Our Life Events guide helps when clients lose a spouse.

When a client’s spouse passes away, it’s rough. You feel terrible for their loss, and you want to help them sort out the financial tangle that’s often left behind.

That’s your job – to be there for your client when they need you most.

But you can’t always predict when life events will unfold. What if your client needs you in May, when you’re taking a well-deserved vacation? Or over a long holiday weekend?

Accounting websites with CPA Site Solutions allow you to be available for your clients 24/7/365. Our sites contain page after page of guides and FAQs designed to help your clients whenever they need it.

You serve existing clients far better with this high-quality content. And a well-served client – one you support in his hour of need – will never want to leave.

3,000 Pages of Financial Guides

Our financial guides cover 5 major areas:

• Life Events

• Business Strategies

• Tax Strategies for Businesses

• Tax Strategies for Individuals

• Investment Strategies

Our guides are written by top-flight writers so you know you’re offering sound information.

Over 1,000 Frequently Asked Questions

A list of FAQs is an important resource for your clients. Sometimes it’s easier to skim a list of questions than to look for an answer you didn’t even know you wanted.

Our FAQs are divided into categories, such as Financial Planning, Life Events, Banking, and Taxes, among others.

On That Long Holiday Weekend…

On Labor Day weekend, when you were at the lake with your kids, your client Nancy needed you. Her husband had died the previous week, and after the shock had worn off a bit, she was ready to tackle the will, life insurance, mortgage, and everything else left behind. The only problem was, it was late on Sunday night.

Luckily, the last time you’d met, you mentioned the Financial Guides and FAQs, and urged her to use that resource whenever she needed it.

Nancy remembered that. When you got back to your office on Tuesday morning, you had an email from Nancy. Using your Financial Guides, she’d researched what papers to collect for various benefits and for finalizing the estate. She knew she needed to contact Social Security and she was hoping you could help her with that.

This Financial Guide, "Death of a Spouse: Financial Steps You Should Take," helps clients get organized in a time of confusion. (Click on the image to enlarge.)

In short, she used the Financial Guides to become informed about her situation. She still needed to talk to you – but she knew the questions to ask.

This was a great comfort to Nancy. She began to feel that she’d be able to make it on her own after all.

Of course, with you as her trusted advisor.

Complete Web Suite with Tons of Content

Accounting websites with CPA Site Solutions come loaded with Financial Guides, FAQs, financial calculators, Monthly Client Newsletter, and many other pages. Your clients have access to all this material anytime. It doesn’t take your place – it just enables clients to help themselves with the big picture, and come to you for the details.

If you’d like to take advantage of our Complete Web Suite – serving your clients better and turning them into raving fans – give us a try free for 60 days.

If you have any questions about the content on your site, call us at 1-800-896-4500, or email us at support@cpasitesolutions.com.

Do your clients use the Financial Guides or FAQs? What other content do your clients enjoy? What content is the most important on your site? Let us know in the box below.

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.