dropped from 25 minutes to 4. Same team, considerably more volume through the door.

What it costs. The core workflow is free to use.

What it connects to. Xero Practice Manager, GovReports and Lodgeit. Firms without those can work from drag and drop or email forwarding.

See it for yourself
The fastest way to work out whether this fits your practice is to run one of your own lodgements through it. Sign up free at admiin.com or book a walkthrough with the team.

A huge thanks Admiin for providing us with this article. Want to learn more? Don’t hesitate to reach out to us or directly to the team at Admiin.