Does an accounting firm need a client portal, or is email enough?

For most accounting firms past a few dozen clients, email isn't enough, and a client portal is worth setting up. A portal puts document uploads, e-signatures, requests and return status in one secure place, so nobody has to dig through inboxes in March. You may not need new software for it, because many firms already pay for a tool with a portal they never fully set up.

Email works until busy season

Email feels free, and every client already knows how to use it. For a small firm with one partner who remembers everything, it can hold together for years.

It starts to break when the client list and the team grow. A client photographs a W-2 on the kitchen table at 9 p.m. and replies to a thread from last April. Another sends three versions of the same brokerage statement over two weeks, each one called "scan". A third insists she sent her 1099s in January, and someone spends twenty minutes searching four inboxes to find them.

None of this is a disaster on its own. Across a few hundred returns, though, it turns into hours of saving, renaming, filing and replying. It also means the firm's record of what came in, and when, lives in personal inboxes. When a staff accountant leaves in May, part of that record leaves with them.

There's a cost on the client's side as well. A client who gets asked twice for a document they already sent starts to wonder what else is getting lost. That feeling stays with them when they decide whether to come back next year.

What a client portal does

A client portal is a secure website where each client logs in to deal with your firm. A good one handles four jobs in one place:

• Secure upload. Clients send documents from a phone or a computer, and the files land in that client's folder.
• E-signatures. Engagement letters, Form 8879 and other authorizations get signed online, with a record of who signed and when.
• Requests. You send a list of what you need for this year, clients check items off as they upload, and the system reminds them about anything still missing.
• Status. Clients can see where their return stands without calling the office to ask.

Messages live in the portal too, attached to the client's record rather than to one person's inbox. That matters most in October, when a question comes up about a document from February and the whole exchange is sitting in one place.

Emailing tax documents is a real risk

Few things people send are as sensitive as tax paperwork. A W-2 or a 1099 carries a Social Security number, and much of the rest shows bank accounts, income and the names of children.

Ordinary email was never designed for that. Attachments sit in the sender's mailbox and in yours for years, and they get forwarded. Autocomplete puts the wrong Jennifer in the "To" line. And if a staff member's email account is ever taken over through a phishing message, every attachment in it is exposed at once.

A portal doesn't make a firm immune to problems, but it changes the defaults. Files travel over an encrypted connection, access needs a login, and documents stop piling up in a dozen inboxes. The IRS publishes a guide for tax professionals on safeguarding taxpayer data. It's worth a partner's hour to read it next to a plain description of how your firm handles documents today.

You may already own the software

Before you shop, look at what you already pay for. Practice-management and document tools such as TaxDome, Canopy and SmartVault include client portals, and several tax software suites offer one of their own. Plenty of firms have the feature available and almost no clients using it.

When a portal fails, the software is rarely the cause. Clients get a login email from a name they don't recognize and ignore it. Staff keep accepting attachments by email "just this once". The portal isn't connected to the tax software or the document store, so someone downloads every file and saves it again by hand.

Request lists are often too generic as well, so a retired couple gets asked for payroll reports and decides the whole thing isn't meant for them. Buying another tool on top of all this usually makes it worse. Clients end up with two logins, staff end up with two places to check, and documents get split between systems.

So for most firms, the useful question is how to connect and set up the tools they already have, so the whole team and most clients use them every day.

What a good setup looks like

Each client has one record, and documents, signatures and messages all hang off it. Request lists come from templates by client type, so a salaried employee gets a short list and a business owner with two rental properties gets a longer one. Reminders go out on a schedule without anyone having to remember them.

The portal should connect to the rest of your systems. Uploaded files land in the right folder in your document store and, where the tools allow it, flow into the tax software. If you keep the books for some clients in QuickBooks, their monthly requests can run through the same portal.

Status stages should match how your team actually works, something like documents requested, in preparation, in review, ready to sign and filed. If the stages describe somebody else's workflow, staff will stop updating them by the second week. Give one person in the firm ownership of the portal, ideally someone who knows the client work. They keep the request templates current each season and notice which clients haven't logged in yet.

Then the firm has to stop accepting attachments by email. This can be done politely. A standard reply that thanks the client, uploads the file for them this once and points them to the portal works well. After one season of that, most clients have switched.

Clients are the part partners worry about most, especially older individuals and busy business owners. Launch outside busy season, ideally in the fall, with a small request such as a signed engagement letter. Make the first login work from a phone with no app to install.

Send a one-page guide or a two-minute screen recording of exactly what they'll see. And keep a fallback for the handful who never will. If a long-standing client prefers to drop off a paper folder, scan it and upload it yourself.

A rough way to put numbers on it

Say a twelve-person firm prepares 900 individual returns and 150 business returns a year. Suppose each return takes, on average, four rounds of email to collect the documents, and each round takes about six minutes to read, save, rename, file and answer. That's 1,050 returns times four rounds times six minutes, or about 420 hours in a season.

Now suppose a portal with proper request lists and automatic reminders brings that down to one or two touches per return, at around four minutes each. Call it one and a half. That comes to roughly 105 hours. The difference, a little over 300 hours, falls mostly between February and April, when your team has the least time to spare.

These numbers are made up to show the method. Yours will be different, and the point is to run the same sum with figures from your own firm. Even if the saving came out at half of this, it would be worth knowing before you decide email is fine.

Connecting tools like these and setting them up around the way a firm works is the kind of work we do at eORB.

Where to start

1. Pull ten client files from last season and count the emails it took to collect each client's documents. That gives you a real number to use in place of the example above.
2. List the software you already pay for, log into each admin panel, and check whether it includes a portal, e-signatures and request lists, and which of those are switched off.
3. Pick five friendly clients and send their next request, such as a year-end organizer or an engagement letter, through the portal. Write down every place they get stuck and fix those before you roll it out to everyone.