Google Workspace for accountancy practices

Service-line structure looks tidy and creates a problem: a client's audit team, tax team and advisory team each hold partial context, and cross-team access is granted ad hoc until everybody can see everything. Client-based drives make the access question explicit and answerable.

The overhead is real. A practice with four hundred clients has four hundred drives, which needs a creation process tied to client onboarding and an archival process tied to disengagement. Both are automatable, and neither is optional at that scale.

Emailed attachments are the mechanism behind most invoice fraud aimed at accountancy clients, and they are also how client data ends up in mailboxes with no retention control. Named-account sharing on a client drive, or a portal, removes both problems at once.

The objection is always that clients find it harder. Sometimes true, and the honest response is that the friction is worth it for anything containing financial data or personal information. A short client-facing guide, sent at onboarding rather than mid-engagement, removes most of the resistance.

Temporary staff arrive in volume and leave quietly. If accounts are created without an end date, they persist, and each one is a live credential against client financial data held by someone who no longer works with you.

Set the expiry at creation, put temporary staff in their own org unit with tighter external sharing and download controls, and review the list at the start of the following month. It takes minutes and it removes the single largest access risk in a practice tenant.

Statutory retention runs from a client's year end or filing date, not from when a document was created. Workspace retention rules are configured against org units and time, so satisfying the obligation depends on an archival step that moves closed years into a retained location.

The pattern that works is an archive org unit per retention period, an archival step in the year-end process, and an annual verification that the archive contains what the practice management system says it should.