Onboarding paperwork is the slow part, not the advice

Droplana is a client document portal for professional service businesses. For financial advisors and planners, that means one private, persistent portal per client - for collecting onboarding and review documentation, and for sending reports, statements and recommendations back. Two-way exchange, no client account.

The document load is front-heavy and never actually ends

Advisory work has a shape that most file-sharing tools get wrong.

Onboarding is a burst. Identity documents, address verification, source-of-funds evidence, a signed suitability questionnaire, maybe a transfer authority and a fee agreement. Six to ten items, several of which the client has to physically find, and one of which they will forget.

Then it goes quiet, and then it comes back. Annual review documents. A statement they want a copy of. An updated address. A new declaration after a change in circumstances. Two years in, the file is thick and it is spread across an inbox, a shared drive folder, and whatever the client sent by WhatsApp that afternoon.

Tools built for one-off transfers handle the burst badly and the long tail worse. A WeTransfer link is gone in a week. An email thread is searchable in theory and unfindable in practice at the point where a compliance question actually gets asked.

A per-client portal fits the shape. The onboarding checklist lives in the portal. The review documents land in the same portal. In year three, the whole relationship is in one place, in date order, labelled by client. If you are still weighing up the category itself, our client portal guide covers what these tools do and what to compare.

Why advisors use Droplana

The checklist does the chasing

Set a document checklist per client and they can see what is outstanding without asking you. The chase is asynchronous: they open the portal, see three items ticked and two missing, and deal with the two. This is usually the difference between an onboarding that takes four days and one that takes three weeks.

The phone is the scanner

Ask a client to scan a passport and you have added a week and an obstacle. Ask them to photograph it and it arrives in ten minutes. The Take Photo button opens the phone camera directly in the portal. Most clients use it with no instruction at all.

One link, permanently

The client's portal link does not change and does not expire. Not per project, not per document, not per year. When a client asks in month eighteen where to send something, the answer is the same link you gave them on day one.

Reports go back the same way

Annual review packs, valuations, and recommendation documents go into the same portal, not out as a 20 MB email attachment that a corporate spam filter quietly eats. Per-file comments let you add the one line of context the document needs without starting an email thread about it.

Access you can revoke instantly

When a relationship ends, revoke the client's access. It takes effect immediately. The files stay with you - they always belonged to the business, not to the client.

Data protection, stated plainly

An advice file is one of the denser concentrations of personal data a small firm will ever hold: identity documents, income, assets, sometimes health information behind a protection recommendation. Under GDPR your firm is the data controller; a tool that stores those documents is a processor, and Article 28 requires a Data Processing Agreement between you.

What Droplana does here:

• EU storage, exclusively. Files, comments and metadata sit on Hetzner infrastructure in Germany. Objects are stored under opaque, randomly generated identifiers - never named after a client, a filename or its contents - and are never exposed on the public internet.
• Encrypted at rest, per client. Each client's files are encrypted with a key derived specifically for that client. This protects against a storage-level breach. It does not protect against a compromise of the application host itself, since the master key lives there alongside the storage credentials - we would rather say that plainly than imply more than is true.
• DPA on every plan. Practice and Studio include a countersigned DPA.
• EU sub-processors. Storage with Hetzner in Germany, mail delivery with Brevo in France, payments with Creem in Estonia. Each is an EU company, and mail and payment providers never receive file contents.

None of this makes your firm compliant on its own. Compliance is a process question. But it removes the awkward part of the conversation where a client asks where their passport scan is stored and the honest answer is "an American cloud drive, probably." The full detail, including what the per-client encryption does not cover, is on our security page.

Where Droplana is not the answer

• It is not a CRM or a practice management system. There is no pipeline, no task list, no client record beyond the portal itself. If you need the document layer inside your CRM, use your CRM's portal.
• It is not a qualified e-signature provider. In-browser signing records who signed, when and from where, with a public verification page - a real audit record, but not a certificate-based signature.
• It has no integrations and no public API. Nothing syncs to your back-office system automatically.
• It is not archival storage. Storage is capped per plan and there is no overage billing - when you hit the limit, new uploads stop and existing files stay accessible.

Advisors working alongside accounting practices and mortgage brokers often end up with the same per-client document layer across the whole referral chain, which is not an accident - the document problem is identical.

Quick FAQ

Can clients upload documents to me? Yes, that is the main use. Each client has a private portal for ID, address verification, source-of-funds evidence and signed forms.

Do they need an account? No. No account, no password. They open a link and confirm by email magic link, or with a Google or Microsoft account they already have. The device is remembered for 90 days.

Can they sign in the portal? Yes, with in-browser PDF signing. It is not a certified or qualified electronic signature. Where a hard legal signing requirement applies, use a dedicated provider - or have the client upload a scan of the paper original.

What happens when I hit the storage limit? New uploads are blocked; existing files stay accessible. There is no overage billing. Each Storage add-on adds 500 GB and raises the maximum file size to 5 GB.

Can I stop a former client accessing their portal? Yes, immediately. Revocation takes effect at once, and the files remain yours.

Check our simple pricing (or start free)

Storage levels and team seats scale with your plan.
Security, per-client encryption, isolation, in-browser PDF signing, and data export are the same on every plan.
No per-client fees. Tax calculated by Creem at checkout.

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