Building a Client Collaboration Portal for Grant Thornton

1. Challenge

Grant Thornton's Tax teams work with clients on complex, document-heavy engagements where clear communication, secure information sharing, and timely follow-up are critical to delivering a strong client experience.

As engagements grow in complexity, the number of stakeholders, documents, questions, versions, deadlines, and decisions can increase quickly. Even well-run engagement processes can become harder to coordinate across traditional collaboration channels, especially when clients and practitioners need a shared view of activity, context, and next steps.

Grant Thornton saw an opportunity to make this collaboration experience more connected, structured, and transparent for both clients and practitioners.

The goal was to create a secure, client-facing portal that could act as a modern front door for collaboration: giving clients one clear place to share information and engage with their advisers, while giving Grant Thornton teams better visibility and control over document intake, engagement activity, access, deadlines, communication, documents, and audit history.

Alongside the immediate opportunity to improve day-to-day collaboration, the portal also aligned with Grant Thornton's broader focus on evolving the digital client experience: creating more connected, transparent, and intuitive ways for clients and advisers to work together.

2. Solution

Cloud Drift worked closely with Grant Thornton's Tax and technology teams to shape a focused first release of the client portal.

The goal was to move quickly without compromising on the experience or the core controls needed for secure client collaboration. The portal had to be intuitive enough for clients to adopt with confidence, structured enough for practitioners to manage engagement activity effectively, and flexible enough to evolve as Grant Thornton continued to learn from real-world use.

It was deliberately designed around clarity and ease of use. Rather than adding complexity for its own sake, the experience focused on making the most important collaboration moments feel natural: finding the right engagement, sharing information, responding to messages, managing access, tracking deadlines, and understanding what had happened.

The portal gives each client and engagement a dedicated workspace. Clients can upload and download documents, leave comments, respond to messages, and collaborate with their Grant Thornton advisers in one structured, secure environment.

For Grant Thornton teams, the portal creates a clearer way to manage document intake and engagement activity. Practitioners can view client engagements, manage access, track deadlines, lock or unlock engagements, and see an audit history of key actions, all in one place.

The first release capabilities included:

• Client and engagement dashboards
• Secure file upload, download, and bulk download
• Internal and external user access
• Email invitations with access codes
• Engagement deadlines and auto-locking
• Manual lock / unlock controls
• File-level comments and engagement-level messages
• Audit logs showing who did what and when

The portal was designed to bring the same clarity, professionalism, and responsiveness that clients expect from Grant Thornton into a more connected digital experience, while establishing a reusable foundation for its broader digital client experience agenda.

Cloud Drift's delivery approach was deliberately pragmatic: define the core use case, design around the needs of clients and practitioners, build the product quickly, and create a foundation that could evolve over time.

3. Results

Grant Thornton received a working first release of the client portal, ready to introduce with selected Tax clients and refine through real-world usage.

For clients, the portal creates a more professional and intuitive way to collaborate with their Grant Thornton advisers. Documents, comments, engagement context, and communication are brought together in one secure space, reducing the need to navigate multiple channels during document-heavy work.

For practitioners, the portal brings more structure and visibility to client engagements. Files, comments, deadlines, access, and activity history are organised around each client and engagement, making collaboration easier to manage and trace.

Beyond the first release, the portal gives Grant Thornton a practical building block within a wider digital transformation roadmap: a foundation that can evolve into richer workflows, analytics, AI-assisted document classification and routing, duplicate detection, and deeper communication features.

Most importantly, the project moved quickly from a clear client-service opportunity to a working digital product. It gave Grant Thornton a practical way to build on its existing strengths in client service, creating a more connected digital experience for clients and advisers while demonstrating Cloud Drift's ability to deliver focused, high-impact product engineering inside a complex professional services environment.

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