Guide · US accounting
A client portal for small CPA firms that clients will actually use
Most small CPA firms already have a portal. It came bundled with the tax software, it has forty features, and every February the same clients email photos of their W-2s anyway. The problem usually isn't the lack of a portal. It's that the portal asks clients to learn something new once a year.
What clients actually need to do
Strip it back and a client has four jobs in a tax season. A good portal makes each of them obvious on a phone, with no app to install.
- See a short list of what you need from them this year, in plain words ("Your 1099-B from Schwab"), not a 14-page organizer.
- Upload a photo or PDF against each item, and be told straight away if it's the wrong year, the wrong form or unreadable.
- Sign the engagement letter and Form 8879 when it's ready.
- Pay the invoice.
What the firm needs
- One screen showing who is waiting on whom, so nobody has to dig through email to find out.
- Reminders that go out on their own, politely, until the list is done.
- Documents stored somewhere private, with access you control, not in a staff member's inbox.
- A record of consent where you use or disclose return information (the IRC section 7216 rules), and a portal that fits the written information security plan the FTC Safeguards Rule and IRS Publication 4557 expect you to keep.
Buy a suite, or build a small one?
If you already use a practice-management suite and your clients use its portal, keep it. Adding another login won't help. A small custom portal makes sense when your clients ignore the bundled one, when you've outgrown email and a shared drive, or when your intake is unusual (multi-state returns, trusts, small-business bookkeeping clients who send receipts all year).
The trade-off is honest: a custom portal does fewer things, but the things it does are shaped around your checklist and your branding. You also own it. If you stop paying for Care, you take the code and the data with you.
How I build one
I build a working version on your own website's look before we talk, using made-up sample clients. If it fits, it goes live on your domain in about a week, with a 14-day free trial and no card. Your client files live in storage you control, and you can export everything at any time.
Try it · sample data only
The live example is a portal for a small US CPA practice, filled with fictional clients and fake documents. Upload anything to see the document check work; nothing real is stored.
Open the sample-data demo