Setting Up Your Accountant Portal: 5-Minute Guide

One of the most common questions we hear from accountants evaluating Accounted is how long it takes to get started. The answer is genuinely about five minutes, and that is not marketing optimism. The practice portal has been designed to get you from zero to reviewing your first client's records as quickly as possible, with no sales calls, no contract negotiations, and no complex technical setup.

This guide walks through each step of the process. If you prefer to learn by doing, you can sign up directly and follow the on-screen prompts. But if you want to understand what each step involves before you begin, read on.

Step 1: Create Your Practice Account

Navigate to the Accounted website and select the option for accountants. You will be asked for basic practice details:

• Practice name — your firm's trading name
• Your name and email — this becomes the primary admin account
• Practice size — a rough indication of how many clients you manage (this helps us tailor the onboarding experience, not limit your access)
• Professional body membership — optional, but if you are a member of ICAEW, ACCA, AAT, CIOT, or similar, this appears on your profile

There is no payment step. The practice portal is entirely free, as we explain in our post on why the practice portal carries no cost. You are not entering a trial period. There is no credit card required. The access you get on day one is the same access you will have in year five.

Once you submit these details, your practice account is created and you are taken to the main dashboard. At this point, the dashboard will be empty because you have not connected any clients yet. That is the next step.

Step 2: Connect to Your First Client

There are two ways to connect an accountant to a client's Accounted account, and the right choice depends on whether your client is already using Accounted or not.

If Your Client Already Uses Accounted

If your client is already an Accounted subscriber, they can invite you from their settings. They navigate to their accountant settings, enter your email address, and send an invitation. You receive an email with a link to accept the connection. Once accepted, their records appear in your practice dashboard.

Alternatively, you can send an invitation from your side. From the practice portal, select "Add Client" and enter your client's email address. They receive a notification in their Accounted account (and via email) asking them to approve the connection. Once approved, you have access.

The connection process includes a permissions step where the client confirms what level of access you have. The default is full review access, which means you can view all transactions, review flagged items, generate workpapers, and submit filings on their behalf. The client can also grant read-only access if they prefer a more limited relationship.

If Your Client Does Not Yet Use Accounted

If your client is not currently on Accounted and you want to recommend it, you can send them a sign-up invitation directly from your practice portal. This sends them a branded email explaining that you use Accounted for managing your clients' records and inviting them to subscribe.

When the client signs up through your invitation link, their account is automatically connected to your practice portal. No additional connection steps are needed. This is the most frictionless path for both parties: one action from you, one action from the client, and you are connected.

For a detailed guide on the client-side experience, see our post on how to onboard clients to Accounted. It covers what clients see, what they need to do, and how to handle common questions that arise during the process.

Step 3: Configure Your Review Preferences

Once you have at least one client connected, you will want to configure your review preferences. These settings determine how the review queue works for your practice.

Confidence Threshold

The most important setting is the confidence threshold. This determines the cut-off point at which Penny's categorisations are auto-applied versus flagged for your review.

• 0.95 (Conservative) — more items flagged, suitable for initial setup or complex clients
• 0.90 (Default) — balanced approach, catches genuine exceptions without excessive flagging
• 0.85 (Efficient) — fewer items flagged, suitable for well-established clients with predictable patterns

You can set a global threshold for your practice and then override it for individual clients. Most accountants start with the default 0.90 threshold and adjust after a few review cycles once they have a sense of the AI's accuracy for each client.

Notification Preferences

You can configure how and when you are notified about items in your review queue:

• Immediate notifications — receive an email or dashboard alert whenever a high-priority item is flagged (useful for items close to a filing deadline)
• Daily digest — a summary email each morning listing the number of items awaiting review across your client base
• Weekly digest — a weekly summary, suitable for practices that review in weekly batches

Most practices find the daily digest strikes the right balance between staying informed and avoiding notification fatigue.

Workpaper Settings

Accounted generates workpapers automatically as part of the review process. You can configure the level of detail included:

• Standard — records what was reviewed, what was changed, and what was approved, with timestamps and user identification
• Detailed — includes Penny's confidence scores, reasoning for each categorisation, and a full audit trail of the AI's decision-making process
• Custom — select specific elements to include based on your firm's documentation requirements

The detailed setting is recommended if your practice is subject to quality assurance reviews or if you want comprehensive documentation for regulatory purposes. For more on how workpapers are generated, see our dedicated post on automated workpaper generation.

Step 4: Add Your Team (If Applicable)

If you are a sole practitioner, you can skip this step. If your practice has multiple staff members who will use the portal, you can add them from the team management section.

