Client approvals and e-signatures without the email back-and-forth
Stop chasing approvals over email. Capture client sign-off and e-signatures in the portal, with an audit trail your practice and clients can trust.
Every accounting practice knows the rhythm. You finish a BAS or a set of financials, attach the PDF, and email the client for sign-off. Then you wait. A reply lands three days later asking a question you already answered. The signed page comes back as a photo of a screen. By the time the approval is in hand, you have lost an afternoon to chasing, and you are still not certain who actually clicked send.
The back-and-forth is not a client problem. It is a process problem. When approvals live in inboxes, nobody owns the thread, nothing is logged, and the version everyone is looking at is anyone's guess. The fix is to move approvals and e-signatures out of email and into one place where the request, the document, and the decision all sit together.
Why email approvals quietly cost you
Email feels free, but the hidden cost adds up fast across a busy lodgment period. A few of the patterns most practices will recognise:
- No single source of truth. The PDF you sent, the reply, and the signed copy are scattered across three messages and possibly two people's inboxes.
- Version drift. A client approves "the financials" without anyone being sure which draft they actually opened.
- Weak evidence. A line in an email saying "looks good, go ahead" is not the same as a recorded, timestamped approval against a specific document.
- Manual follow-up. Someone has to remember who has not replied, then write the reminder, then check again tomorrow.
None of this is about clients being difficult. It is about the tool. Email was never built to record a decision against a document, and it shows.
Send work for approval inside the portal
Finye gives every client a secure portal login. Instead of attaching a document to an email and hoping, you publish the work to the client's portal and ask them to approve it there. The request, the file, and any notes you have added all appear in one view the client can open from any device.
From the client's side the experience is simple: they log in, see what is waiting for them, read it, and approve. No hunting through an inbox, no replying to the wrong thread, no printing and scanning. From your side, the request is tracked as a work item, so it sits on your board alongside everything else your team is managing rather than disappearing into a personal inbox.
Because the portal is tied to the client record, you also keep document requests, uploads, invoices, and approvals in the same place. A client who has just approved their financials can pay the related invoice on the same visit, and your team sees both events against the same client without switching tools. If you are weighing up how a connected portal compares with stitching point tools together, our comparison walks through the difference.
Capture e-signatures where you need a signed instrument
Approval is enough for a lot of routine sign-off. Some documents need a genuine signature: engagement letters, authority forms, and anything you want held as a signed instrument. Finye handles this with built-in e-signing.
You can generate an engagement letter, send it for e-signature through Annature or DocuSign, and let the client sign electronically without printing a thing. Once the document is signed, post-sign automation takes over so the executed copy is captured and the next step in your workflow can begin, rather than the signed PDF sitting in an inbox waiting to be filed.
That matters most at onboarding, when a new client has a stack of paperwork to get through before you can start work. Pairing e-signed engagement letters with document and PBC requests, plus AML and KYC onboarding, means a new client can complete the formal steps in one guided run rather than a dozen separate emails. Our guides cover how practices structure that onboarding flow.
An audit trail clients can trust
The real payoff of moving approvals and signatures into the portal is the record it leaves behind. Every approval and signature is captured against a specific document, with the who and the when recorded automatically. You are no longer relying on an email that says "yep, fine" with no clear reference to what was being approved.
This protects the practice and reassures the client. If a question comes up later about whether a return was authorised before lodgment, you have a clear, timestamped trail rather than a search through old messages. For anything involving a TPB obligation or an ATO lodgment, being able to point to a recorded approval against the exact document is far stronger than an inbox screenshot.
It also tidies up your internal accountability. Because approvals and signatures attach to the work item and the client record, anyone on the team can see the current status without asking. A staff member covering for a colleague during leave can pick up exactly where things stand, including what is still waiting on the client.
Stop the reminder chase
Half the pain of approvals is the follow-up. When everything runs through the portal, the status of each request is visible on your board, so you can see at a glance what is outstanding instead of digging through sent items. Pending approvals and unsigned documents stop being invisible.
For practices that want to go further, the same client communication can flow through Finye rather than personal email, so the request, the nudge, and the eventual approval all live in one thread tied to the client. The result is fewer dropped threads, less manual chasing, and a clearer picture of where every piece of work actually sits.
The shift is not dramatic. You are still asking clients to look at work and say yes. You are simply doing it in a place that records the decision, keeps the document attached, and lets your team see the status without asking around.
If chasing approvals over email is costing your practice time you would rather spend on client work, see how Finye brings approvals, e-signatures, and the client portal together. Start your free trial or take a look at our plans to find the right fit for your firm.