Client Portal for Accounting Firms
An accounting portal is judged on one metric: how much less chasing your team does. The document request cycle is where practice time disappears, and it is the part most portals automate badly.
Discuss your projectThe chase is the product
Most of the manual work in a compliance season is not preparation. It is asking clients for documents, working out which ones have arrived, and asking again. Firms run this on spreadsheets and email, and it consumes senior time at exactly the point in the year when senior time is scarcest.
So the portal is built around a request list per client per engagement: every item you need, its status, who it is waiting on, and automatic reminders on a schedule you set and can pause for a client who has asked you to. Your team sees one screen showing every outstanding item across every client, sorted by what is blocking work. Clients see only their own list, with a clear indication of what is still needed.
The second-order effect matters as much: because the list is structured, you can see which clients are consistently late and which requests are consistently misunderstood. A request item that half your clients get wrong is usually badly worded rather than evidence that clients are careless.
What it handles
Document collection with rollforward
Last year's request list carried forward and adjusted, so a new engagement year starts from what you asked for last time rather than from a blank page.
Upload from a phone
Most clients photograph documents rather than scanning them. The portal accepts that, handles multi-page capture, and does not reject a file for being a photograph.
E-signature on returns and letters
Engagement letters, authorities and filing approvals signed in the portal with the signature recorded against the document and the time, which is what matters if it is ever questioned.
Delivery of finished work
Accounts, returns and reports delivered into the portal rather than emailed, with a record of when the client opened them.
Invoices and payment
Statements and payment by card or bank transfer, which measurably shortens collection compared with emailed PDFs.
Access for a client's own staff
A bookkeeper or office manager given access to upload without seeing the directors' personal tax documents. A common requirement and a common source of accidental disclosure.
Built for the load spike, and for your security obligations
An accounting portal is idle for most of the year and then every client logs in during the same fortnight. That is a specific engineering requirement rather than a general one: the system has to absorb a large multiple of its normal load, uploads have to survive slow connections and interruptions, and reminder sending has to be queued so a batch to several thousand clients does not block anything else. We test at the seasonal peak rather than at the average.
On security, firms handling US tax data have concrete obligations rather than general ones. The FTC Safeguards Rule requires a Written Information Security Plan, and IRS Publication 4557 sets out what is expected of a preparer safeguarding taxpayer data. A portal is usually the single biggest improvement a firm can make against those obligations, because it replaces the practice of emailing tax documents as attachments. We build access control, encryption, logging and retention to support that plan — and the plan itself is a document your firm owns, not something software provides.
Where you are in the UK or Europe, the equivalent constraints come from GDPR and from your professional body's requirements. Tell us which apply and we design to them rather than retrofitting.
Practice system integration
- Practice management: Karbon, Senta, Xero Practice Manager or your own workflow system, so jobs and deadlines drive the request lists.
- Ledgers: Xero, QuickBooks Online, Sage, so client records are not maintained twice.
- Tax software, where it offers integration — many do not, and we will tell you honestly whether yours does before scoping around it.
- Document management, where you already have one and it should remain the system of record.
- Where there is no API, a scheduled file exchange works and we will be explicit about its limits.
Common questions
Tell us what you need
Describe the problem and we will come back with scope, timeline, and a rate. No obligation to proceed.
Get in touch