Two-factor or multi-factor authentication — requiring something beyond a password to sign in. For systems holding tax data, authenticator-app TOTP is the baseline; SMS is weaker because of SIM-swap attacks.
Temporarily disabling sign-in after a number of failed attempts, to blunt password guessing. A common setting is five attempts and fifteen minutes.
A client the firm currently serves, as distinct from a prospect or an archived record. Most practice management pricing and reporting keys off this count rather than total records ever created.
Inspecting a compressed file's declared structure before extraction, so a small upload cannot expand into enough data to exhaust the server.
An immutable record of significant actions — who did what, to which record, from which IP, at what time. Distinct from an activity feed, which is a readable summary; the audit log is the evidence.
Automatically moving completed items out of a working list after a set period, so the list stays a working list rather than a history.
Turning a PDF bank or credit card statement into structured, categorized transaction data suitable for import into accounting software. Modern conversion extracts, reconciles and categorizes; a person verifies before it is accepted.
Cloud object storage for files. Paths that lead with a tenant identifier organize the store by firm; separation is enforced by the tenant-scoped lookup that resolves a path, not by the path itself.
Checking a proposed password against corpora of passwords exposed in known breaches, usually via k-anonymity so the password itself never leaves the server. Recommended by NIST 800-63B.
The list of accounts a business records transactions against. In practice management software each client has their own Chart of Accounts, never shared, usually imported as a QuickBooks-style sheet with Account and Type columns.
A consolidated view of everything a firm holds about one client — contacts, services, files, messages, internal notes, work items, invoices and activity history — reached from a single record rather than assembled from separate systems.
A secure web experience where a firm's clients see their own records, upload documents, read messages and view deadlines — without any visibility into the firm's internal tools or other clients.
A stored record of an employee's pay for a period. Practice management systems track this for reporting; they do not generally process payroll or file payroll taxes.
How certain an extraction or categorization engine is about a result. Common bands are Auto above 95%, Suggested between 80 and 94, and Unknown below 80 — the last requiring manual categorization.
A gate that inspects input before it reaches the primary AI model, blocking prompt injection, credential-extraction attempts and schema probing, while letting legitimate questions through.
A firm-defined field captured at document upload for a given document type — so a firm can require, say, a tax year on every W-2 without a vendor code change.
The set of keys an application uses to encrypt data at rest. Persisting the ring outside the application — and wrapping it with a cloud key vault — is what lets encrypted data survive a redeploy.
A qualifying child or relative claimed on an individual return. Practice management systems store dependents alongside filers, with name, date of birth and SSN.
The taxonomy entry describing a kind of document (Bank Statement, Tax Document, Client Upload, Internal). Drives which custom fields appear and whether the client is notified.
A tracked ask from the firm to a client for specific documents, followed through to receipt. Distinct from an email asking for the same thing, because its status is visible to both sides.
The process of retrying and chasing a failed subscription payment. Normally handled by the payment gateway rather than the application.
Electronic filing of a tax return with a taxing authority. In a workflow context, "waiting on e-file forms" usually means the return is complete but the signed authorization has not come back.
Storing sensitive fields — SSN, FEIN, driver's license, bank details — encrypted in the database, so a copy of the database alone does not disclose them.
A defined piece of work a firm has agreed to perform for a client, usually documented by an engagement letter. In software terms it typically maps to a work item or a service enrollment.
A sequence of automated messages that increases in urgency and stops the moment the requested action is completed. The stopping condition is what separates it from a nag.
The nine-digit federal tax identifier for a business, formatted ##-#######. Treated as sensitive data and encrypted at rest in any well-built system.
A person named on an individual return — primary taxpayer or spouse — as distinct from a dependent or a business owner.
A visible, removable chip representing one applied filter, so a user can always see why a list is showing what it is showing.
An attack where a value beginning with =, +, - or @ in an exported CSV executes as a formula when opened in a spreadsheet. Neutralized by escaping such values on export.
The federal rule requiring financial institutions — which includes tax preparers — to maintain a written information security program with specified administrative, technical and physical safeguards.
Matching a cleaned payee name to a close but not identical account name. Sits between an exact match and an AI suggestion in most categorization hierarchies.
A rule applied automatically to every query for a tenant-scoped table so it can only return the current tenant's rows. Applied in the data-access layer, it is a strong default rather than an enforcement boundary — row-level security in the database is what makes it one.
Constraining an AI answer to a supplied set of source documents rather than the model's general knowledge — the difference between a support assistant that cites your help center and one that invents features.
A confident, fluent, wrong answer. The reason AI output in an accounting context should be treated as a suggestion requiring review, never as source-of-truth data.
A tab-delimited text format QuickBooks Desktop imports natively. Each transaction exports as a TRNS plus SPL pair; a well-formed file also declares its payees in an !OTHERNAME block so the import does not fail on unknown entities.
The questionnaire a firm sends a client at the start of an engagement to collect the year's information. AI intake extraction reads a completed form and pre-fills the client record from it, subject to staff confirmation.
A record of addresses seen in the sign-in pipeline, with geographic location, ISP and threat classification, used to block traffic before the application processes it.
A technique for querying whether a secret appears in a dataset without revealing the secret — a client sends a short hash prefix and filters the returned matches locally. It is how breached-password checks stay private.
A prospective client who has made contact but has not yet been converted to a client record. A lead pipeline tracks stages such as New Inquiry, Qualified, Proposal Sent, Closed Won and Closed Lost.
Checking a file's actual binary signature rather than trusting its extension or declared MIME type. A file named w2.pdf is accepted as a PDF only if its leading bytes say so.
A saved mapping from a payee name to a Chart of Accounts account, so the same vendor categorizes itself automatically on that client's future statements.
