Modern accounting firm

Overview

Accounting firms have many practice management solutions to choose from, but few offer a modern and flexible client portal that elevates the client experience. This workspace template was designed with the help of leading CPAs and will help you provide clients a secure all-in-one experience that brings together messaging, files-sharing, contracts, intake forms, billing, access to schedule calls, and access to financial statements.

To see the client experience before cloning the workspace, create a test client account first. Once you're ready to get set up you can clone the workspace. When you clone a workspace you will go through the regular onboarding flow but at the end you will start with an environment that is optimized for CPA firms.

General onboarding tips

Go through the Copilot Guide, especially the "Getting Started" section. There you can learn about basic setup, customizations, custom domains, and more. Going through the Getting Started section should take less than 15 minutes.

What to do after cloning this workspace

This workspace was designed for accounting firms and below you can find some best-practices specifically for your industry.

App setup

This workspace comes with the below apps installed.

1. If there are apps you don't want, navigate to the App Setup page, click into the app you don't want, and remove it. For example, if you don't want to create a Helpdesk for your clients, it's better to remove it so that the user experience is simplified.

2. You can change the name and icon of any app. You can also rearrange the apps on the sidebar. The app listed at the top of the "Client-facing apps" section will be the home page of your portal.

Customize the Client Home App

The Client Home is a customized home page for your clients. When your clients log in to your portal this is the first page that will load. Here's how to customize it:

1. Navigate to the Home App on the sidebar. This is the default page of your client portal.

2. Customize the home page. For example, you can:

   1. Introduce your firm.

   2. Set expectations around availability and working hours.

   3. Explain how clients should use the client portal.

Configure the Messages App

The Messages App is how you can communicate with clients and how clients can communicate with you. You can send messages from the Copilot Dashboard and clients will receive messages both via email and in-product in your portal. Clients can reply directly via email with responses or reply from your portal. We generally recommend our Messages App over email due to security and convenience, but if you workflows are heavily email-centric you can also disable it. Follow the below steps to customize the Messages App:

1. Navigate to the Messages App settings page.

2. Configure your welcome message. This is the message sent to clients the first time they log in. Our recommendation is to introduce your firm, remind them to bookmark your portal, and explain how you want them to use it. For example, you might say something like: "Welcome to {businessName}'s accounting portal. Here you can securely communicate with us, upload and access files, and sign contracts."

3. You will see a toggle called "Email notifications contain message contents". When this is enabled, when you message clients in the Copilot Dashboard they will receive email notifications containing your message. Clients can directly reply to these emails with their response. In general, we recommend keeping this setting enabled due to client convenience. However, you can also disable this setting if you want to require clients to authenticate to your portal in order to respond.

Configure your scheduling app

Copilot works with a variety of scheduling products like Calendly. To make scheduling for clients follow the below steps:

1. Navigate to the App Setup page and click into "Schedule a call".

2. Replace the Calendly URL with your own. If you use another scheduling product, you can enter the URL for that product.

Sharing financial statements

In this workspace, we set up a Google Sheets embed called "Financial statements". If you log in as a client (we recommend creating a test client to test the client experience) you'll see what the user experience of viewing financial information in a Google Sheet is like. Note that this is only a demonstration and you'll want to uninstall this app (not all clients will ever see the same financial information). To share financial information with clients follow these steps:

1. Navigate to the Add an App page.

2. You can embed any products that support embedding. For sharing financial information we see accounting firms use products like Google Sheets, Airtable, Looker Studio, Databox, and many others. Select the product you want to use or click on "Embeds and Links" if it is not listed.

3. Under Setup Type, select Manual. This lets you connect different content for each client or company.

4. After installing the app, you can now configure an embed for each client or company.

Using the Exporter App

Copilot was designed to make data export and backup easy. In particular, we've heard that accounting firms like the ability to export message histories with clients for legal reasons. Here's how you can use the Exporter:

1. Navigate to Exporter on the sidebar.

2. Select the message channels you want to export and a file type.

3. Start the export job.

Setting up custom visibility for apps

We are increasingly seeing accounting firms that offer tiers of service to clients with monthly plans. In your Copilot Dashboard you can set up a custom field that represents the "tier", and then you can set values for the tier levels. For example, "Basic", "Professional", "Advanced". Once configured, for each app you can now set up custom visibility rules such that clients on different tiers get access to different apps. Here are some ideas you can explore:

• Only let clients on premium plans access to schedule calls with you.

• Only let clients on premium plans access for a knowledge repository made with our Helpdesk App.