How to choose the best client portal for accountants
There is no single best client portal for accountants, and any page that claims otherwise is selling. There are criteria that separate the ones that get used from the ones that get abandoned in March.
Free for 14 days, no credit card. Your portal carries your firm's name from the first client you add.
2024 returns — both entities
10 of 13 received1 item overdue — FirmHello is chasing
- Company accounts pack Received 2 Mar
- Payroll year end Received 2 Mar
- Personal income summary Received 5 Mar
- ! Dividend vouchers Overdue
- Rental statements Reminder Friday
- Engagement letters, both Approved 12 Jan
Hensley Clark's portal, as their client sees it.
We make a client portal, so treat this as an interested party's guide. What follows is the list of things we would check if we were buying one for a practice, including the criteria where we would not win, because a guide that finds in our favor on every point is not a guide.
The single strongest predictor of whether a portal survives its first tax time is not its feature list. It is whether clients will use it without being trained. Everything below is downstream of that.
Eleven things worth checking
Ask a vendor all of these. The answers are more revealing than a demo, and a vendor who will not answer plainly has told you something.
Can a client use it without being taught?
This is the criterion that decides everything else. If a client has to create an account, choose a password, verify an email and then work out where to click, a meaningful proportion of your client base will reply to your email with an attachment instead, and you will be running two systems.
- Does the client have to register before they can send you anything?
- Does it work properly on a phone, where most documents actually are?
- Is the first screen a list of what you need, or an empty file area?
Does it chase, or does it only store?
Plenty of products described as client portals are document repositories with a login. The work in an accounting practice is not storage, it is pursuit. If the portal cannot follow up on outstanding items by itself, you have bought a filing cabinet and kept the job.
- Are reminders automatic, on a schedule you control?
- Do the reminders come from your firm, or from the vendor?
- Can you see every client with something outstanding on one screen?
Is it priced per client or per seat?
Per-client pricing punishes you for the thing you are trying to do, which is have more clients. It also creates a quiet incentive not to onboard the small ones, which is how a portal ends up covering only half a practice and therefore none of the benefit.
- Are client logins unlimited?
- What happens to the price in your busiest month?
- Is there a charge per document, per approval or per gigabyte?
Whose brand do your clients see?
This is not vanity. Clients have been trained to be suspicious of unexpected links asking for financial documents. A request that arrives from your firm at your domain clears that hurdle. A request from a vendor's domain does not, and the result is phone calls asking whether the email is genuine.
- Can you use your own domain, not a subdomain of theirs?
- Do notification emails come from your address?
- Is your logo on the login page, or theirs?
What does the audit trail actually record?
Ask specifically. "Fully audited" can mean anything from a complete actor-level log to a list of file upload timestamps. You want to know who viewed a document, who downloaded it, when permissions changed, and whether you can export the lot without asking support.
- Is every view logged, or only uploads and downloads?
- Can you export the log yourself, per client and per engagement?
- How long is the log retained?
Can staff access be limited per client?
A seasonal preparer should see the returns they are working on. Portals built for sole practitioners often have exactly two levels of access, which stops being adequate the moment you hire.
- Is access granted per client, or per whole firm?
- Are there roles beyond owner and user?
- Is single sign-on available, so leavers lose access automatically?
Where is the data held, and for how long?
Your own retention policy already exists. A portal that cannot match it becomes a second, contradictory policy that you are nonetheless accountable for.
- Can you choose the hosting region?
- Can retention be set per client or per engagement?
- Can you purge a client's documents on request, and prove it?
How do you get out?
Ask this before you sign, not afterwards. A portal holds years of client documents, and the cost of leaving is the real measure of how confident a vendor is in its product.
- Can you export everything, per client, without contacting support?
- What format does the export come in, and does it keep the structure?
- What happens to client access if you stop paying?
Does it handle the things that are not documents?
A surprising share of tax time is spent asking questions rather than collecting files: is this still your address, did you make any charitable gifts, is the rental still let. If the portal only takes uploads, those questions stay in email and the portal covers half the problem.
