If you work in conveyancing, you’ll know how quickly a day can disappear. You might start the morning planning to get through a few important jobs, only to find yourself dealing with emails, chasing documents and answering questions from clients. The work you intended to do gets pushed further down the list.
Some admin is unavoidable, but does it really need to take up so much of the day?
A lot of time can be lost simply trying to find information. A client sends something over by email, another document is saved elsewhere and an update is added to a spreadsheet. When you need to check a detail later, you can end up looking in several places before finding what you want.
Keeping case information together can make a real difference. Staff can see what’s been received, what still needs doing and where to find important documents. It also makes things easier when another member of the team needs to pick up a case.
New enquiries can take up more time than you might expect as well. Details need to be collected, quotes prepared and potential clients contacted. If much of this is done by hand, it is easy for things to get missed when the office is busy.
Having a quicker way to deal with enquiries can help. QMP’s Quick Quote Calculator allows website enquiries and estimate requests to feed into the platform, giving your team a place to manage new leads. Branded quotations can also be prepared without having to put everything together from the beginning each time.
Paperwork is another job that can eat into the working day. Forms need sending out and returning, searches have to be organised and documents need to be kept somewhere they can be found again. When everything is handled separately, keeping track of it all can become a job in itself.
QMP brings parts of this process together, including TA6 forms and search bundles. Having these alongside other case information means staff don’t have to keep switching between different places to see what is happening.
Then there are the client updates. Buying or selling a property can be stressful, and people want to know that things are moving forward. It is understandable that clients get in touch for an update, but answering the same questions throughout the day can leave less time for other work.
Being able to see the progress of each case makes it easier to know what needs attention. Milestones and outstanding tasks can be tracked, helping your team spot when something is waiting to be completed. It also makes it easier to keep clients, estate agents and mortgage brokers informed.
None of this means that technology should take over the personal side of the job. Clients still want to speak to someone who understands their situation and can answer their questions. In fact, having fewer routine tasks to deal with can give staff more time to do exactly that.
It is worth looking at the systems your business already uses, too. Are they helping your team, or are people spending time moving information between different platforms? A system should make everyday work simpler. If it adds more steps, it may be worth looking at another way of doing things.
Small changes can make a difference over time. Making information easier to find, keeping documents together and having a clearer view of case progress can all help reduce the amount of time spent on routine admin.
There will always be paperwork and follow-ups in property transactions. The aim is not to get rid of them altogether, but to make them easier to manage so they don’t take attention away from clients.
QMP is designed to help conveyancers and estate agents manage quotations, forms, documents and case progress in one place. To find out more about how the platform works, visit qmp-app.co.uk.
