The Client Portal Gap Most Professional Services Firms Don’t Talk About
As Soliant Consulting’s VP of Sales, I am fortunate to sit in on many sales conversations and get an inside look into the technology opportunities organizations have and the issues they’re struggling with. My team and I recently sat down with a large accounting firm, and their team shared that they don’t have a client portal. At all. They knew they needed one, but they weren’t sure where to start.
At that point, their clients were logging into separate tools for documents, billing, team communication, and service management, but there was no single place to bring it all together. They knew they needed a client portal but simply hadn’t gotten to it yet.
This conversation didn’t surprise me as much as it probably should have. The firms most likely to have a client experience gap aren’t the ones that have been standing still; they’re often the ones growing the fastest and don’t have time to put something in place.
How Fast-Growing Firms End Up with a Lacking Client Experience
Professional services firms generally invest in the technology that follows the people doing the work. The document management platforms, billing systems, CRM tools, and specialized applications for each service line that I mentioned above are good examples. Those investments make sense, because they’re close to the work.
What firms are slower to invest in is the layer that connects all of those internal systems to the client. Nobody raises their hand to say something is broken, because technically, nothing is. They’re just failing to capture an opportunity to significantly improve the client experience.
What Happens to Client Experience When a Firm Grows Through Acquisition
M&A compounds this issue. A firm that grows through mergers and acquisitions inherits the technology decisions of every practice it brings in. Each acquired firm has its own document platforms and processes. Each one may work fine in isolation, but clients who engage across multiple service lines end up touching several different platforms just to work with what they see as one firm.
They may have one login for tax documents, another for wealth management, and another for billing. A client with three or four active service lines could realistically be navigating five or six different tools in a given year.
Each one is a small friction point. Taken together, they send a message the firm didn’t intend: we haven’t fully brought this together for you.
A well-built client portal addresses this directly by providing a single place where clients can do what they need to do without being sent elsewhere. That’s a reasonable thing for a client to expect from a top firm.
Building the Right Foundation for a Client Portal
At the start of every client portal development project at Soliant Consulting, we ask our clients what they actually need to accomplish. For most professional services firms, the answer is fairly consistent. Clients need to:
- Log in securely and manage their profiles, preferences, and notifications.
- Upload and download documents.
- See who on the firm’s team is responsible for their engagement.
- Understand which services they have active.
- Communicate directly with their team.
- Access billing and invoice history.
A portal that handles those tasks reliably earns regular use. That’s the foundation. Everything else gets built on top of that core once it’s solid.
We work through this during the discovery phase of our client portal development projects. We run structured discovery sessions, document the use cases, and build a working prototype using AI-assisted tools before we write a single line of production code. That gives clients something real to react to early. It means we’re not guessing at the interface when development starts, and it gives both sides a clear picture of what the project actually requires.
After all, we don’t know exactly how clients will navigate the portal, which features they’ll actually reach for, or where the UX assumptions are wrong until real users are in front of the application. Getting a focused product in front of users faster means getting real feedback faster. That feedback shapes what you build next more than any amount of upfront planning.
This discovery process naturally surfaces prioritization challenges, and that’s where defining your MVP becomes critical.
For example, one accounting firm we worked with had close to 30 documented use cases when we first got on a call. Before our next conversation, they narrowed that list to 16 for their initial release.
Projects that try to launch with everything tend to take longer, cost more, and still require significant rework after launch. Projects that start with a clear, honest MVP tend to work out better for both parties. That doesn’t mean you don’t eventually launch more features. It means you get something out the door, learn from it, and build from a better position.
Your Long-term Partner for Accounting Client Portals
Client portal development is a long-term investment in how clients experience your firm. Firms that build around how clients actually work, not just around their own internal systems, deliver something clients return to. A well-executed portal makes every interaction simpler, makes it easier for clients to engage across service lines, and reduces the quiet attrition that comes from friction nobody brings up, but everybody feels.
Contact our team to talk through what a portal project would look like for your firm. We’re happy to walk through the details with you.
