Tutorial · 5 min read
The Build Sheet for an Accounting Practice on Instagram
The argument for what a practice should and should not automate is made in a separate post — route, do not advise — and it is worth reading first, because it explains the sorting rule this build sheet applies.
This is the sheet itself. Five automations, in build order, with the fields you set for each. The order matters more than any individual template: refusals go in before replies, facts go in before judgement, and generated text goes in last or not at all.
Build one: the document refusal
First, before anything that answers a question. Say something useful about a filing deadline and somebody will send you a photograph of their PAN card within a day. This automation exists so that arrives at a wall rather than into an unmanaged pile.
Trigger: any post, plus DMs. This one is deliberately not scoped, because the behaviour it catches happens everywhere.
Keywords, any-of: PAN, Aadhaar, Form 16, GST number, bank statement, ITR, attached, bhej diya, bhej rahe, send kar diya, document bhej. Matching folds case and punctuation, so you do not need pan and PAN separately. It does not fold Indic vowel signs, so if your clients type in Devanagari, list each form you actually receive.
Negative keywords: none. You want this to fire generously. A false positive costs one polite sentence.
Private reply: one template, thirty words, saying please do not send documents here and naming the channel where documents actually go. Same words every time, which is exactly what you want.
Capture to Leads: on. You want to know who tried, so somebody can follow up properly.
Advanced: check the quiet hours on this one specifically. A refusal that arrives at 9am for a document sent at 11pm is fine; a refusal that never arrives is not.
Build two: the deadline and due-date answers
The cleanest automation in a practice, because a due date is true regardless of who is asking. That is the whole test for whether something belongs here.
Trigger: the specific posts where you talked about the deadline. Not any post. A one-word comment is only unambiguous when the post makes it so.
Keywords, any-of: due date, last date, deadline, kab tak, kab tak hai, extension, date kya hai.
Negative keywords: penalty, notice, late fee — those are situation-dependent and belong with a person.
Public reply: a short line under the comment, because other readers have the same question and you only want to answer it once.
Private reply: the date, plainly, plus a pointer to the official source rather than your paraphrase of it.
Maintenance: put a reminder in your own calendar to review this template whenever the date could move. A stale template is worse than no template, because it is confidently wrong at scale.
Build three: the document checklist
Second-cleanest, same reason. What to bring to a first appointment does not change based on who is asking.
Trigger: specific posts, plus DMs if you get the question there.
Keywords, any-of: documents, what to bring, kya chahiye, checklist, papers, required.
Private reply: the list. Keep it shorter than you want to. A checklist that runs past a phone screen gets skimmed and half-followed.
Then add one sentence to the end: and please do not send them here. This is the point where a practice usually creates its own document problem, by asking for a list in the same message it should have redirected.
Build four: new-client enquiries, captured
The one that pays for the exercise, and the one most practices build first and should build fourth.
Trigger: any post. New clients arrive from wherever.
Keywords, any-of: new client, fees, charges, consultation, appointment, naye client, kitna charge.
Private reply: do not quote a fee. Confirm you are taking clients, say what happens next, and give exactly one next step — a form, a number, a time. Two options is a decision; three is a delay.
Capture to Leads: on. This is the list you will actually work.
Advanced: first-time senders only, if you want to keep existing clients out of a template that reads like an introduction.
Build these
Never build these
Build five: generated replies, narrowly, and last
Only after the four above are live and you have watched them for a fortnight. By then the credit ledger has told you which questions your templates do not cover, which is the correct input for this decision.
Templated replies are free and unlimited. A credit is spent only when the AI writes something new — one credit, one reply, with 100 credits free and no card, and packs from ₹499. A practice running mostly templates through a busy fortnight can plausibly not touch a pack, which is a strange thing for a vendor to write and is nonetheless what the metering does.
The season checklist
- Rate budget. One reel about a deadline can travel much further than your practice. The cap turns a spike into a queue rather than a thousand DMs in an hour.
- Quiet hours, in your clients' timezone. Not the one you clicked at setup. A cluster of quiet-hours refusals during your working day means it is wrong, and the rows will be shifted by exactly the offset.
- Takeover is your escalation. The moment you or an article assistant answers by hand, automation is out of that thread. Nothing to configure.
- Know where the kill switch is. It is the first of the ten checks. Being able to find it in three seconds is worth more than any alert.
- Read Activity on a fixed day. Sends, and refusals grouped by reason. A window refusal means a comment arrived on a post older than seven days and nobody could have answered it.
Order of operations for the first week, if you want it paced rather than listed, is in the getting-started guide. And the neighbouring profession with almost the same constraints and a different set of forbidden answers is covered in the financial advisers post.