Charging for actual usage above an included allowance — for example AI tokens consumed beyond a plan's monthly grant — reported to the payment processor as meter events.
One deployment serving many independent organizations with isolated data, storage, configuration, users and branding. Distinct from separate installations per customer.
A dashboard element listing the specific items behind a warning number — the earliest-due, the overdue, the stuck — rather than only the count.
Optical Character Recognition — converting an image or scanned PDF into machine-readable text, the step before any extraction can run on a scanned statement.
Usage beyond a plan's included allowance. A well-designed overage is soft: you are billed for it, never blocked, so work does not stop mid-task.
The recurring interval an employer pays for — weekly, biweekly, semimonthly, monthly. Payroll tracking keys most of its reporting off this.
Normalizing raw statement descriptions — stripping store numbers, transaction IDs and processor prefixes — so that "SQ *BLUE RIDGE 4471" and "BLUE RIDGE SUPPLY" resolve to the same vendor.
A business client's registration of an employee for payroll tracking, typically holding an encrypted SSN, a pay rate and federal withholding details.
A deliberately slow password hashing function. Slowness is the point: it makes offline guessing expensive. Iteration counts of 100,000 or more are typical.
The core client split in most practices: individuals filing personal returns, and entities filing business returns. Linked client records connect a household to its entities without duplicating data.
The share of a firm's clients who actually use the portal rather than reverting to email. The single most useful measure of whether a portal deployment succeeded.
The system a firm runs its operations on — clients, work, deadlines, documents, communications and billing — as opposed to the tax or accounting software that produces the deliverables.
An attempt to make an AI feature ignore its instructions by embedding new ones in user input — for example inside an uploaded document. Mitigated by moderating input before the primary model call.
Adjusting a charge for a partial period when a subscription changes mid-cycle. Shown as its own line on a well-formed invoice.
An older plain-text transaction format still accepted by QuickBooks Desktop and Quicken. Simpler than IIF, but it carries less structure — no double-entry splits.
Finding the most relevant sections of a document corpus and passing them to the model as context, so answers are based on those documents rather than on general training data.
Granting permissions to roles rather than individuals, then assigning people to roles. A permission matrix lets an administrator control what each role can see and do without touching code.
Verifying that a statement's arithmetic closes: beginning balance plus deposits minus deductions equals ending balance for a bank account, or previous balance plus charges minus payments equals new balance for a credit card.
Single-use backup codes issued at MFA enrollment, for signing in when the authenticator device is unavailable. Regenerating them invalidates the old set.
The definition of how an event or task repeats — daily, weekly, monthly, annually. Editing a recurring item should always ask whether the change applies to future occurrences.
How long records are kept before deletion. Distinct from secure disposal, which is the mechanics of removing both the stored file and its database row.
A year-at-a-glance view where each row is a client and each column a month, showing sales tax filing progress. The bookkeeping equivalent is the monthly bookkeeping grid.
A named, stored combination of filters, sort order and visible columns, so a routine question does not have to be re-asked every time.
A licensed user of the staff-facing application. Most per-seat pricing counts anyone who logs into the admin side; well-designed portals never count clients as seats.
A hard limit on licensed users, enforced at the point of creating a staff account or sending an invitation, rather than discovered at renewal.
Any task a client can complete without a staff member doing it for them — uploading a document, checking a deadline, updating a contact. Every self-service task removed from staff is compounding time saved.
Fetching one page of rows at a time from the database rather than loading everything into the browser. Necessary once a list outgrows a few thousand rows.
A record that a specific client receives a specific service — Monthly Bookkeeping, Sales Tax, Payroll, Personal Taxes — usually with effective dates, assigned staff and a billing rate. Enrollments commonly drive which automated reminders a client receives.
The attributes that make an authentication cookie safe: HttpOnly (script cannot read it), Secure (HTTPS only) and SameSite (limits cross-site sending).
A session timeout that resets on activity, so an active user is not signed out mid-task while an abandoned session still expires.
The record of every status a record has passed through and when, which is what makes a pipeline auditable rather than merely current.
The text that appears on a payer's card statement. Snapshotted onto an invoice record so a historical invoice still renders what was true when it was issued.
The firm's list of filing due dates, published to staff and often to clients. A database-backed tax calendar can be edited by managers rather than hardcoded by a vendor.
A prior-year-populated worksheet sent to clients to gather the current year's information. Usually the single highest-volume document a firm distributes and collects.
One independent organization inside a multi-tenant system. In client-facing copy this is normally called an Organization — "tenant" is an implementation word, not a user word.
Determining which organization a request belongs to, usually from the hostname, before authentication runs — which is what allows a sign-in page to carry the right firm's branding.
The unit AI models bill by — roughly three-quarters of a word in English. Plan allowances and overage rates for AI features are almost always expressed per million tokens.
Time-based One-Time Password, RFC 6238 — the six-digit rotating code produced by authenticator apps. Phishing-resistant relative to SMS because the secret never travels over the network.
Presenting software under the firm's own name, logo, colors and domain rather than the vendor's. Full white-label usually means the firm's own domain, its own email sending domain, and no vendor attribution.
Work that has been started but not yet billed. A WIP board is the live list of open engagements with current status, owner and due date.
The documented security program the FTC Safeguards Rule requires. Software can supply many of the controls a WISP describes, but the plan itself, the risk assessment and the training remain the firm's responsibility.
A single tracked piece of billable or non-billable work, distinct from a personal to-do task. Work items carry a work type, a status drawn from that type's allowed list, a client, an assignee and a due date.
A firm-configured category of work — Individual Tax Return, Business Tax Return, Monthly Bookkeeping, Sales Tax, Payroll, Advisory. Each work type usually defines its own set of valid statuses, so staff never see a status that cannot apply.
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