Choosing a Client Portal for Your Accounting Firm

How your accounting business manages its financial records and connects with its clientele can make a real difference in the success of the business. Every accounting firm exchanges financial documents with its clients. However, sending earnings statements and tax documents as email attachments is never a good idea because email is far from being a secure method.

A client portal for accountants offers you a simple and secure platform to manage your accounting projects. This way, accountants and their clients can access the private portal to upload, view, and share documents with ease. When choosing the best client portal for your accounting firm, you need to consider a checklist of factors including its usability and the features it offers, such as e-Signature integration, and secure file storage and sharing.

Clinked offers one of the best client portal software for accountants to manage their workflows. A new era of improved collaboration between accounting teams and their clients has come to stay; there is no reason why your firm shouldn’t be part of it.

Key tips to consider when choosing client portals for accountants.

If you are a beginner who is searching for a client portal platform to supplement your existing digital channels, it helps to consider the following:

Accessibility of the portal from different devices

Most accounting teams and their clients work remotely, in transit, and during off-hours. You should want to ensure that your portal site guarantees easy access from a range of devices such as desktops, tablets, and smartphones, and other internet devices. While the majority of client portal software is web-based, not all of them support every browser. The best client portals allow for easy access from popular browsers such as Chrome, Safari, and Firefox.

Seamless integration with your accounting work environment

Productivity can be maximized when users have a reliable and intuitive work environment where they can manage all projects and share documents easily. Try to choose a portal that seamlessly integrates with your existing document management tools. This will allow you to provide effective documentation, actively engage with clients, and build a healthy working area.

Secure file storage and sharing

With Clinked client portal, file sharing is fully secure. Advanced encryption is a salient feature to look out for when selecting a client portal for your accounting firm. A portal that encrypts files immediately before transmission is worth it. While authorized users can share files directly through the portal, there are times when clients will be connecting with attorneys, business partners, and other third parties. In such circumstances, encrypted email could be essential. A secure email service is a vital tool for document-sharing with receiving parties who do not require fully-fledged access to a web portal.

Support for multiple file types

A great client portal functions as a valuable file repository. Choose a client portal software for accountants that supports many file types your business often deals with. These may include common file formats such as PDFs, word documents, PowerPoint, images, videos, Excel spreadsheets, and the like.  QuickBooks files can be quite large, so be sure to check the maximum file size as well.