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Moving files and applications to the cloud does not automatically fix how document work moves through an accounting firm. Teams can still lose time searching for files, switching between systems, tracking versions, chasing client documents, and figuring out where a job stands.
To explore where document workflows still break down, Ace Cloud Hosting spoke with Daniel Rock, Chief Revenue Officer at SuiteFiles.
Daniel has spent 15 years in B2B SaaS revenue leadership, largely across accounting, tax, and practice management technology. Today, he leads SuiteFiles’ revenue team across ANZ, the UK, and the US.
SuiteFiles brings document management, email, client collaboration, and digital signing into a workspace built on a firm’s own Microsoft 365 environment.
In this conversation, Daniel explains where accounting firms lose time in document workflows, why email remains a weak point, what a modern client document process should look like, and where AI can assist without replacing human review.
1. Many firms have moved apps and files to the cloud, but document work still feels messy. Where do accounting firms usually lose the most time in document workflows?
Honestly, it’s almost never the storage. Most firms sorted that years ago.
Two things eat the time. The first is finding things. There’s a Gartner or McKinsey number doing the rounds that says the average employee spends two hours a day looking for things rather than actually finding them. I’m not sure I fully believe it, but it wasn’t a vendor like us that made it up, and nobody ever laughs when I say it on a call.
The second is switching. A firm might use three tools to finish one job. That’s three subscriptions and a bit more clicking, sure, but the real cost is the focus you lose in between. I go from here to there, forget what I was doing, do three other things, and the job never quite lands.
Then there’s version drift. Underscore v2, underscore v3, underscore final, underscore final final, underscore final, and I really mean it this time. We’ve all done it.
And the handoffs. Waiting on a client, waiting on a partner’s sign-off, waiting on someone to file the signed copy back where it belongs. Moving to the cloud didn’t fix any of that. It just moved the mess to a nicer address.
2. Why is email still a weak point for firms when it comes to sending, receiving, tracking, and storing client documents?
Email is great for conversation and pretty poor as a filing system. Most firms use it as both.
I spoke to a firm recently that was still dragging each email into the right client folder by hand. That works fine right up until it’s March, and then standards slip. The document ends up living in one person’s inbox, where the rest of the team can’t see it and nothing sits on the client record.
Attachments are the other half of it. Size limits mean the 30MB PDF turns up in three parts, or as a zip, or as twelve photos of receipts. And nothing confirms anything arrived, so you get the “did you get my email?” email.
Then there’s the risk side. Client data sitting in mailboxes forever, and in My Documents on people’s laptops, is a harder conversation with your IT partner than most firms expect. The amount of client data on local machines out there is genuinely a bit terrifying.
Look, a decent chunk of clients will email you things no matter what else you give them, and that’s fine. The answer isn’t killing email. It’s making sure email isn’t where the documents live, or the record of what happened.
3. What should a modern document workflow look like for an accounting firm, from client request to upload, review, signing, and filing?
Start from the client’s side, because that’s where it usually falls over.
The request goes out as an actual request rather than an email. The client sees a task saying here’s what we need, they hit upload, and it lands in the folder you chose, on the client record, visible to whoever picks the job up next. You get notified. Nobody’s re-filing anything.
Documents get created from templates that pull live client data from Xero, IRIS, QuickBooks Online, or Karbon, so nobody’s re-keying an address or copying and pasting merge field names like it’s a mail merge in 2004.
Review happens on the real document. No check-in, check-out. If two people open it, you see both sets of initials and what each person is doing. One version, full history, so there’s no “final_v3_ACTUAL” doing the rounds.
Signing sits in the same flow instead of being a trip out to a separate tool, and the signed document files itself back where it was sent from.
My test for any firm is simple. Can someone answer “where’s that up to?” without asking a colleague or opening three systems? If yes, you’ve got a workflow. If not, you’ve got a folder structure and a lot of goodwill.
4. How can client portals and digital signing improve the client experience while also reducing back-and-forth for the firm?
For the client, it’s mostly about confidence. Small things matter here. Telling them “you have two documents to sign” rather than sending over a wall of stuff. Having your firm’s branding on it so it doesn’t look like phishing. Being clear about what’s needed and by when.
