Your firm runs 200 recurring tasks. Can you name 50?

Ask a finance lead to name the recurring tasks their team runs and you will get the big ones in seconds: month end close, bank reconciliations, payroll, VAT returns, client reporting. Ask for the fiftieth and the room goes quiet. A recurring task list for an accounting or finance team is rarely missing because it is hard to write. It is missing because nobody has ever been given a week to write it.

The count is the first surprise. Take a hypothetical firm with 25 people and 40 clients. Each client has a monthly bookkeeping cycle, a quarterly VAT return, a year end, a payroll run, a few chasers. Multiply it out and the firm is running hundreds of recurring tasks, most of which nobody would call by name. They are just "what happens on the fifth".

This post is a practical way to get from a vague sense of the work to a list you can use. It follows on from the argument in why nobody has a list of what their team does, and it assumes you want the list for its own sake: continuity, planning, fair workloads. Whether any of it ever goes to an AI agent is a later decision, and a better one once the list exists.

Define what counts as a recurring task

Agree the unit first, or you will spend the week arguing. A workable rule:

• It comes back on a pattern: daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly.
• One person could pick it up and finish it in a sitting or a day.
• It has an output you could point to: a reconciled account, a filed return, a sent report.

"Month end" is not a task. It is a bundle of twenty of them. "Reconcile the main current account for client X" is a task. If you cannot say when it is done, break it down further.

Day one and two: ask people what they did, not what they do

Job descriptions lie by omission. Ask each person to open last month's calendar, sent email and the files they touched, and list everything they did that they will do again next month. Not what their role says. What actually happened.

Give them a plain template, one line per task:

1. Name: a verb and an object, such as "Reconcile main current account".
2. Rule: when it comes back, such as "third working day after month end".
3. Time: roughly how long it takes, and say it is a guess.
4. Who: who does it, and who else could if they were off sick.
5. Where it lives: the folder, the template, the system it touches.
6. Documented? Is there a checklist or a manual, and when was it last used?

Those six fields are enough. Resist adding a seventh. A list that is simple to fill in gets filled in.

Day three: collect the tasks nobody thinks of

The first pass will miss the work that does not feel like work. Go looking for it deliberately:

• The chasers. Reminding clients for documents, reminding colleagues for approvals.
• The checks. Looking over someone else's output before it goes out.
• The calendar items. Filing deadlines, licence renewals, annual confirmations.
• The small favours. The report one partner always asks for on the tenth, which exists only because someone started doing it three years ago.

These are often the single-owner tasks that matter most. If you want to see why, read what happens to your close when one person quits.

Day four: merge, name and count

Put every list in one place and tidy it. Merge duplicates, fix names so that two people stop calling the same task different things, and split anything that is really a bundle. Then count.

Three counts are worth writing down straight away:

• Total tasks. Expect it to be larger than anyone guessed.
• Tasks with one name next to them. Your continuity risk.
• Tasks with no documentation. Your onboarding cost, and the work any future agent would have nothing to run on.

Do the maths on time too, and label it as illustrative. Say 60 tasks take around three hours a month each. That is 180 hours a month, more than a full-time person, sitting in the gaps between the work everyone remembers.

Day five: read it back to the team

This is the step firms skip, and it is the one that decides whether the list stays honest. Show it to the people who built it. Let them correct it. Say plainly what it is for: planning cover, spreading load fairly, and finding the repetitive half of their month that could be made lighter first.

If people suspect a task list is a redundancy exercise, they will leave things off it, and the list will quietly become wrong. Tell them what you intend to do with it, including that documented work can eventually be handed to software, and what that means for their role. A team that trusts the answer will keep the list current. A team that does not will not.

Keep it alive, or do not bother

A task list in a spreadsheet is true on the day you finish it and out of date by the end of the quarter. The sustainable version attaches the list to the work itself: each task is generated on its own rule, each person sees what is due, and the notes and checklists live on the task. Then the list updates when the work changes, with no separate admin. That is how we think about it at Beaks, and it is why the first thing we build is the plain daily surface for recurring work, not a dashboard.

Whatever you use, the principle is the same. The list should be a by-product of running the week, not a project that ends.

One thing to do this week

Do not start with the whole firm. Pick one team of three or four people, hand out the six-field template on Monday, and ask for it back by Thursday. Count the tasks, count the single-name lines, and read the totals out on Friday.

You will find more than you expected, and a handful of tasks that will worry you. Both are exactly what the list is for.