Operational briefing · For boutique firms
The always-on operations chief for boutique professional services.
Helmsmark watches incoming client email, drafts engagements from your templates and rate cards, reconciles time against billable hours, politely chases overdue payments, and closes each day with a one-page operations digest for the founder.
- ABA Rules
- 1.1 · 1.6 · 5.1 · 5.3
- AICPA
- Human sign-off on every client deliverable
- Reach
- 5–50-person practices
Built for firms where every client touchpoint is regulated
- Law practices
- ·Accounting shops
- ·Consulting studios
- ·5–50 person practices
How it works
One quiet team member, four habits.
Most ops tools carve out one slice of the back office. Helmsmark sits a layer above — the horizontal orchestration that ties inbox, proposals, time, AR, and the daily digest into one constant.
Watch
Watches the inbox — never owns it.
Reads incoming client email against your firm’s own templates and rate cards. Flags privilege, classifies intent, and never replies without your sign-off.
Draft
Drafts engagements and follow-ups.
Pulls the right template, fills in client matter numbers and fee schedules, and waits for your approval before a single byte leaves the firm.
Reconcile
Reconciles time, billables, and AR.
Pairs timers and calendar events to draft invoices, marks non-billable, and counts every hour by client, matter, and practice group.
Digest
Closes the day with a one-page digest.
A single Operations Briefing — drafted, held, sent, and overdue — lands in the founder’s inbox before they open the laptop tomorrow.
Compliance & control
Built around the parts that get boutique firms in trouble.
Real regulation, not boilerplate. ABA Rules 1.1, 1.6, 5.1 and 5.3 — competence, confidentiality, supervision — and the AICPA requirement that a human sign off on client work. Helmsmark ships with the guardrails the firm keeps meaning to build.
Privilege handling
Built-in vocab + per-matter hold list. No guessing.
Supervisor gating
Every outbound waits for a named human’s click.
Engagement thresholds
Trigger by fee, matter, or counterparty.
Audit ledger
Exportable, timestamped, immutable on the firm’s side.
Approval flow · one outbound
Each step is a hard gate. Removing a gate is an audit event, not a config.
- 1
Watch
Reads inbound against a privilege vocab. Anything matching “privileged,” “work product,” or a configurable set is held.
- 2
Hold
Drafts are sequestered in a client-matter-scoped vault until a named supervisor signs. Nothing in this state is reachable by a reply.
- 3
Approve
Engagements above your threshold — by matter, fee, or counterparty — queue on the founder’s desk with the full context one click away.
- 4
Send
Only after sign-off. Every outbound carries an immutable ledger entry you can export for ABA / AICPA audits.
The daily digest
One page. Every motion of the firm.
Tomorrow’s first task is reading this. A single, scannable briefing — what was drafted, what was held, what went out, what’s overdue — so the founder walks in already caught up.
Color-coded states. Drafted · held · sent · overdue at a glance.
One click to source. Every line links back to the underlying email or matter.
Forwardable. A copy the founder can paste to a partner without redaction.
Operations briefing
Marlowe & Co LLP
Wed · 17:42 ET
Day 47
Privileged
2
Held
1
Drafted
3
Overdue
$8,400
Pricing
Three tiers. None of them are seat-based.
Pricing follows the work the agent takes off the founder’s plate — not the number of people who happen to forward it an email. All tiers include the approval layer.
Watch
From $1.2k/mo
Stand up the inbox layer first. Privilege handling and a daily digest.
- Inbox watch with privilege vocab
- Daily one-page digest
- Audit-ready outbound ledger
- Email support
Operate
From $3.4k/mo
Draft, reconcile, and chase. The full operations loop, gated for human sign-off.
- Everything in Watch
- Engagement drafts from your templates
- Time & billable reconciliation
- Polite AR follow-ups
- Slack + email support
Orchestrate
Custom
For larger firms, multi-office practices, and franchised professional services groups.
- Everything in Operate
- Practice-group routing
- Counterparty & engagement thresholds
- Named onboarding partner
All tiers include human-in-the-loop by default. No tier removes the approval gate. Reach us at helmsmark-20aewj@polsia.app.
Close-of-day briefing
Bring the operations chief in-house.
Quietly.
One conversation, one dry-run digest on your inbox the next morning, and a written answer to whether Helmsmark is a fit for the way your firm works.