Client Management and Portals

Adoption is the whole product

A portal that half your clients use is worse than no portal, because now documents arrive through two channels and neither is complete. The honest way to evaluate one is not by feature list but by asking what percentage of client document exchange actually goes through it after six months.

The three reliable killers are friction at the door, an empty room, and a firm that never closed the old door. Each has a straightforward fix, and none of them is a feature.

• Friction at the door: a client who signs in twice a year will not remember a password, and a password reset that goes to an email they no longer check ends the relationship with the portal permanently
• An empty room: if the only thing inside is a folder the client already has copies of, there is no reason to return. Put the thing they actually want in there, which is usually the current status of their work and the document they need to sign
• The old door left open: if a client can still email an attachment and get a reply, they will. Adoption is a decision about how your firm responds, not about how the software is configured

Isolation, and the question to ask a vendor

A multi-tenant portal holds every client’s records in the same database. The question that matters is where the separation is enforced. If the application filters records by client identifier when it builds a page, then a bug, a crafted request or a stale link can return somebody else’s data, because the only thing stopping it was a line of application code.

The stronger design enforces the boundary in the database itself, so a query issued on behalf of one client cannot return another client’s rows even if the application asks for them. In Postgres that is row-level security. The right question to a vendor is therefore not "is client data separated" but "where is the separation enforced, and what happens if the application layer asks for the wrong record".

The related question is what a portal login can actually reach. A client identity should not be able to read staff-only notes, other clients, or firm-level records, and it should not be able to change its own permissions. Ask how that is tested, not whether it is true.

Login models, and the trade-off nobody states plainly

There is no perfect option here. There is a trade-off between security posture and the probability that an infrequent user gets in at all, and firms should choose it deliberately rather than inherit it.

A pragmatic pattern is to combine them: a credentialed portal for clients who will engage with it, and a no-login, upload-only page for the ones who never will, so a document you need still reaches you rather than sitting in an inbox. Accupe uses a client code and PIN for the portal, with a separate Secure Deposit Box page that accepts uploads against a client code without any sign-in and cannot be used to browse or download anything.

E-signatures: what makes one hold up

Electronic signatures are ordinary in UK business practice. The general position is that an electronic signature is capable of executing a document where the signatory intends to authenticate it, and the practical questions are evidential rather than existential: can you show who signed, what they signed, and when. The UAE likewise recognises electronic signatures under its electronic transactions and trust services legislation, with a higher tier available for authenticated signatures.

There are exceptions worth knowing rather than assuming. Deeds have their own execution formalities including witnessing, and certain instruments in both jurisdictions sit outside the general position or attract additional requirements. If a document class is unusual, check it once rather than per transaction.

Terminology also matters when a counterparty pushes back. A simple or advanced electronic signature is what almost all business agreements use. A qualified electronic signature involves a certificate authority and secure signature creation hardware, and is rarely required in ordinary practice. Accupe issues simple or advanced electronic signatures, and says so plainly rather than implying a qualified one.

• Identity: how did you establish that the signer was the person you invited. A link on its own only proves somebody had the link. A one-time code sent to the signer’s own email address, recorded on the certificate, is materially stronger
• Intent: an explicit act of signing and an attestation, not a checkbox buried in a page
• Integrity: a cryptographic hash of the signed document, so any later alteration is detectable. Accupe records a SHA-256 hash of both the original and the signed file and exposes an integrity record anyone can check
• Attribution and time: an audit trail of invitation, view, verification, signature and completion, with timestamps, and ideally an independent time stamp rather than only the vendor’s own clock
• Completeness: per-signer fields so signer two cannot fill signer one’s boxes, a signing order where sequence matters, an expiry, and a decline that captures a reason

Branding that does not stop at the front door

Branding a portal is not vanity. It is the difference between a client trusting a document request and treating it as a phishing attempt. The weak point is almost always the email: a portal that carries your logo perfectly, announced by a message from a domain the client has never seen, undoes its own work at the only moment it mattered.

Decide how far you want to take it before you roll out. Logo and colours are the cheap part. A custom domain and white-labelled notification emails are the parts that need DNS work and, in most products, a higher plan. In Accupe the firm logo appears on the portal on every plan, while portal colours, a custom domain and white-labelled client emails are Elite features.

Offboarding, retention and the awkward questions

Portals accumulate. Every engagement letter, identity document and signed return sits there indefinitely unless somebody decided otherwise, which is a data protection position taken by default rather than by choice.

Answer four questions before you roll out rather than after a client asks: what happens to portal access when an engagement ends, how long documents are retained afterwards, what a client is entitled to take with them, and who at your firm can delete something. Handled at the start these are three lines in your engagement letter and a setting. Handled later they are a conversation with a former client.