A firm handles more notices without more staff by taking the retrieval and the arithmetic off its people: classify each notice on upload, read its deadline onto one calendar, check the figures that can be checked, and start every response from a draft. What stays with staff is the judgment and the approval.
A firm with many employer clients receives a steady stream of government notices: SUI rate notices, benefit charge statements, workers' comp premium audits, IRS penalty letters, wage and hour inquiries. Much of the time each one takes is mechanical: identify the notice, find the deadline, pull the client's payroll numbers, check the state's math, write a response that follows a known format.
Little of that time is judgment. Should we protest? Is a voluntary contribution worth it? Does this client have a pattern? The rest is retrieval and arithmetic, and that is the part software can take off a team. Here is the playbook, stage by stage.
Where the time goes
| Stage | By hand | With Kreto |
|---|---|---|
| Identify the notice | Read it, work out the agency and the notice type | Classified on upload |
| Find the deadline | Look up the agency's window and count the days | Read from the notice and put on one calendar |
| Pull the payroll | Find the client's payroll detail for the period | Read from the payroll register you uploaded |
| Check the math | Redo the agency's arithmetic | Rate notices against the schedule; Form 941 notices against payroll |
| Draft the response | Write the letter from a blank page | Drafted with the evidence attached; a person approves |
Source: What each stage involves, and what the Kreto product does at it today.
What stays with people is review and approval: the professional judgment. Everything else becomes a queue your staff supervises instead of a document they produce.
The playbook
Step 1: One intake point per client
Notices arrive scattered: client photos, forwarded emails, mail opened at the client's office three weeks late. The first fix is a single intake point per client that the whole firm uses. One intake point is what makes every later stage possible; a notice you never see is a deadline you never track.
Step 2: Classify on arrival, not on triage day
Employer notices come in many families (unemployment, workers' comp, wage and hour, paid leave, I-9, ACA, IRS, licensing, collections), and each carries its own deadlines and response formats; the guide to government notices breaks them down. Kreto reads over 50 notice types and pulls the agency, tax period, amount and respond-by date onto the record when the document is uploaded.
Step 3: Check the state's math
Many money notices reduce to arithmetic over wages your client already reported. Keep a current payroll register on file per client. Kreto checks rate notices against the agency's 2026 schedule in 51 states and Form 941 notices against the client's payroll in every state, with fixed calculations rather than a model's guess, and puts any difference in dollars. Every other notice is read and its deadline tracked.
Step 4: Draft from the figures, approve as professionals
A protest letter for a SUI rate notice has a known shape: account facts, the state's number, your number, the evidence, the request. Kreto drafts it from the checked figures, and a person at your firm reviews, edits and approves it before anything is sent. That review is not a limitation of the playbook; your license and your client relationships ride on what goes out the door.
Step 5: Every deadline in one place
Protest and response windows are short and differ by state and notice type. A firm-wide calendar of every client's open notices replaces the spreadsheet someone maintains until they go on vacation. Missed deadlines are the most expensive failure in notice work, because they turn winnable protests into a year on the wrong rate.
Step 6: Report the dollars, not the documents
The end product of notice work is not a filed letter. It is money your client did not lose: rate corrections won, assessments corrected, voluntary contributions that paid (run the numbers with the voluntary contribution calculator). Telling the client what was saved turns compliance from a cost your firm absorbs into advice your firm bills.
What not to hand over
Be suspicious of any system that promises to handle notices without a person in the loop. Whether to protest is a judgment call. Whether a voluntary contribution is worth it depends on the client's hiring plans. Anything that goes to a government agency under your firm's name deserves professional eyes first. Take the retrieval and the arithmetic off your team, and route every outbound action through your approval. That is how Kreto is built.
Getting started
You do not need to re-platform your firm to start. Pick your five busiest clients, give their notices one intake point, and run one month's notices through Kreto with your team approving. Compare the staff hours against the month before. The CPA overview covers the firm workspace, and the companion workflow guide goes deeper on running notice work across many clients.
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