Client Portal

A browser dashboard your clients log into — carrying your practice's name, not ours.

Which plan: the Client Portal belongs to Accountant Firm, and is switched on for the whole 30-day trial so you can try it before committing. It is not part of Basic, Professional, Professional 15, Accountant Pro or Accountant Enterprise. Firm branding is included wherever the portal is.

What it is

If you hold a client's books inside your own Kantivo installation, the portal is how that client sees them without ringing you. They open a web page, sign in, and find their own figures: profit and loss, balance sheet, what they still owe, what they have paid. They can send you documents and message your team from the same screen.

Nothing is installed on their side and they buy no software. The books stay in your installation, where you already work on them.

Why it is worth the setup. The portal is the difference between a client who waits for you to email a PDF and one who answers their own question at nine o'clock on a Sunday. It also removes the standing awkwardness of a client discovering the software vendor and wondering whether they need you at all — because as far as they can tell, the portal is your practice.

Switching it on

The portal is configured per company, so you decide which clients get one.

Open the client company whose books you want to expose
Go to Accountant Tools → Client Portal Settings
Turn Enable Client Portal on
Tick what this particular client should see — financial statements, document exchange, messaging, and whether to show them an invitation to license their own copy
Press Save Settings

Repeat for each client you want to bring in. A client with no portal enabled simply has no way to log in; nothing about their books changes.

Wearing your name

Everything a client sees can carry your practice's identity instead of ours:

Firm name — in the header and on the sign-in screen
Logo — PNG or SVG, around 200 × 60 pixels
Colours — a primary and an accent shade to match your brand
Welcome message — whatever greeting you want on the dashboard
Tagline — a line under your firm name at sign-in

This is the point of difference worth understanding. QuickBooks Online Accountant puts Intuit's name on every screen your client touches, which quietly teaches them that the software is the relationship and you are the intermediary. Here they see your firm, and the notification emails come from your firm too.

Inviting a client

Switch to that client's company
Open Accountant Tools → Client Portal → Invite Client
Enter their email address
Press Send Invitation

They receive an email with a secure registration link and set their own password. Invitations last 30 days; expired ones can be reissued and live ones revoked, both from the portal management panel.

What the client sees

After registering they land on a dashboard scoped to their company alone:

Summary — cash position, revenue, the handful of figures they actually ask about
Income statement — over any date range they choose
Balance sheet — assets, liabilities and equity as they stand
Open invoices — what is outstanding, payable by card on the spot
Payment history — everything settled through the portal

They see only what you enabled, and only for their own company.

Getting paperwork in

Asking for something specific

Under Accountant Tools → Client Portal → Document Requests, create a request with a title (“January bank statements”), a note, a category and an optional due date. It appears on their dashboard straight away and they upload against it.

When they just send things

Clients can also upload without being asked — receipts, a signed contract, a letter from HMRC or the IRS. Uploads are filed by category and visible to your team immediately.

What this replaces. Plenty of practices pay separately for SmartVault or ShareFile at roughly $20–$40 a month purely to move documents about. This does that job, and the documents arrive already attached to the right client.

Keeping the conversation

Portal messaging exists so that “what did we agree about the van?” has an answer that is not somebody's inbox.

Threads keep each topic together instead of scattering across replies
Clients are notified when you write, and see an unread badge
Attachments can ride along with any message
Every exchange is stored alongside that client's financial records

Automatic notifications

Kantivo emails the client when something needs their attention: the original invitation, a new message from you, and a document you have shared. All three carry your firm's name and colours, so nothing in their inbox mentions us.

This matters more than it sounds. A document request nobody notices is a document request that turns into a phone call in three weeks.

Limits and safeguards

Portal users are read-only. They can view figures and upload documents. They cannot create, edit or delete an accounting record of any kind.
Access is per company. A portal login reaches one client's books and no other.
You control the surface. Whatever you leave unticked in settings does not exist as far as that client is concerned.
Revoke at any time from the portal management panel.

The portal needs your installation reachable. Kantivo runs on your machine, so a client signing in at midnight reaches your books only if that machine is on and Kantivo is running. If clients will use the portal outside your working hours, leave it running.