Transcription
You can use this to build your own custom software for your accounting firm. What? Because the software accounting firms run on today is, uh, inflexible to say the least. And most of us want some customizability. And I know this because when we first talked about this app last year, people were pumped. Like, this is a tool I can use to finally realize my vision for my firm.
Fast forward to today, and things have gotten even juicier with today's sponsor, Assembly, where firms create remarkable client experiences. Because what would your accounting firm look like if you could customize the software your client used? A little more. Sounds nice, right?
In this video, I'm going to show you first exactly how to create a client portal completely tailored to your clients. How to use built-in automations to make this sucker run on autopilot. How to build store pages that let your clients opt into more services themselves. And last, how to just, like, digest where this fits into my accounting firm's tech stack.
Because you probably already have some other tool that has a client portal component. But here's the rub. Imagine this. I hate saying this. Imagine you want to stop using that tool that has the client portal. But now all of your clients are trained on that tool. You are trapped, right? But what if instead, your client experience, the portal, was separated from your workflow tools? Meaning you're now free to make whatever behind-the-scenes changes you want to workflow tools without changing the client experience.
I know you already have a hundred questions. May it just be the portal to rule them all. Let's get into it.
We're in Assembly here. And if this looks familiar, they used to be called Co-pilot. Now they're Assembly, and they've shipped a whole bunch of new features. The big party trick here is under App Setup. These are all the apps the client will see on the left-hand side of their view. And this is totally customizable. I can rearrange these. Any of these can be disabled. Get out of here. I, I, I actually want that. I can add apps from a, let me zoom out, from a huge library of apps. Look at this. Apps can be internal, like a QuickBooks integration, two-way sync with Slack, like the sound of that. And external apps. These are client-facing. Look at all these. These are all different third-party services. You know how you've always wished you could consolidate everything down to one portal? That's the idea here. And even back up at the top, anything that is embeddable, like a YouTube playlist, a lot of apps now, they have, like, an embedded version of their app. It can be embedded directly in the portal. And you can even hire a developer to build totally custom apps. That is a little module that hangs out on the left-hand side of the client's portal that'll do some sort of custom job.
And these apps, actually, let's, let's log in as the client. If we log in as the client, by the way, on this login page that is branded for my firm, they log in here either via a magic link or via email and password. Did you see how smooth that was? Hit them with the instant replay. Like, the email went in and it said, "You just want a link?" But then I put my password in and it flipped to a login button. Okay. Anyways, client logs in. These are all the apps that we were talking about that you can customize. You see on the left-hand side of the screen, we got a little welcome page here, a collection of succulents. I'm going to be so pleased if that's what those actually are. But as they logged in, they got a few to-dos here. Uh, looks like an onboarding form to fill out, a contract that needs a signature, so a tax engagement letter, and then a task, which is kind of like where you collect all your client-facing to-dos.
Now, all of this, everything you're seeing here, can be done on a custom domain. So, the website isn't your firm.assembly.com. It literally lives on your firm's website, and the Assembly branding can be completely removed if you want.
Now, flipping back to the firm view, I'll come up to CRM. This is where you manage all of your companies and then your contacts that belong to those companies. How do you get people in here? You can manually create them. You can import them, or you can use a signup link that actually anyone can use. So, for example, you let people on your website sign up even if they are not clients. They get some free resources. I'm going to show you some big old marketing hacks and how to use that, uh, in just a bit here.
But before we get too far, does it security? You better believe it does. We've got AICPA SOC 2 security. It is even HIPAA compliant. They'll sign a BAA. That, like, that's not a thing that we need, but just goes to show you they got their stuff on lock.
Before we get to automation stuff, one more thing I wanted to show you on App Setup. If I wanted to add an app that was, I don't know, what are our options here? Let's say it was simply a Loom video. I'll install the app. I'll give it a name. And this is the name that'll show up on the left-hand side. We'll just call this "Need More Help." I'm going to put the link to the Loom video down here. And this is a Loom video about basically upgrading to the gold tier of my tax package. It's not really just, just pretend that that's what's happening here. So, I'll put that link in there. And now we can see a preview of the Loom. I can add this. And if we flip back over to the client view, now we've got this "Need More Help" view down at the bottom.
But here's the cool thing is because that's like an upsell trying to get people to the gold package, what we can do is make that app only be visible to the right people. So, let's hop in here to edit the App Setup. Then down at the bottom, right now it's visible to all contacts, but we can edit this. We can say "Custom Visibility" and then only show it to contacts that have certain properties. So, I have a contact property that says their tax package is either gold, silver, or bronze. And if this is an upsell video for folks that I want to go to gold, then I guess I want to show this to everybody but the people who already have gold. So let's just say, "Should everyone who isn't gold."
