Client portal for accounting firms
Your clients email you their documents, phone you to ask about their annual accounts, and dig through archives for their last filing. The portal centralises deposit, progress and documents — each client sees only their own file.
In your day-to-day
- 01
Clients deposit documents directly in their space, attached to the right financial year — the email inbox stops being the collection channel.
- 02
File-progress tracking: documents awaited, work in progress, planned date for delivery of the accounts.
- 03
Permanent access to produced documents — filings, annual accounts, certificates — and to the firm’s fee notes.
A typical scenario
A typical firm with 300 small-business clients still collects documents by email and replays the same scene weekly: “can you resend my filing?”, “how are my accounts coming along?”, “where do I send this invoice?”.
- 01
A tradesman photographs an invoice from his phone; it lands in his space, attached to the right financial year, without ever passing through a staff member’s inbox.
- 02
A company director checks her accounts’ progress — documents received, work in progress, meeting date planned — instead of calling for the third time.
- 03
On a Saturday, a client downloads his latest filing for his bank; nobody at the firm hears about it, which is exactly the point.
What changes
Document collection stops being an email negotiation, and the firm’s phone line recovers its true purpose: the conversations that actually deserve an accountant.
Order of magnitude
Working assumptions
- →300 clients
- →one factual request per client per quarter (progress, duplicates, document drop-off)
- →an average of 5 minutes’ handling each
About a hundred requests a month answered by the portal itself — roughly 8 hours of switchboard and secretarial time returned monthly, before even counting the effect on document collection. A conservative estimate.
Indicative estimate built on average sector assumptions — it gets recalibrated on your actual volumes during scoping.
What eats your days
- →
Client documents arrive loose by email, and staff spend their mornings filing instead of producing.
- →
The firm’s own fees are chased last — the cobbler’s children go barefoot on receivables too.
- →
A file falling behind only becomes visible close to the deadline, when it is too late to smooth the workload.
How it works
- 1
Plugged into your tools, not a second entry
The portal reads live from your project-management tool, your CRM, your invoicing. Your team works as before; the client sees their slice, always current.
- 2
Approval built in
The client approves deliverables directly in the portal — an entire email thread disappears per revision round. Every approval is dated and traced.
- 3
Access walled by construction
Each client account reaches only its own projects and documents — never a neighbour’s. Minimal rights, every view logged: compliant by design, not by patch.
Typical results
-80%
“where is my project?” emails, typical order of magnitude
24/7
clients check on their own, whenever suits them
4-6 wks
to a first useful version in production
Orders of magnitude observed in production; your diagnostic sets your own baseline and targets.
Frequently asked questions
Will our clients really deposit documents in the portal rather than by email?+
Yes, if depositing is easier than email: photo from the phone, drag and drop, automatic reminders listing precisely what is missing. And during the transition, the triage agent attaches whatever still arrives by email — both channels converge in the same place.
Does the portal work with our existing practice software?+
It plugs into it: the portal exposes a slice of your current tools, it does not replace them. Your staff work as before; the client sees their file, always current, and nothing of other clients.
Is this the problem eating your team’s time?
Tell us how you work today — 30-minute call, then a free written diagnostic of what this agent would change for you, with numbers.
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