Setting up your Pertavo account

An account belongs to a firm, not to a person. Everything else in Pertavo — users, folders, documents, messages — hangs off that firm, so it is the first thing to exist.

Create the firm

1. Go to Register and enter your name, work email and a password.
2. Give the firm its name. This is the name clients see on the invitation email and at the top of the portal, so use the name on your letterhead rather than a working abbreviation.
3. Submit the form. You are signed in immediately and land on the dashboard.

The person who registers becomes the firm’s first CPA account and can invite everyone else. There is no separate owner login to set up.

Confirm the email address

Password resets and every invitation reply go to the address you registered with. Check it is one you actually read — a shared inbox that nobody watches is the most common reason a client’s reply disappears.

You can change it later under Settings → Profile.

Set the firm’s rules before the first upload

Two settings are much easier to choose now than to change once documents exist, both under Settings → Organization:

• Documents — the maximum file size and which file types are accepted. The defaults are 50 MB and PDF, DOCX, XLSX, JPG, JPEG and PNG.
• Document Type — the list of types a document can be filed under. These are the labels you will be filtering by for the rest of the year, so it is worth agreeing on them with whoever does the filing.

Then, in order

1. Turn on two-factor authentication on your own account.
2. Create the folders you want documents to arrive into.
3. Invite your colleagues, then your clients.

Doing it in that order means the first client who signs in finds a portal that is already furnished, rather than an empty one.