Now, there are way more ways we can customize the visibility of that. For example, if, uh, you know, the company is part of some sort of company group, if they have a specific, like, advisory package. I'll show you back over on the CRM side. These contacts, see the fields down the right here? These are all custom things that I set up. So, what tools do they use? What's their tax package? Their advisory package, their industry. If I drill into, uh, Jason Stats here, who is the contact on Jason Stats Beekeeping. Here we've got all the details for this client, some internal chat with the team, client notes, but these details are all of those custom fields. We can create as many of these as we want to. So, it could be a tag for, like, client group, tags for, like, whatever service levels they're getting, anything you want. You set that up here. I mean, even something like this is actually a cool example, "Add Phone Number." And the fields can even be set to be read-only or editable by the contact. So, when they log into their own account, they can change that stuff if they want. Think, like, phone number, address versus other fields that I want to set and be locked on their end.
So, all of these apps that we set up, the visibility of these apps can be super granular, literally down to the single client. Imagine a client with a very specific need, and they get something totally tailored to them in their client experience that solves a specific problem. Just think about how cool that would be to be able to deliver that to a client. Oh, and did I mention it actually works really good on mobile? Exact same experience. See the three to-dos over here? Look. See? Soup's modern. You got all the same nav options up here. Very cool. I don't, honestly, I don't even know how you charge for that. Like, solving that specific of client problems. I just know that we can. And it's all very cool.
But let me show you the new power user features that take all of this and make it even sweeter. Enter automations. A few examples here. Uh, a thank you after a client completes a form. We go to edit the workflow. We can see when a form has been submitted, specifically the onboarding form, send a message, "Thank you for submitting your onboarding," blah, blah, blah. Assign a contract when a client logs in for the first time. Edit this workflow. When a client first logs in, send them a contract, the tax engagement letter contract. Very quick and easy to create.
Let's just make a new one here. Start from scratch. Let's say every time a, let's say a company is created, let's just build out, like, whatever the templated folder structure is. So, upload files and folders. I've got this folder structure here, and I'm just going to drag that in to upload. I'll publish this automation. Let's go create a company as an example. So, I'll come over to CRM Companies, create Jason's Other Company. We can push an invite to Jason. I'm just going to copy the magic link. And now, if we're logged back in as Jason, we can see here's his other company we just created. And if we hop down to Files, we can see that folder structure that we just kicked off with that automation.
Now, if Assembly's built-in automations don't get you far enough, take a look at this. This is Zapier, a tool for building out, like, custom automations. These are all the supported triggers and actions you can automate inside of Assembly with Zapier. I'm just going to start scrolling here as I talk because this is the most ridiculous list I have ever seen in my life. The level of detail in the things they will let you automate. We are still going. Okay. Yep. There's, yeah, a lot. Everything down to, like, creating tasks for a client, updating tasks, fetching task templates. This is the most ridiculous level of Zapier and Make automation support I have ever seen. So, if something happens in a different service, again, the goal is to try to pipe everything we can into Assembly, right? We can create a custom automation with Zapier to create a task.
I come over to Jason and go up to Tasks. This is like a side-by-side Kanban view. And create a new task. "Pay your Q3 estimates. Don't forget then upload confirmation to your 2026 folder, please." I'll give a due date, 10/15. In all likelihood, you probably have a template for this sort of thing that you're going to ask a bunch of people. I'll hit Create. So now we're under To-Do. Flipping back to the client view. Jason's got a new task. "Pay your estimates." Market is done.
But whether you are building these automations inside of Assembly or outside with something like Zapier or Make, you can see a world where this thing is like hyper-automated, right? And you've got these sequences for how your services need to flow. And that stuff just happens on its own. Almost like the perfect marriage of an accounting firm service business with a software platform. Like doing the best of both.
Now, I'm going to show you one other feature that's really powerful before we get into thinking about, like, how does this fit into my tech stack. The last feature, it is your store page. That is like a full-blown store page where people can buy stuff. So, under Billing, we've got Products. These can be one-time purchases, recurring things. These products can have any number of prices. So, if I talked with, let's go back to Jason, and you wanted to buy that financial advisory package, I'd go to Billing and I'd add an invoice that included that financial risk assessment we just saw. You see the two different prices here. And if we add a payment method on file, we can even automatically collect.
But all of these products can now be organized into a store. So, here's an example store on the right here. You've got recurring services on the top, but then below that, we can add any number of one-time products that we want to. So, we've got an audit support package. Let's put that, uh, that financial risk assessment on there. Got to put one more, business formation. Now we've got three, like, standalone purchase items under these subscription items. Let me zoom out a bit.
Now, this store, it can be presented as an app inside of the client's portal. And so you combine the power of being able to organize all your projects here, all the stuff that you want to sell people. You can set the payment preferences, like who pays the fees if it's a credit card, us or the client, and build this store directly into the client experience.
Now, maybe you don't want, for example, the recurring services. Maybe we've just got some digital products that our clients can buy from us. If that's the case, I can turn off the recurring stuff up here. And now we've just got these one-time purchase options. Let me publish this so it shows up in the client portal. By the way, you can even publish this publicly. If you wanted to present this on, like, your website, for example. The beauty of doing that, let me publish, is when they come to this page, they could buy one of your products, and that will immediately take them into their Assembly portal where they get access to those products, presumably.
