Do you share documents with your accountant? ReChive is for you

If you run a business, you have to deal with bookkeeping and accounting. Not only are they essential parts of your admin, but they're also a legal requirement.

These tasks are often too complex for a business to handle on its own, so many of us end up hiring an external accountant who, for a monthly fee, takes care of all our invoices and receipts.

The typical way many accountants work, regardless of country, is to give you a unique email address and ask you to forward all your invoices and receipts there. Later, they go through the emails and process the attached files.

The problems we face

The workflow seems simple: you get an invoice, you forward it to your accountant, and they take care of the rest.

But there are three fundamental problems with this approach:

1. You still need a system to manage your invoices and receipts; especially to track unpaid invoices, whether they're ones you need to pay or ones you've sent to customers.

2. You quickly lose track of which documents you've already shared with your accountant and which ones you haven't.

3. Even if this email-based system somehow works for invoices, it does nothing for your other important documents, such as letters, contracts, acknowledgments, etc.

After years of running my own business and helping small businesses, I've experienced these problems firsthand. With so much on your plate, it's hard to stay on top of document management, payment tracking, and making sure everything is shared with your accountant.

Introducing share targets for ReChive

ReChive was already a feature-rich and useful document management system. But our users still had to manually handle the process of sharing documents with their accountant, and rely on memory to know if everything had been shared.

It wasn't just a problem for our users, it was a problem for us here at Vieolo too. We had to rely on memory or external platforms to keep track of what had been sent. That's not what we stand for at Vieolo (and by extension, ReChive).

We needed a solution that would:

• Remind us if a document hasn't been shared
• Let us share documents securely and reliably
• Give us a clear history of what's been shared
• Allow flexibility based on our preferences
• Let us limit team access to this feature, if necessary

So we built share targets and since we started using it for our own operations, I can confidently say it removes all the friction from working with your accountant.

Here's how it works:

You create a share target

Just head to the Workspace tab (in the web app or any ReChive app), open the share target section, and create a new one.

When creating a target, in addition to the basics (name and email), you can choose:

• The types of documents allowed to be shared
• Whether sharing documents with this target is mandatory
• If mandatory, the start date from which selected document types must be shared

Note: for legal and security reasons, you can't change a target's details after creating it, so double-check everything before saving.

If you create a mandatory target, all documents issued on or after the start date will show up in the pending list, even if their status is marked as completed.

Share your documents as you go

Entries that need to be shared will be marked as "Not shared" and will appear in your pending list. This way, you'll always know what still needs to be shared.

To share a document, just open the entry and go to the "Share" tab. You'll see the list of targets related to that entry and can select which files to send via email.

A key focus for us was to avoid accidentally re-sharing files. To help with that, your files are clearly divided into two categories:

• Not previously shared
• Already shared

This ensures you don't re-send something by mistake, which could cause duplicate entries in your accountant's system.

After sending, you'll see a full share history in the "Share" tab, complete with the file name, target email, timestamp, and the user who initiated the share.

Once all files in an entry are shared, the entry is automatically marked as "Shared" and removed from your pending list. Instant peace of mind.

Managing your team's access

Naturally, you don't want unauthorized access to such a critical part of your records. That's why you can manage team access through the “Share data” permission.

Only workspace owners and members with this permission can share documents with targets and view the share history.

This permission works on top of existing access levels. For example, a user with access level 1 won't be able to share documents marked with sensitivity levels 2 or 3, even if they have the “Share data” permission.

We felt the immediate effect

As soon as we rolled out the feature last week and started using it on our own documents, we felt the difference.

There was an instant layer of added organization on top of our already-structured document system. We shared everything that needed to be shared in just a few clicks, and then had a crystal-clear overview of what was shared and what wasn't. Spoiler alert: everything was shared—nothing left pending!

So, open your ReChive app and start using share targets today. We'd love to hear what you think!