Accounting & financial services
Client portal that cut tax-season email volume by ~60% for an accounting firm
8-person accounting firm, BC
An 8-person accounting firm was drowning in tax-season emails: document requests, missing files, status questions, last-minute uploads. We built a client portal that gave clients a structured place to upload documents, see what was still outstanding, and check status without emailing.
Anonymized. Real project shape and outcome ranges, identifying details changed to protect client confidentiality.
Headline numbers
What changed
Tax-season email volume
Down ~60%
Average doc-collection time
~17 days → ~6 days
Late-filed returns
Down ~70%
Build time
10 weeks to launch
The problem
Where they were stuck
Every client engagement spawned 20-40 emails about documents: requests, follow-ups, 'did you get this?', resubmissions.
Documents arrived in five different places — email attachments, a shared drive, a generic upload tool, sometimes paper.
Staff spent the first hour of every morning answering 'where are we at with my return?' emails.
Late filings often traced back to missing documents that nobody chased until the deadline.
The approach
What we built and why
- 1
Built a per-client portal with a clear checklist of required documents for that engagement.
- 2
Clients could upload directly. The portal showed what was still missing.
- 3
Status was visible to the client without an email — 'in progress', 'awaiting documents', 'ready for review', 'filed'.
- 4
Internal staff view showed every client's status across the firm. Partners could see who was at risk of a late filing two weeks out.
The result
What it actually did
Tax-season email volume dropped about 60%. Mornings stopped being inbox triage.
Average time to collect a client's documents fell from about 17 days to about 6.
Late-filed returns dropped roughly 70% in the first season — the early-warning view let partners intervene in time.
Clients reported the portal felt more professional than the email chaos it replaced.
Under the hood
What it's built on
Stack & shape
- Secure client portal with per-client document checklist
- Internal staff view with firm-wide status
- Document upload with virus scanning and audit log
- Optional integration with the firm's tax-prep software (phase 2)