And it has to be easy. If it means creating an account, remembering a password, and hunting for an upload button, they’ll go back to email, and I wouldn’t blame them. If your clients hate the portal, adoption collapses, and you’re back where you started.
There’s a control point people miss, too. You don’t always want to share a whole folder with a client. Quite often you just need three specific documents off them. Being able to request exactly that, rather than opening a door and hoping, keeps everyone out of trouble.
For the firm, the win is the chasing you stop doing. Status is visible, so you’re not reconstructing an email thread to work out whether the trust deed ever arrived. The signed document comes back filed rather than sitting in someone’s downloads.
One practical thing worth checking: whether signing is charged per signature. If it is, teams quietly start rationing it, and a workflow people avoid using isn’t a workflow. Ours is flat and included, which sounds like a billing detail and turns out to change behavior.
5. For firms using QuickBooks Desktop on the cloud, Xero, or IRIS, how should document management fit into the larger remote-work strategy?
Ledgers and practice tools change over the life of a firm. Your documents outlive all of them. So treat the document layer as the constant and choose it on that basis, not as an add-on to whatever you’re running this year.
Hosted QuickBooks Desktop is a sensible answer for a lot of firms, and I’d never call it backward. The thing to watch is documents ending up inside the hosted session or on local drives. Then remote work depends on that session being up, and your files are somewhere the team can’t easily search.
Our route is different. Documents sit in your own Microsoft 365 tenant, on your SharePoint, in your local Microsoft data center. Data sovereignty stops being a question. Users come from your existing M365 list, so there’s no separate set of logins to manage. And if you ever switch us off, your files and folders are still there. No extraction project, no wrestling it into a usable format. That’s a very different position to data locked inside a vendor’s database, on-prem or otherwise.
Then it’s about the connections: Xero, IRIS, QuickBooks Online, Karbon, MYOB, WorkflowMax. Client data flows in so nobody’s re-keying it in two places.
Get that right and remote work stops being an arrangement you make. It’s just how the firm runs.
6. Where can AI improve document workflows in accounting firms today, and where is human review still essential?
Today, it’s good at preparation. Finding things based on what’s inside a document rather than what someone happened to name the file. Summarizing a long agreement so you know where to look. Building a template from a plain instruction and dropping the merge fields in for you, which is the bit nobody enjoys.
Writing a file request when you say “get me the 1099s and W2s for Joe Smith”. Checking what a client uploaded against what you actually asked for, so last year’s bank statements get caught before they reach your desk.
Where people stay firmly in the loop: judgment and anything that leaves the building with the firm’s name on it. Tax positions. Advice. Materiality. What you tell a client and how you say it. Final sign-off. Exceptions too, because the interesting work is always the messy 5%.
We’ve built it that way on purpose. The AI checks the upload; a person still accepts it and decides where it saves. And when we summarize a document for a client who’s about to sign, we tell them it’s AI-generated and ask them to read the actual thing. I’d love to say clients read everything we send them. That would be a lie. But we’re not going to pretend a summary is the document.
Rule of thumb: AI prepares, people approve. And whatever the AI does, you need to see what it did and be able to undo it.
A Better Document Workflow Is About Movement, Not Storage
Daniel’s perspective highlights an important distinction. Most firms have already solved where documents are stored. The harder problem is how those documents move from request to completion.
Time disappears when team members have to search several places for a file, switch between tools to complete one job, reconcile different versions, or manually work out whether a client has responded. Email adds another layer of risk when important documents remain inside individual inboxes or on local devices instead of becoming part of the client record.
Remote work makes this structure even more important. Whether a firm uses hosted QuickBooks Desktop, Xero, IRIS, or another accounting platform, document access should not depend on one machine, one hosted session, or one employee knowing where something was saved.
AI can make parts of this process easier. It can help search document contents, summarize information, prepare requests, create templates, and check whether clients uploaded what was requested. But Daniel draws a clear boundary around professional judgment. Advice, tax positions, materiality decisions, exceptions, and anything leaving the firm under its name still require human review.
That is where a more connected cloud environment can help. With Ace Cloud Hosting, firms can run QuickBooks Desktop alongside document storage, tax applications, Microsoft 365, and other business tools in a secure, remotely accessible environment. This gives teams more consistent access to the applications and files they need while reducing dependence on individual devices and fragmented workflows. Start with a free trial to see how it fits your workflow.
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