Give your accountant access (Accountants & advisers)

You can let an accountancy practice work in your organisation without sharing passwords, without buying them a seat on your plan, and without ever losing control of what they can see or do. Their staff sign in with their own accounts, everything they do is recorded under their own name, and you can change or withdraw their access at any moment — it takes effect on their very next click.

This guide is for the client side: business owners granting access to their accountant or bookkeeper. If you are the accountant, see Run an accountancy practice.

Before you begin

• You need the Owner or Administrator organisation role — the same authority that manages members. The access panel is deliberately invisible to the practice itself: an adviser can never operate the page that governs their own access.
• Any plan can grant practice access, including Starter. Advisers never use one of your seats.

Open Settings → Accountants & advisers.

Connect with a practice

There are two ways to connect, and both end the same way: nothing is shared until you (or the practice) accept, and the access granted is always your decision.

1. Your accountant invites you. The practice sends an invitation to your email address. Follow the link, sign in (or register), and you will be asked to:

• choose which of your organisations to connect — only organisations where you are an Owner or Administrator are offered;
• confirm the access you grant. The practice proposes an access level, but it is a suggestion, never a grant — you can keep it or choose a different one.

Accepting connects the practice immediately, and you land on the Accountants & advisers panel showing exactly what you granted.

2. You invite your accountant. On the panel, under Invite your accountant:

1. Enter the practice's Practice ID — a 26-character code your accountant can read from their own practice settings page. Ask them for it.
2. Choose the access you offer.
3. Select Send request. The practice's owners are emailed, and your request appears under Pending requests you've sent until they accept, decline, or it expires.

Choose the access level

Access is granted as a named access profile — a fixed bundle of permissions designed for advisers:

• Accountant (external) — the full working set: documents, payments, purchases, banking, accounting and reports, including the sensitive corrections a practice sometimes needs (voiding, write-offs, reversals, exports) and the ability to post into a locked period and move the lock date.
• Bookkeeper (external) — day-to-day bookkeeping without the sensitive corrections, and without the locked-period permission.
• Sales adviser (external) — sales documents and customers only.
• Read-only adviser (external) — view everything they are given, change nothing.

Whatever the profile, an adviser can never manage your members, roles, settings or branding, delete your data, or see this panel — those are permanently reserved for your own team.

Note: Permissions marked sensitive on the panel (for example voiding invoices or exporting reports) are additionally recorded in your audit history every single time the practice uses one — including when a practice member only views a sensitive screen. The record is written before the action runs; if it cannot be written, the action is not performed and the practice member is told so, rather than the action going ahead unrecorded.

What the panel shows you

For each practice with access:

• the practice name and status (Active, Suspended or Ended);
• People with access — every practice staff member assigned to your organisation, by name, with their role at the practice, whether they are active, when they last accessed your organisation, and a Restrict control per person (below). Practice staff who are not assigned to you are not shown — and cannot reach you;
• Their access — the granted profile spelled out permission by permission, so you can see exactly what it does and does not allow;
• Security & access history — a running record of every grant, staff change, suspension, and access.

You are also notified by email whenever the practice assigns or unassigns a staff member — access never appears silently.

Note: The profile you grant is a ceiling, not a promise that every practice person uses all of it. Practices can organise their own staff — giving a trainee a narrower working set than a partner, for example — but nothing they configure can ever exceed what you granted, for anyone.

Change, suspend or revoke access

All three controls sit on the panel, and all take effect on the practice's very next request — there is no delay and nothing they can do to keep a session alive.

• Change their access — pick a different profile and select Update.
• Suspend access — a kill switch. Give a reason and select Suspend access. The practice cannot lift a suspension you imposed; only you can Resume it. (The practice can also suspend its own access — in that case only they can resume.)
• Revoke — ends the relationship permanently. Give a reason and confirm. History is retained, but re-engaging later needs a completely new invitation.

Block specific actions for one person

Sometimes the problem is not the practice — it is one individual. Next to each person under People with access there is a Restrict button. It opens a screen listing every permission your current profile grants (plus anything you have already blocked, even if the profile no longer includes it), and you simply tick anything this named person must not do in your books, then Save restrictions.

Four guarantees make this a genuine veto rather than a polite request:

• It always wins. However the practice organises its staff — whatever role or special access they give the person — a permission you tick here stays blocked for that individual in your organisation.
• It can only remove. Restricting never adds anything to anyone's access; there is no way to mis-tick your way into granting more.
• It sticks to the person, not the paperwork. If the practice unassigns them and later reassigns them, the restriction is still in force. Even if the whole relationship ends and is re-established months later, it is still waiting.
• Only you can lift it. The practice cannot see your reasons and cannot remove the block; untick and save when you decide.