But flipping back to the client's portal view, we can see under here, Jason CPA Services. Whatever options you want to present, they show up right here, and the client can literally go through and check out right there.
Now, there's services you probably wouldn't do that with, right? Where you want more tailored control over the pricing for the client. But even if you just use this for the more standalone, one-off services you do, even use, like, that store view externally. Let's say you've got, like, a $10 course just to get people to give you money for the first time, and it's like a 60-minute video about how to do XYZ. You can create that store, give people a way to buy that stuff, and then it pulls them straight into an Assembly account, and you're now starting to reel them into becoming a client.
If we actually go back and combine this with the power of automations, let's create a custom automation for anyone who buys, uh, I don't know, that, that, what was it? Financial Risk Assessment. Let's make a new automation from scratch. Triggers anytime an invoice is paid for specifically the financial risk assessment at, you know, maybe at that higher price. After that, we can then send them automated messages, assign them a form to complete, update the client details. Maybe we've got a custom field that is their advisory service level or something like that. You can enable that for clients. You can even enable that for non-clients. Though maybe for a non-client, actually, I don't want to send them a message. So, if I go back to App Setup, I'm going to leave this page, go into Messages, and customize the visibility of the Message app to only be visible to clients that have a property that is like, you know, they are an active client. So, you create a custom field that's like, "Are they a lead? Are they an active client? Are they a former client?" Only show messages to current clients.
Now, I think this store is pretty cool. Depending on your firm's approach to fixed pricing, obviously, if you use a lot of fixed pricing, this whole thing is super powerful. But remember, regardless of your pricing structure, we can still build little apps to upsell any client from whatever their current service tier is up to the next tier. So, for example, like, it can be as simple as this. I can create literally a Google Doc, "Advisory 1. Do you know there's even more ways we can help you?" Embed a little Loom video. "Drop me a message to learn more."
If I grab the link to this Google Doc and we come back to Assembly and we create a new app for a Google Doc. I'm going to install this and put the link to the Google Doc in here. This is now an app that we can add and make visible to specifically the clients who are on, like, a service level where we want them to upgrade to, you know, Advisory 1, I think is what that said. So, that could be anybody on, you know, silver bookkeeping package, could be anybody on a bookkeeping package that doesn't have an advisory package. You can build out the apps that are on the left side of their screen so that regardless of what package they're on, you can have a dedicated app showing them how to get more help from you. And all of that can be displayed and presented. The checkout flow, all of that infrastructure can be designed and built once to lead clients through that journey from, from non-client, even before they're a client, to a profitable client that is upselling into additional services.
Now, Google Doc, very simple example, right? You can also embed, you know, Notion pages. You've got a bunch of different options here. But that is an objectively cool way to build your firm's client-facing tech in a way that is totally bespoke to you.
But elephant in the room, what about the rest of my tech stack? Right? How does this change how I build out all the tools I use in my firm? Well, I think Assembly is a really interesting option for firms who are looking to build something different. So many of us come into running an accounting firm with a very specific vision of what we want that to look like. And then you plug into the tools available in the space and you realize that's not possible. My vision for what this accounting firm can be can't be done using off-the-shelf tools. And for people like you, if this is you, I mean, that's what makes Assembly really special, right? The power to build custom upsell flows. The power to build a more tailored client experience by service level, by client group, even apps or, or individual clients.
And the kind of wild thing we didn't really touch on here is just how far you could go in designing an experience for non-clients to get access to a video or a course. Maybe they get a message from you there, then give them almost like a self-service journey to becoming a client. Man, that, that completely changes what your marketing looks like. And people are actually doing it. On the podcast recently, we broke down a firm where the guy has built out a completely custom client experience in Assembly. They're embedding client financial statements as apps. They have an updating Google Sheet app. They use Google Sheets, and that Google Sheet of the client financials, it is an app that the client can see inside the portal. They have another Google Sheet that is like the status of the bookkeeping by bank account and by month, and that updates, and the client can hop in and see at any time. They're even using, forgot about this, NotebookLM's podcast feature, an AI tool from Google. They will give it the most recent financial statements, and it will generate a 10-minute AI podcast walking through their financial results. And then they will put those audio files into the portal for the client to listen to. And that is a level of flexibility that I know, even if you aren't generating AI podcasts, a lot of firms have been looking for, right? To be able to make something that feels a little more specific to us and the way that we want to serve our clients. It is honestly super cool, very mind-opening stuff from today's sponsor, Assembly.
If you want to kick the tires on Assembly, check out the link in the video description to get started. They do a 14-day free trial with no credit card required. But if you end up buying it, use promo code Jason. It'll get you $100 off the first month of whatever plan you choose. And if your head's kind of still spinning on ideas here and you want to riff on even more of what's possible, check out this previous demo we did that went a little deeper into just how far the portal experience can be customized for your clients.