Everything FirmHello does, and why each part is there
The product is narrow on purpose. It handles the client-facing edge of an accounting practice and leaves your tax software, your ledger and your practice management alone.
Year-end financials 2025
9 of 13 received1 item overdue — FirmHello is chasing
- Bank statements, Jan–Jun Received 12 Aug
- Bank statements, Jul–Dec Received 12 Aug
- Payroll summary Received 19 Aug
- Fixed asset invoices Received just now
- ! Stock count at year end Overdue
- Director loan confirmation Reminder Thursday
- Letter of representation Approved 6 Aug
Request lists
Build a named list of everything you need — files, answers, approvals — and send one link. Your client sees a checklist, not a paragraph of instructions buried in an email.
Automatic chasing
FirmHello sends the reminders. Pick a rhythm, and outstanding items get followed up until they arrive or you call it off. Nobody on your team has to be the nag.
Client vault
Every document a client has ever sent or been sent, in one searchable place, versioned, with retention rules. No more hunting through three years of email for last year's engagement letter.
Roles and per-client access
Staff access is granted one client at a time, on top of owner, staff and limited roles. A seasonal preparer gets the engagements they are working on and nothing else, and loses them the day they finish.
Approvals on the record
Put a document up for approval as an item on the same checklist. The record captures who approved it, the wording they agreed to, when, from where, and a fingerprint of the exact version they saw. It is not an electronic signature and we do not pretend otherwise.
Intake forms
One public link that turns an enquiry into a client record, a portal login, and their first request list — before you have spoken to them.
Your brand, your domain
Your logo, your colors, your domain. Clients log in at portal.yourfirm.com and every notification comes from your firm, not from a vendor they have never heard of.
Audit trail
Every view, upload, download and permission change is recorded and exportable. When someone asks who saw what and when, the answer takes one search.
In more detail
The parts that are easy to describe in a sentence and harder to get right.
Request lists are made of four kinds of item
Not everything you need from a client is a file. A request item can be a document upload, a typed answer to a question, a confirmation that something is still true, or an approval. That sounds like a small distinction and it is the difference between a portal covering the whole job and covering half of it.
A tax return list, for instance, is rarely all uploads: it is six documents, three questions about circumstances, one confirmation of bank details and an approved engagement letter. Putting all of it on one list is what lets the client finish in a single sitting.
Templates are the reason it saves time twice
The first time you build a request list you save the client some confusion. The second time you save yourself the work of writing it. Templates hold the items, the instructions and the reminder rhythm, and applying one to a client pre-fills everything including the items clients always forget.
In a firm with staff, templates are owned at firm level rather than by individuals, which is how you stop two preparers asking the same client for different things.
Chasing is a policy, not a task
Set a rhythm per template — daily in the last week before a deadline, weekly the rest of the year, nothing at all for a client who has asked you not to. Reminders go out from your firm, name the specific outstanding items, and stop the moment an item arrives.
Because reminders belong to the request rather than to a person, a client is never chased twice about the same thing by two people, and follow-up does not stop when somebody is on leave.
The vault is the part clients come back for
Everything a client has sent or been sent stays in their vault, foldered, versioned and searchable, with retention rules you set. Clients use it far more than firms expect, mostly to find their own prior-year documents, which quietly removes a category of request from your inbox.
Because it is permanent, a handover or a year-end archive is an export rather than an assembly job.
Branding is a security feature
Clients have been trained to treat unexpected links about their finances as suspicious, which is correct. A request that arrives from your firm, at your domain, with your logo, does not trigger that response. A request from a vendor's domain does, and the result is phone calls asking whether the email is real.
Your logo, your colors, a custom domain and notifications from your own address are on every plan from Practice upwards.
Approvals are not signatures, and we say so
An approval in FirmHello records the person who gave it, the exact wording they agreed to, the time, the address they came from, how they were verified, and a fingerprint of the document version they were looking at. The approved version is locked, so a later edit cannot inherit an earlier approval. That is a stronger record than most firms have today for the things they currently approve by email.
It is not an electronic signature. We do not issue certificate-backed signatures, we are not a qualified trust service, and an approval will not satisfy a rule that specifically requires a signature — an engagement letter your regulator expects signed, a tax form with its own signing requirements, a document a court will examine. For those, use a qualified e-signature provider; most firms need one for a surprisingly small number of documents.
We would rather lose a sale to that distinction than have a firm discover it during a dispute.
Integrations, honestly
Cloud storage sync, calendar and accounting integrations are on the roadmap and are not built yet. FirmHello today is a standalone portal that you connect to your website with a link or a subdomain. If a deep integration with a specific practice management or tax product is what would decide your choice, we are not yet the answer, and we would rather tell you here than in a demo.
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.
Written for the practice you actually run
The mechanics are the same everywhere. The document lists, the vocabulary and the deadlines are not, so each page below is written in its own.
Put your firm's name on it this week
Start a free 14-day trial, add your logo and your first client, and send a request list before the end of the day. No credit card and nothing to install.
No card and no sales call. If you would rather tell us about your firm first, use the longer form.