Client portal for accounting firms: buy or build?

You’re probably already paying for a client portal, or at least for the features that do the same job. They’re built into Fortnox, Spiris and Björn Lundén, they come with BankID login and document sharing, and yet half your clients still email their receipts straight into your inbox.

At the same time, the portal doesn’t carry your brand. Your client logs in with Fortnox, not with your firm. So sooner or later the thought surfaces: shouldn’t we have our own client portal, on our own website, under our own name?

It’s a fair question. But the answer isn’t the same for every firm, and anyone selling custom development should be honest enough to say so. Here’s what the decision actually looks like, with prices, the legal side and the pitfalls that rarely get mentioned.

Before we get into the details, here are the three routes in short:

What you’re already paying for

All the major accounting software vendors now include client features that work like a portal, built into their packages for accounting firms. Functionally, they cover most of what a small firm needs.

According to Fortnox’s price list, Byråpartner costs SEK 499 per consultant per month. Spiris, the new name for Visma Spcs, lists a regular price of SEK 379 per consultant per month for its firm package, with offers for new customers. Björn Lundén works with a firm licence plus various collaboration packages per client. Exact features and add-on fees vary, including for signing, client access and transaction volume. All prices exclude VAT and were checked in October 2026.

In spring 2026 Fortnox also introduced Fortnox Access, a mandatory fee for every client company. It runs from SEK 9 to 199 per month depending on how many vouchers the company has booked in the past year, and its introduction drew heavy criticism from accounting firms, the trade magazine Balans reported in April 2026.

Here’s the honest answer: for most firms with one to ten consultants, these portals are enough. Document exchange, messaging, signing and status tracking are already in place. What you’re missing isn’t features.

What you’re missing is three other things. Your brand, because the portal is the vendor’s face to your client, not yours. Control over costs, because the per-client fees keep climbing and you can’t influence them. And freedom, because the deeper your clients sit in the vendor’s app, the harder it becomes to ever switch systems.

The middle road many firms miss: white label

If the brand is what bothers you, there’s a shortcut that rarely comes up in the build-or-buy discussion. There are ready-made firm portals sold as white label, meaning under your firm’s name, colours and domain.

The most established one in Sweden is Accountec. Their portal sits on top of the systems you already use and gathers document sharing, signing, secure messaging and KYC behind a single login, with your logo on it. According to Accountec’s pricing page, the standard price is SEK 119 per client company per month, plus transaction fees for signing (SEK 12) and PEP/AML checks (SEK 14). Prices were checked in October 2026 and should be verified before you buy. Visma has also marketed a client portal of its own for firms, but after the switch to Spiris it’s unclear exactly what applies, so check directly with them if you’re a Visma customer.

If the brand is your only reason to build, white label wins. You get your own portal for roughly a hundred kronor per client per month instead of a development project of your own. It would be strange of us to pretend otherwise.

But white label has a ceiling. You’re still renting someone else’s product. The workflows are theirs, the pricing is theirs, and the data lives with them. The question is where that ceiling sits for your particular firm.

When building your own portal is the right call

There are three situations where a portal of your own actually is the right decision, and they rarely have much to do with the logo.

First, the client experience. With your own portal, clients log in on your website, with BankID, and meet an interface you control completely. No extra app to download, no per-client platform fee someone else can raise, no confusion about whose system it actually is. For firms competing with the big chains, that’s a clear position: with us, it’s simple.

Second, integration across several systems. Do you have clients in both Fortnox and Visma, maybe a few in Björn Lundén too? Then your clients are currently pushed into different portals depending on where their bookkeeping happens to live. Your own portal can pull data from all of those systems through their APIs and show the client a single view. Ready-made portals can also bring several systems together, but they don’t always offer the level of integration, the data model or the workflows your firm needs. Fortnox has an open REST API with OAuth 2.0 to build against, and Visma runs a developer portal of its own. It takes real development work, but it’s entirely doable.

Finally, your own workflows and ownership of the data. Do you want the portal to mirror exactly how your firm works, with your status steps, your reminders, your automated messages? Do you want the client history to be an asset of your own, whichever software you use five years from now? Then building your own is the only option that gives you that.

One thing that scares many firms unnecessarily is BankID. You don’t need to build that part from scratch, and you shouldn’t. Connecting BankID directly to a bank means handling certificates, renewals and strict security requirements yourself. You want to avoid that. Instead, you connect BankID through an established e-ID provider, such as Criipto or Scrive, which handles the security-critical part for you through a single API. That turns BankID into an ordinary integration instead of a security project of its own.