Each team member needs:

• Name and email — for account creation
• Role — Admin (full access including practice settings), Reviewer (can review clients and generate workpapers), or Read-Only (can view client records but not make changes)
• Client assignments — optionally, you can assign specific clients to specific team members

Role-based access ensures that junior staff can be given appropriate permissions without risking unintended changes to client records. A common setup is for partners and managers to have admin access, qualified staff to have reviewer access, and trainees to have read-only access until they are ready to conduct reviews independently.

For practices with more complex team structures, our guide to multi-staff practice management covers delegation workflows, escalation paths, and capacity planning across a team.

Step 5: Explore the Dashboard

With your account created, clients connected, and preferences configured, your practice dashboard is now populated and ready to use. Here is a quick orientation of what you will see.

Client Overview Panel

The main panel shows all your connected clients with key metrics:

• Bookkeeping status — is the client's bookkeeping current, or are there gaps?
• Items awaiting review — how many flagged items are in the queue for each client?
• Next deadline — when is the client's next filing obligation?
• Penny's health score — an overall measure of how well the AI is performing for this client, based on confidence distribution and correction frequency

You can sort clients by any of these columns, making it easy to prioritise your attention. Clients with upcoming deadlines and pending review items naturally rise to the top.

Review Queue

The review queue aggregates all flagged items across your client base into a single, filterable list. You can work through it client by client or process all items of a particular type across multiple clients. The queue is covered in detail in our review queue guide.

Deadline Calendar

A calendar view showing all upcoming deadlines across your practice. MTD quarterly submissions, VAT returns, Self Assessment deadlines, and Corporation Tax deadlines are all tracked automatically based on each client's filing obligations. Colour coding indicates the status: green for on track, amber for approaching, red for overdue.

Reporting

Practice-level reports give you an overview of your workload, review efficiency, and client base health. You can see metrics such as average review time per client, flag rates over time, and common flag types. These are useful for identifying clients who need more attention and for tracking the efficiency gains as the AI learns over time.

Common Questions During Setup

Do my clients need to do anything?

If your clients are already using Accounted, they just need to approve the connection request. This takes less than a minute. If they are new to Accounted, they need to subscribe and set up their account (connecting their bank, uploading any initial receipts). The client-side setup takes about fifteen minutes.

Can I connect clients who use other accounting software?

The practice portal is specifically for clients who use Accounted. If your clients use Xero, QuickBooks, or another platform, you would continue to manage those clients through those platforms' accountant tools. Many practices run a mixed client base during the transition period, with some clients on legacy platforms and new or transitioning clients on Accounted.

For practices evaluating whether to move clients from legacy platforms, our comparison guides (such as Accounted vs Xero) provide a detailed breakdown of the differences to help you decide which clients are good candidates for migration.

What if I have questions during setup?

The setup process includes contextual help at each step, and our support team is available via email if you get stuck. That said, the process is straightforward enough that most accountants complete it without needing to contact support. The most common "issue" is not a technical problem but a question about optimal threshold settings, which is less about right and wrong and more about your practice's preferred approach to risk-based review. Understanding the distinction between bookkeeping and accountancy oversight can help calibrate this — the threshold essentially defines where the AI bookkeeper's work ends and the accountant's begins. With no setup cost (the portal is free, saving your practice £hundreds compared to paid alternatives), there is genuinely no barrier to getting started.

Is my data secure?

Accounted uses bank-grade encryption for all data in transit and at rest. The practice portal uses the same security infrastructure as the client-facing application, with additional controls for multi-user access. Sessions time out after 15 minutes of inactivity, two-factor authentication is available (and recommended), and all access is logged for audit purposes. More details on our security practices are available on the ICO's GDPR guidance pages which outline the regulatory framework we comply with, and our own security documentation available upon request.

What Happens Next

Once you are set up, the rhythm of using the practice portal settles quickly. Most accountants find that within a week, the dashboard and review queue become part of their daily workflow. Within a month, the efficiency gains are measurable. Within a quarter, the idea of going back to line-by-line review feels unthinkable.

The portal continues to improve as you use it. Penny learns from your review decisions, reducing the number of flagged items over time. The dashboard's metrics give you visibility into where your time is going and where further efficiencies might be found. And as more of your clients move to Accounted, the single-dashboard advantage compounds — you spend less time switching between platforms and more time on work that adds value.

If you are ready to get started, create your free practice account. If you want to learn more about what the portal offers before committing, our page for accountants provides a comprehensive overview. And if you have specific questions about how Accounted fits into your practice workflow, the AccountingWeb community forums have active discussions from accountants who use the platform.

Five minutes. That is genuinely all it takes. The longest part of the process is deciding to start.

Accounted gives accountants a free practice portal — manage all your clients, file to HMRC, and let Penny handle the routine work. See the accountant portal →