Client Hub

Judie McCarthy founded Client Hub in 2017 after measuring that her own firm spent about 30 percent of staff time chasing clients for information, and the product still reflects that starting point. The organising idea is the client task: an uncategorized transaction in QuickBooks Online or Xero becomes a question in the client's portal, the client answers it there, and the answer flows back to the person doing the books. Around that sit job workflows with checklists and owners, in-app messaging that is meant to replace email threads, a shared inbox, dashboards, and iOS and Android apps for both staff and clients.

The plan structure is simple and the storage is not metered. Solopreneur is $49 per user per month on annual billing and restricted to single-user firms. Practice Manager is $59 annual or $79 monthly. Practice Manager Plus is $79 annual or $99 monthly and adds the deeper ledger work: book reviews, financial report packs and a 1099 manager. Clients are unlimited on every plan, file storage is unlimited, and the AI drafting features are included rather than sold as a credit pack, which is unusual at this price.

The gaps are specific and easy to check against a firm's own work. There is no tax software integration of any kind, so Drake, UltraTax, Lacerte and ProSeries firms track return status somewhere else, and the tool is plainly aimed at monthly bookkeeping rather than 1040 season. E-signature is not native; it runs through SignWell, which means no knowledge-based authentication path for Form 8879 inside the product. There is no proposal or engagement letter module, so Anchor or Ignition sits alongside it. Time tracking and billing are thin next to Canopy or BQE Core. And the security page is the weakest document of the set: it describes GCP and AWS hosting in US and Canadian data centres, TLS in transit, 256-bit encryption at rest and SMS-based two-factor authentication, but it points at the certifications of its cloud providers rather than a Client Hub SOC 2 report, and no trust portal is published. A firm with enterprise clients should ask for that in writing before signing.

Financial Cents is the closest cross-shop and costs less per seat at the entry level while carrying tax software integrations and a much larger workflow template library, so a mixed tax and bookkeeping firm will usually prefer it. Double covers the same client-books review ground with far stronger close automation and now a tax suite, at per-client rather than per-user pricing. Client Hub's argument against both is that the client-facing half is better built: the portal is the product rather than an attachment to it, and firms that live or die on client responsiveness feel that difference within a week.

Strong-option is confirmed. The company is nine years old, TinySeed backed, ships current AI features and publishes real pricing, which puts it well past one-to-watch. It stops short of top-pick because the tax side is absent and the compliance documentation is inherited from its hosting providers rather than its own.