So what does it cost? There are no published industry prices to go by, and where a project lands depends entirely on scope. What drives the cost is known, though: the BankID connection, document management, how granular the permissions need to be and, above all, how many accounting systems the portal has to talk to. Expect a development project, not a monthly fee, with a yearly cost on top for hosting, monitoring, security work, support and further development. Ask for an itemised quote covering both before you start sketching.

It also means the maths needs volume or strategy to add up. A firm with 30 clients that just wants to get rid of the Fortnox logo is making a bad deal. A firm with 200 clients across three different systems, a clear growth plan and a brand meant to carry weight — that firm calculates differently.

The rules that apply whichever route you take

Here’s the part that’s surprisingly often forgotten in portal discussions: the legal requirements are the same whichever way you go.

The main rule in chapter 7 of the Swedish Bookkeeping Act (in Swedish) is that accounting records must be kept for seven years and stored in Sweden. Electronic storage in another EU country can be allowed if the law’s conditions are met and the Swedish Tax Agency is notified. Storage outside the EU may require special permission under the act, and it also raises separate questions about international transfers of personal data. Swedish or EU-based hosting is therefore normally the simplest and safest choice, and it’s one of the things we always check, closely tied to where your website is actually hosted. Since an amendment took effect on 1 July 2024 (SFS 2024:342), paper receipts may be destroyed once they’ve been correctly transferred to digital form, which makes portal workflows even more useful.

The GDPR sets requirements too. When a vendor processes personal data on the firm’s behalf, a data processing agreement is required, as the Swedish Authority for Privacy Protection (IMY) explains in its guide to processor agreements (in Swedish). For some processing activities, the vendor or the firm may instead be an independent controller. Roles, responsibilities and agreements therefore need to be assessed per processing activity, not just for the system as a whole. That applies just as much to Fortnox as to a web agency building your portal.

And BankID? There’s no law that singles out BankID for firm portals. But according to the Swedish Internet Foundation’s survey Svenskarna och internet 2025, virtually every Swede uses Mobile BankID, so it’s the standard in practice, and strong authentication also lines up with the GDPR’s requirement for appropriate security measures. A portal for Swedish clients should have strong authentication, and BankID is often the natural choice. It needs to be complemented with clear permission levels, access logs, encryption, backups and incident routines. Authentication confirms who the client is, but the rest of the security still has to be in place.

The uncomfortable truth: the technology is rarely the problem

Now for the part that should be on the first page of every portal vendor’s brochure but never is.

Firms’ biggest problem with client portals isn’t the features. It’s that clients don’t use them. In a survey by Björn Lundén and Revisionsvärlden of more than 400 Swedish accounting firms (May 2026), 62 percent named their clients’ low digital maturity as the biggest obstacle to further automation. And in Wolters Kluwer’s Future Ready Business report (March 2026), only 15 percent of Swedish businesses reported very high loyalty to their professional services providers, the lowest in Europe. The relationship is more fragile than many firms think, and a portal the client doesn’t understand won’t make it stronger.

A portal of your own doesn’t fix that by itself. But it removes the two most common excuses: yet another login with yet another vendor, and a fee the client never asked for. The rest is craft. Onboarding, reminders, and an interface so simple that email actually feels like the clumsier option.

So whatever you choose, budget time for getting your clients to use the portal. That decides more than the technology does.

How to make the decision

The decision boils down to three steps.

Start with what you’re already paying for. If you haven’t activated and rolled out the document and case features in your existing firm package, that’s step one, before a single krona goes anywhere else.

If it’s only the brand that chafes, go white label. A service like Accountec gives you a portal of your own at a fraction of the build cost. A good solution for many firms.

Build your own only when several things point the same way: the brand is central to your growth, you need integrations or workflows no ready-made product can handle, the maths holds for both the build and the running costs, and someone owns security and maintenance for the long term. If all of that is true, a portal of your own becomes a digital asset that gives you greater control over the client experience, the integration layer and the long-term product plan. That control comes with an ongoing responsibility for operations, security and third-party dependencies. We’ve written about how that calculation works in general in our guide on building your own system versus buying SaaS. This article is that guide applied to the reality of an accounting firm.

If you want the numbers before you decide, we’ll go through which accounting systems your clients use, what the firm and its clients pay in licences and per-client fees today, and what a portal of your own would cost to build and run over five years. If the numbers support a build, we do it with custom development, with BankID through an established provider and hosting in Sweden. If they don’t, our advice will be to switch on what you already pay for, or to go white label.