Restricted people show an N blocked badge on the panel, so what you have set is always visible at a glance. Two badges on the Restrict screen are worth knowing: Sensitive marks permissions whose every delegated use is audited anyway, and Not in current profile marks a restriction on a permission your current profile no longer grants — it is kept deliberately, as your protection, in case you ever widen the profile again.

Example. You grant your practice the full Accountant profile because your engagement needs it — but a junior you have never met has just been assigned to your organisation, and you would rather corrections were partner-only. Open Restrict next to the junior's name and tick the sensitive permissions (voiding, write-offs, reversals, exports). The practice keeps its profile, the junior does everything else normally, and those specific actions are simply not available to them in your books — whatever happens to their assignments in future.

When a restriction makes an adviser's work impossible, tell the practice what you have blocked and why — they cannot see the detail, only that an action is unavailable to that person.

What happens next

Once connected, the practice assigns specific staff to your organisation (you are emailed each time), and those people can open your organisation from their own practice screens. Inside, they see a permanent banner reminding them whose books they are in, they can do exactly what the granted profile permits and nothing more, and every action is attributed to the individual who took it — visible in your audit history.

When your accountant offers to pay for your subscription

A practice can offer to pay for your subscription (a sponsorship). The offer appears on this panel and by email, and three things are guaranteed:

• Nothing changes until you accept. No subscription exists, and nothing is billed to anyone, before your explicit acceptance. You'll be asked to confirm your identity when you accept or decline.
• Paying is not access. Sponsoring your subscription gives the practice no extra reach into your books — access is governed only by the profile you granted.
• You can always take billing back. Your account's Plan page lists any sponsored organisation with a Take over billing button. Using it switches the organisation to your own account's plan immediately; the sponsor's subscription simply stops at the end of its paid period.
• The practice pays, not you. Sponsored plans (the Client Edition family) are billed to the practice, per organisation. Nothing is charged to your account for a sponsored organisation.
• The practice chooses the plan, and can change it. You are emailed whenever it does. A move to a richer plan takes effect at once. A move to a lower plan takes effect only when the current paid period ends — your panel and your Plan page say "moves to … on <date>" until then, and nothing changes for you before that date. If the new plan is not what you expected, talk to the practice, or take over billing yourself from your Plan page and choose your own plan.

If you already pay for a plan, the acceptance dialog names exactly which plan the sponsored one would replace — accepting means your own paid plan is superseded while the sponsorship runs, so read that line carefully.

Sponsorship is per organisation. If you have several organisations, each needs its own offer, and your own plan keeps covering the ones that are not sponsored — the Plan page says how many that is. If every organisation on your account ends up sponsored, your own paid plan is no longer used by any of them: the Plan page tells you so, and you can move to the free Starter plan to stop paying for it. The sponsorships carry on regardless.

If the sponsorship ever ends — the practice stops it, a payment fails and isn't recovered, or your relationship with the practice ends — you are emailed, the subscription runs to the end of its paid period where possible, and your organisation then falls back to your own account's plan. Your data is never affected; only plan limits change.

Troubleshooting

• I can't see Settings → Accountants & advisers. You need the Owner or Administrator organisation role.
• I accepted a sponsorship but nothing has changed. Activation happens when the practice completes its checkout — until then the offer sits at "awaiting checkout" and your current plan continues. Chase the practice, or withdraw your acceptance by asking them to cancel the offer.
• My accountant says the invitation link doesn't work. Links expire after 7 days and die after one use, a decline, or a withdrawal. Send a fresh request, or ask the practice to re-send theirs.
• The invitation asks me to choose an organisation but the list is empty. You are not an Owner/Administrator of any organisation yet — create one first, or ask an organisation owner to open the invitation instead.
• I revoked access — is anything left behind? No live access, ever. The history of what they did remains in your audit trail, which is exactly what you want. (Any person restrictions you set are kept too — they will be back in force if you ever re-engage the practice.)
• The practice says one of their people can't do something the profile allows. Either you have restricted that person (check for an N blocked badge on the panel), or the practice has narrowed that person's own working set — their choice, within your grant. Your profile is the ceiling, not a guarantee that everyone reaches it.
• Someone under "People with access" shows a Deactivated badge. They have left the practice or been suspended by it, and they cannot access your books — that ended the moment the practice deactivated them. They stay listed until the practice also unassigns them (you will be emailed when it does); their past work stays in your audit history either way. If the person concerns you, you can restrict them now — the restriction will already be in force if the practice ever reactivates them.

Related guides

• Run an accountancy practice — the other side of this relationship
• Control what practice staff can do — how practices organise their staff within your grant
• Organisation roles and permissions
• Activity and audit history
• Manage members and access