Client Document Portal for a Bilingual Accounting Firm
Bilingual client portal with AI document classification and automatic tax-deadline reminders. Takes the tax-season document-chasing chaos out of the accountant's week.
- Client
- Sample scenario: Auckland accounting firm serving Chinese-speaking SMBs
- Industry
- Accounting Firm
- Services
- Enterprise SoftwareAI Integration
- AI first-pass classifies client documents (GST invoice, payroll, expense, asset, etc.) with human review on anything uncertain
- Bilingual portal and reminders so Chinese-speaking SMB clients actually use it
- Xero integration where the client already uses Xero — no duplicate data entry
The scenario
A mid-size Auckland accounting firm serves mostly Chinese-speaking small-business owners — restaurants, dairies, import/export, small retail. Typical annual rhythm:
- Every March-April, the firm's inbox explodes with GST returns, income tax documents, payroll summaries — in Chinese, English, sometimes handwritten photos taken on a phone.
- Clients send things as multi-part messages, Gmail attachments, paper drops. Critical documents get lost or duplicated.
- The firm bills fixed fees per return, but the variable cost of organising messy submissions eats margin.
This case study describes what we can build remotely for a firm with this shape.
What we build
A bilingual client portal where every SMB client has their own secure workspace:
- Upload receipts, bank statements, invoices. AI classifies each document (GST invoice, payroll, expense, asset, income statement, etc.) and extracts totals, dates, GST-registered status of the vendor. Accurate for standard document types; flags anything uncertain for human review.
- Missing-items checklist for each return ("we're still missing your February bank statement").
- Bilingual deadline calendar and reminders (GST, provisional tax, FBT, etc.) — in each client's preferred language.
For the accountants, a back-office that:
- Drafts the GST return from classified documents. The accountant reviews, edits, signs off — no more keying each line from scanned receipts.
- Pulls live data from Xero for clients who already use Xero, so the portal and Xero stay in sync.
- Generates bilingual engagement letters, fee notes, and client onboarding packs.
What the AI actually does — and doesn't do
The AI handles the boring, high-volume first-pass classification that used to consume an assistant's entire week. What it emphatically does not do:
- It does not sign the return. The accountant reviews and signs off.
- It does not give tax advice. It labels documents and extracts amounts; it doesn't tell a client which expenses to claim or how to structure their affairs.
- It does not touch IRD filings autonomously. Submission is always a human action.
The outcome is that the data-entry layer shrinks from hours per client to minutes of review, which lets the accountant spend time on actual advisory work.
Deployment options
- Cloud (default): hosted on our NZ-region infrastructure.
- On-premises: delivered as a Docker Compose package for the firm's own server. Client financial data never leaves the firm's own network — often a decisive factor for firms that have had sensitive-data conversations with clients.
Xero API access requires the client's own OAuth consent either way — we don't hold their Xero credentials; the integration authenticates per-client.
Pricing
Scope-quoted. Free 30-minute consultation, written fixed-price quote. Typical delivery 4-8 weeks depending on how many document types need training examples and whether you want Xero integration and/or bank-statement OCR included.