- Can an item be a question with a typed answer, not just a file?
- Can an item be a confirmation or an approval?
- Can you reuse the whole list as a template next year?
Is it an approval or a signature, and do they know the difference?
These are not the same thing and a vendor who blurs them is telling you something. A recorded approval captures who agreed, to what wording, when, and against which version of the document. An electronic signature is a legal instrument with its own requirements, and where one is genuinely needed an approval will not substitute for it.
Ask plainly which one you are being sold. For our part: FirmHello records approvals, in full, and does not offer e-signature. If your work needs signatures, pair us with a qualified provider or buy a portal that has built one properly.
- Which is it, and is that written down anywhere you can point to?
- Does the record capture the wording agreed and the document version?
- Is it limited by document count per month?
- If it is a signature, what is the evidence pack when it is challenged?
What does it not do?
Ask the vendor directly. Anyone who cannot name a limitation either does not know their product or is not going to be straight with you later. For our part: FirmHello is not a practice management system, has no time or billing, does not prepare or file returns, and does not integrate with your tax software today. If you want one system for all of that, we are the wrong answer and we would rather say it here.
Where FirmHello lands on these criteria
Every featureRequest lists
Items can be a file, a typed answer, a confirmation or an approval, reusable as templates year to year.
Automatic chasing
Automatic, on your schedule, sent from your firm rather than from us.
Your brand, your domain
Your own domain and your logo, with notifications from your address.
Audit trail
Actor-level logging of views, downloads and permission changes, with self-service export.
Approvals on the record
Included from the Firm plan with no per-document charge, and described as approvals rather than signatures because that is what they are.
Client vault
Full per-client export at any time, structure intact, without asking us for it.
Client documents are the most sensitive thing a firm holds
So the portal is built to hold them properly: encrypted, access granted one client at a time, and every action recorded. Nothing travels as an email attachment.
How FirmHello is built- Encrypted in transit and at rest
- TLS 1.3 on every connection and AES-256 encryption for stored documents, with keys managed separately from the data they protect.
- Access is per client, not per firm
- A client can only ever load their own space. Staff access is granted per client, so a junior can be given three files and nothing else.
- No documents in email
- Notifications tell a client that something is waiting and link them to the portal. The material itself never leaves it as an attachment.
- Complete audit trail
- Views, uploads, downloads, approvals and permission changes are all recorded with actor, time and IP, and the log is exportable.
- Retention you control
- Set how long documents live per client or per matter, and hold or purge on request, so the portal matches the retention policy you already have.
- Hosted in your region
- Choose United States, Canada, the EU or the United Kingdom, and your firm's data stays in that region.
Questions buyers ask
You make a portal. Why should I trust this guide?
You should not trust it, you should use it. Every criterion here is written as a question to put to a vendor, including us. The section on what FirmHello does not do is there because a guide without one is marketing.
What matters most if I only check one thing?
Whether a client can use it without being taught. A portal your clients avoid does not become useful by having more features.
Is the cheapest option usually a false economy?
Not always, but per-client pricing usually is, because the cost grows exactly as you succeed. Compare on what a busy March costs, not on the headline monthly figure.
Should I expect integration with my tax software?
Some products offer it, we do not yet. If a deep integration with your specific software is the deciding factor, buy on that and ignore everything else on this page.
How long should implementation take?
Branding and a first request template should be an afternoon. If a vendor quotes weeks of configuration for a small practice, ask what exactly is being configured.
Can I try FirmHello?
Yes, free for 14 days with no card. The useful test is not a demo: pick the client who is slowest to send you things, put a real request list in front of them, and see what comes back.
Related
Where to go next
Every page on the site, grouped by the question it answers.
- Choosing a portal — you are here
- Security checklist
- Large firms
- Virtual tax firms
- Paperless practice
Ready when you are
If FirmHello looks like the right fit after all that, the trial is free for 14 days.
No card and no sales call. If you would rather tell us about your firm first, use the longer form.