Valentina Akpan: Founder of Rellatech, providing administrative and operations support to executives, founders, business owners and teams. Her background combines technical support, customer success, administration and operations.
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The Starting Point
The company was hiring for accounting operations: invoices, proforma invoices, receivables, month-end filing and the follow-up that sits around all of it. This is invoice administration and receivables follow-up. The pack does not give tax advice or cover regulated accounting work. The work was real and recurring. The manual did not exist.
The working instructions lived in six weeks of Slack. Which invoices get checked against what. How a proforma becomes an invoice and where the tracker is. Which of five buckets a closed-month document belongs in. What happens when a customer's card declines. Where files go on the SFTP server and what they are called. Each answer was in a thread somewhere, and the person who knew was the person being interrupted.
The goal was a pack the new hire could work from on the first day, and a plain list of what still had no answer, so the gaps were visible rather than discovered mid-task.
What I Did
I read the six weeks of Slack end to end and pulled out every task that recurred, every rule that had been stated once in passing, and every decision that had been made in a thread and never written anywhere else. That became the task inventory.
Each task went into one of three tiers. Tier one was ready to hand over now: the steps were known, the checks were known, and I had done it myself. Tier two needed a decision from the owner before it could be written as a procedure. Tier three was still being defined and was labelled as such. The new hire starts on tier one, and nobody has to pretend the rest is documented.
For tier one I wrote 15 SOPs in a single Excel workbook, one sheet per procedure. Each follows the same shape: purpose, trigger, steps, the checks that make it done, where the output goes, and who to ask. Wherever I was unsure of a step I put the question in a separate register instead of guessing, so the procedures only say what I could stand behind.
The invoice work got the most attention because it is where mistakes cost the most. The company has a written spec for what an invoice must carry. I turned that into a check that runs before anything goes out, corrected the invoices already in the queue, and wrote down how a proforma invoice is tracked and converted so the tracker and the invoice never disagree.
Before any of this, I had designed three skills assessments for the role, marked them, and walked the candidate through the results one to one. The assessments used the real work, so the pack and the hire were built on the same picture of the job.
What Went Into the Build
15 SOPs in one workbook
One sheet per procedure, each with its purpose, what triggers it, the steps, the checks before it counts as done, where the output goes and who to ask. The invoice spec check, proforma to invoice conversion, month-closed filing, open-invoice categories, card-decline follow-up and SFTP file handling are all in there.
Task inventory tiered by readiness
Every recurring task in the role, sorted into three tiers: ready to hand over today, needs a decision from the owner first, still being defined. The new hire starts on tier one and nobody pretends tier three is documented.
Open-questions register
Each gap I found while writing had a line: the question, who can answer it, and its status. It kept the SOPs accurate, because a step I was unsure of went in the register rather than in the procedure as a guess.
Invoice check against the spec
The company has a written spec for what an invoice must carry. I turned it into a checklist that runs before an invoice goes out, and corrected the invoices already in the queue so the new hire inherits a clean one.
Month-closed filing rules
Closed-month documents were sorted into five buckets with a rule for each, so the same file lands in the same place whoever does the filing. The rule is in the SOP, not in my memory.
Skills assessments for the hire
Before the pack, I designed three skills assessments for the role, marked them, and walked the candidate through the results one to one. The assessments doubled as a preview of the actual work.
Why It Matters
Onboarding without a manual means the new person learns by interrupting. Every question goes to whoever is busiest, the answers are spoken rather than written, and in six months the next hire starts from zero again. A pack gives the new hire something to read and work from before they need to ask, and it keeps the documented procedures separate from the decisions that are still open.
The readiness tiers and the open-questions register do a second job. They make the state of the role visible to the owner. Tier two is a list of decisions waiting on them. Tier three is work the business has not yet defined. Both are easier to act on as a list than as a feeling that things are unclear.
The invoice check pays for itself on its own. An invoice that goes out short of the spec comes back as a query, a delay and a correction. A check that runs before it goes out costs a minute.
A procedure only counts as written when someone who was not in the room can follow it.
Tools and Skills Used
Process documentation and SOP writing, accounts receivable operations, invoice checks against a spec, month-end filing rules, onboarding design, skills assessment design and marking, and the plain habit of writing the question down instead of guessing.
Who This Is For
This case study is worth reading if you are:
- ●Hiring into a role that has been done by the founder or by whoever was free, with nothing written down.
- ●Running billing and receivables through a spec that lives in people's heads and in chat threads.
- ●Wanting a plain list of which parts of a role are ready to hand over and which still need a decision.
- ●Looking for someone to design and mark a skills assessment that uses the real work, not a generic test.
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