Where the time actually goes
Most of the work in a practice is not accountancy. It is the administration wrapped around it, and every partner and practice manager can list it without thinking:
- Records requests that go out, get half answered, and need a second and third email before anything useful comes back
- Document collection spread across inboxes, attachments and whatever the client decided to post this year
- Chasing the thing you asked for three weeks ago, by hand, one client at a time
- Status: which return is at which stage, for which client, and who has it, held partly in the system and partly in somebody's head
- Retyping figures from PDFs that already contain them
None of that is difficult. It is just constant, and it is where the hours leak.
When the software you have is the problem
Plenty of practices are well served by an off-the-shelf practice management product, and if yours is one of them, keep it. We will say so.
The case for building is narrower. It usually looks like this: the system has reached the end of its useful life, the practice has built its habits around it, and nobody is going to extend it. It still works, in the sense that people cope. But every new thing the practice wants to do happens beside it, in a spreadsheet or an inbox, because the system cannot be taught.
At that point, replacing it like for like is the wrong brief. The better one is to build what the practice needs now, and to make it possible to keep adding to it.
What we build for practices
Separate surfaces for separate audiences, on one shared foundation underneath:
- A staff dashboard where the practice runs its day
- A client portal that is its own application with its own workflow, so clients are not navigating a screen designed for accountants. The customer portals page goes into how those are designed
- Document extraction for the PDFs that currently get retyped — invoices being the obvious case — with a person checking the result rather than trusting it blindly. More on that under AI in business workflows
- An API underneath with typed contracts, so the staff and client sides cannot drift apart
- The public site, where it makes sense to keep it on the same platform
The point of the shared foundation is that the second application costs far less than the first. Authentication, deployment, the component library and the data model are already there and already proven.
The evidence: Fortium
Fortium is the platform JLA, an accountancy practice, now runs on. It replaced Cloudclerk, a system the practice had outgrown, and it was never a rebuild of it — the brief was the practice as it is now, with room to grow.
It is a single platform with six applications on it: the staff dashboard, a client portal, the practice's public site, two document extraction services (one for invoices, one for catalogue data) and the NestJS API that sits under all of them. It is live and in daily use, and it is still being built — 2,976 commits between March and August 2026.
The part worth noting for any practice weighing this up: adding the sixth application cost a fraction of what the first one did. That was the purpose of the exercise. Not to swap one system for another, but to stop the practice being trapped by one again.
Price, ownership and who does the work
Fixed price, off a scope agreed in writing before anything is built. Engagements start from £4,000, and most first builds of a real business system land between £8,000 and £15,000. Larger platforms are phased, so each phase is useful on its own rather than waiting for the last one.
The code, the hosting and every third-party account sit in the practice's name from the start. Client data is the practice's data, and the practice should be able to take its software to another supplier without asking us.
The engineering is done by one senior engineer — the person who scopes the work is the one who writes and deploys it. For a practice that means one person to explain the workflow to, once. It also means we are the wrong choice if you need a large team from day one, and we will tell you that on the first call.
If your practice has a system it has outgrown, or admin that keeps landing in a spreadsheet, get in touch and describe it in plain words.