Once you’ve created accounts for all your client portal users, they can begin taking advantage of all the tools and features included with your account, but now that they’re sending you files and logging into your Portal, you may find out you need to know exactly when they logged in and what actions they took. Fortunately, your Firm Portal and the Secure File Exchange both have extensive usage and activity logs, so you can see which of your users are accessing your Portal, what they’re doing, and how they’re managing their files.

By logging into your Portal as an administrator, you’ll find the Portal’s Activity Log under the Account Information heading. This log displays the user email address, time, date, IP address and actions of every user who logs into the Portal. Using the drop-down menu at the top, you can view the actions of specific users, or search for all users performing a specific action, like logging into the Tax Organizer. You can even export the data to an Excel, Word or CSV file so you can examine the data however you’d like.

The Secure File Exchange itself has two logs, Activity and Usage. You’ll find them both under the ‘more…’ menu in the Secure File Exchange.

If you’re running low on storage space and you need to clear out some old files, or if you just want to see who’s making the most of your Secure File Exchange, the Usage Report is just the thing you need. It generates a list of all your users, how many files each one is using and how much of your storage space those files are taking up. Then, if you’re running low on space, you can quickly find out where to trim some fat.

The Activity Log tracks exactly how your users are using the Secure File Exchange. By using this report, you can monitor exactly how and when your clients send and receive files. Using the drop-down menu on the upper right, you can view the Secure File Exchange activities of any of your users, or choose ‘All Clients’ to view everyone’s activity. If you need to know when your client uploaded a file, or which Firm User deleted a client file, you can find all that and more through the Activity Log.

For more information on the level of control you have over your Firm Portal and Secure File Exchange, take a look over our Help Center. You might just find that there are more resources and tools available to you than you realized.

Your Client Portal has a brand new feature.  In response to your requests, we’ve made it easier for you to manage your Portal users.

Now you can stop spending your valuable time searching through unfamiliar email addresses to edit a single client. The next time you log into your Portal’s Add/Modify Client Users section, you’ll see our new Search By Name feature.

Your client User list can get pretty long, and with the self-registration tool it’s easy to lose track of which email addresses belong to which clients.  This new Search By Name lets you easily find a user by simply entering a name or company in the search field.  The Portal will then list every matching account, allowing you to quickly find the user you’re looking for.

With your feedback, we’re continually improving our tools and features to produce the best possible services for you. If you have any concerns, suggests or improvements we can make for you, please give us a call, send an email or contact us through our Live Help Chat.

You can rest assured knowing that your clients files are safe and secure on our servers because your Vault and Client Portal data is encrypted 100% of the time.

While many Client Portal vendors use encryption to secure data in transit, CPASiteSolutions is the only provider to implement encryption where it resides most of the time, on the server hard drives and other storage media.

If this were easy to do, everyone would be doing it. Storing data in an encrypted format requires a lot of programming from extremely high level security experts. All the encryption and de-cryption places a heavy load on the server’s processors so significantly fewer accounts can be placed on each server.

It’s expensive, but worth it when you consider that encryption is considered the most effective method of securing personal and corporate information according to corporate and government security regulators. In fact, many data protection laws specifically list encryption as a “safe harbor” exception to notification rules, and some laws explicitly require the use of encryption.

Keeping You In Compliance

All CPAs and accountants must comply with the privacy laws governing the safe storage of personal and corporate financial information. A single violation of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act caries a fine up to $100,000. So your firm is in jepordy if it isn’t protected.

This new 100% file encryption gives you an extremely high level of protection and virtually eliminates the legal liability associated with data breaches. In fact, your Client Portal has very detailed Audit Trails that help prove that information hasn’t been leaked.

At CPASiteSolutions, we go overboard on security. Other Client Portal vendors provide 5 or 6 layers of security. We don’t stop there. We provide a full 14 layers of security to give you the most protection available.

You don’t need to do anything to get this new level of protection as long as you are using our “Vault” Secure File Exchange system.

If you’re using one of our older Secure File Exchange systems we strongly encourage you to upgrade now. There is no additional cost to upgrade. Yes, the upgrade is completely Free. So please call or email us and we’ll get you setup on our extremely secure “Vault” File Exchange System.

Your Firm and Client Portal has been upgraded this month. This completely new release is even easier to use and comes with the most advanced security features installed.

Sarbanes-Oxley and Gramm-Leach-Bliley Compliance

The laws governing websites for CPAs, accountants , and other financial services fall under unique privacy laws that other website owners don’t need to worry about. If you are transferring sensitive files into and out of a directory on your website, and you fall under the definition of a “financial service” (this includes, among other things, anyone who prepares taxes) you need to pay very special attention to online security.

If you don’t take good care of your client’s financial data online, you could be fined up to $100,000 for each violation of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. At that rate, it doesn’t take many violations to completely wipe you out.

At CPASiteSolutions are well aware of the responsibility you have to your clients, which is why our File Exchange System is continually updated. This is, after all, our responsibility to you. As a provider of websites to CPA and Accounting firms it is our job to keep you in compliance with the law, just as it is your job as an accountant to do the same for your clients.

That’s why we just spent more than $37,000 to develop a new portal system to protect you.

What is a Firm Portal?
The firm portal is your access to the secured area of your website. As a firm user you can not only share sensitive accounting documents safely and securely with your clients, you can also modify your website , transfer files into your root directory via FTP, and access your Email Marketing System .

The new portal was designed by a team of high level programmers and security experts. They went through every possible security threat and locked them all down so you can sleep comfortably at night.

In order to be compliant with the Sarbanes-Oxley and Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act you need to have an audit trail of every user that accesses sensitive data. You now have a complete log of every access to the portal to keep you in compliance.

The Activity Log is both searchable and downloadable. For example… you can quickly search the log to see the last time one of your clients logged into the Vault File Exchange System. And you also have the ability to export a list of every access into Excel. You may never need to use the Activity Log, but it’s nice to know that it’s there keeping you in compliance.

Password Policies

All of the best security in the world becomes useless if you use weak passwords. It’s your responsibility to ensure the security and confidentiality of your client’s information. So if you allow your firm members or clients to access sensitive financial information with weak (easily cracked) passwords, you are in violation of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.

That’s why we’ve implemented new password policies. You can choose how loose or tight you want your policy to be.

Here are the 3 levels…

Low : Average password strength (6 or more characters) required for all Firm and Client users.

Medium (Default): Strong passwords (8 or more characters with a symbol or digit) required for all Firm Users. But “Average” passwords required for Client Users (6 or more characters).

High : Strong passwords (8 or more characters with a symbol or digit) required for all Firm and Client Users.

The new password policy will be enforced the next time a user signs in. If the user’s password does not currently meet the policy, the user will be asked to change their password (to the stronger version) before logging in.

Firewall Friendly

The previous portal used “non-standard” high ports to enforce Secure Socket Layer (SSL) Security. The new portal uses standard ports for SSL security so you and your clients will not have firewall access issues.

Quickly Import Multiple Clients

The previous portal system required you to manually enter each of your clients. Now, that wasn’t too terrible if you only had to enter a few clients. But if you have hundreds of clients the process was mind-numbing and a waist of valuable time.

That’s why we built a client import system into the new portal. Now it only takes a few seconds to enter hundreds of clients.

Easy-To-Use Intuitive Design

The new portal interface uses simple Control Panel Icons instead of a complex menu system. So adding new users, changing access rights, or simply logging into an application is intuitive and easy.

I hope you like this new secure firm and client portal system we designed for you. If you have any suggestions, please leave a comment on this blog or call us.