Software for accountancy practices
Your accounting software exports plain, unprotected PDFs. Pinsta Lock puts a client-specific password on each one as it lands. It protects your client, and it protects you.
Xero today. QuickBooks, Sage Accounting and Karbon are in build.
Pinsta Lock protects downloads while your team is signed in to the extension. Who is covered, and who is not, is on your Clients screen.
Document security
Pinsta Lock puts a client-specific password on the PDFs your practice sends. Applied as you export them, before they reach your hard drive.
The problem
That is not a fault in the software. An export is a file, and a file is what you asked for. But it means every set of accounts, every payroll run and every debtors list leaves your practice as a document anyone who ends up holding it can open.
It is forwarded, it sits in inboxes, and it is opened on shared devices you will never see. Once it has left you have no say in where it goes, and you still carry the liability for what is inside it.
The fix is not another portal for your client to resent. It is making sure the file itself is useless to anyone who was not meant to have it.
What changed this year
AI assistants sit inside Outlook, Gmail and Teams, and they work by reading everything they can reach: messages, attachments, the lot. Your client switched one on. So did their bookkeeper, and the company that bought them. Nobody asked you, and nobody had to.
An ordinary PDF is readable, so it gets read. The accounts you spent a fortnight on are summarised, searched and held somewhere you cannot name. Nothing has been hacked. No rule has been broken. That is simply what those tools do with a file they can open.
A locked document cannot be opened, so it is passed over. It stays something one person reads deliberately, with a PIN, because they meant to. You decide who reads your work, instead of whatever software happens to be installed at the other end.
Works with
Once a client’s accounting software is connected, their downloads lock themselves. Everything else your browser downloads is caught too, with the client read from the file name for you to confirm.
How it works
Sign in once and connect Xero. Pinsta reads which organisations you advise, and who on your team may act on each one.
Generate one or set your own. It belongs to the client, so everything they receive opens the same way, and you tell them once, not every month.
You export as you always have. It downloads, Pinsta locks it as it lands, under its own name with “- Locked” added, and then offers to send your client the PIN for it. No extra clicks, no new habit.
Prefer to decide file by file? Drop any PDF onto the panel instead; useful for payroll software, statements, and anything you print to PDF by hand.
How it compares
| Pinsta | Acrobat | Client portal | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Applied without anyone remembering | Yes | Manual, every file | Manual upload |
| Client needs an account | No | No | Yes |
| Same PIN across a client’s documents | Yes | Whatever you typed | Not applicable |
| Covers your whole team | Unlimited users | Per seat | Per seat |
| Still protected after sending | Yes | Yes | Only inside the portal |
Acrobat is a PDF editor that can encrypt. Pinsta is a control that makes encryption happen without anybody deciding to. If what you wanted was a PDF editor, buy the PDF editor.
What Pinsta never does
Any extension asking to sit inside your accounting software owes you this list. It is the part we would want to read first.
Coming soon
Everything above is Pinsta Lock: it protects what your team downloads. Pinsta Mail will protect what your team emails, including from Karbon and from a phone, where nothing installed on a computer can reach.
It is a last line of defence rather than a second product. An attachment you have already locked passes straight through untouched. Only the one somebody forgot gets caught, with the same PIN that client already has, so nothing is set twice and your client has nothing new to learn.
It works differently, and you should know before you want it. Locking an attachment on its way out cannot be done without reading it, so unlike Pinsta Lock, documents sent through Pinsta Mail pass through our servers. They are processed in the United Kingdom, held only for the moment it takes, never written to disk and never kept. It will be optional and separately charged, so a practice that would rather keep the stricter promise simply does not switch it on. The detail is already written into our data processing agreement, ahead of the feature, so you can read it before deciding rather than on the day.
No date. It needs infrastructure we are not going to rush, and we would rather ship Pinsta Lock properly first than ship both badly.
When somebody asks you to prove it
You get asked this more every year, by professional indemnity renewals, by client due diligence, by security questionnaires, and increasingly by your clients’ own auditors. “We are careful” has stopped being an answer.
Pinsta does not make a practice compliant with anything on its own, and nobody should tell you otherwise. It gives you one control that runs every time and a record proving it did, which is what most of these questions are actually asking for.
Questions
No. They receive an ordinary encrypted PDF and open it with the PIN you gave them, in whatever they already use: Preview, Acrobat, their phone. Nothing to install and nothing to sign into.
Separately from the documents, always. A PIN in the covering email protects nobody, because anybody reading that email has both halves. Pinsta can send the client a one-time link that shows them the PIN, or asks them to choose it, and that link carries no PIN and no company name and stops working after an hour. Or tell them yourself, on a call or in the engagement letter. The one thing that never happens is the PIN and the document travelling together.
Send them a link and they can see it again, without you reading it out or putting it in writing. If you would rather change it, you set a new one and everything from then on uses it. Documents already sent keep the old PIN. That is what encryption means, and it is why a reset is a decision rather than something we do quietly.
Really encrypted. AES-256, the standard PDF encryption every reader supports. Without the PIN the contents cannot be recovered, not by us, not by anybody.
No. Pinsta Lock encrypts on your own machine, inside the browser extension. The document is never uploaded, so there is nothing on our side to read, subpoena, or lose. It is also why Pinsta Lock is cheap to run and will stay that way: the expensive part of a document product is holding the documents, and Pinsta Lock never holds one.
Yes, and it is the plainest thing encryption does. An assistant sitting in a mailbox works by reading what it finds. A locked document gives it nothing to read, so your work is not summarised, searched or stored by software you never chose and cannot ask about. It matters if the worst happens, too. You would still report a breach to the ICO, but whether you must also write to every affected client turns on whether the data was readable, and encrypted data generally is not. That is the difference between a difficult letter to the regulator and four hundred difficult letters to your clients.
PDF, Excel and Word. Those are what Xero and Karbon hand out, and what a client is sent. An Excel or Word file is protected the way Office protects one, so your client double-clicks it, Excel asks for a password, and they type the PIN. Nothing to install at their end.
Xero at launch: reports, contacts, invoicing, payroll and fixed assets. The extension finds a page’s own export control rather than being wired to particular screens, so adding QuickBooks, Sage or FreeAgent is configuration rather than a rebuild. Tell us what you use when you join the waitlist. It decides the order.
No, and that is deliberate. A security tool fails at its weakest-covered person: if the junior without a seat exports the management pack, it goes out unprotected and the whole thing was theatre. Every tier includes your entire team.
They stay locked and stay openable, with the PINs you already gave your clients. The encryption lives in the file, not in a subscription. You would lose the ability to lock new ones, nothing else.
Both. Pinsta is a Chrome extension and works the same on either.
Early access
We are opening to a small number of practices first. Tell us what you use and how many clients you look after, and we will be in touch before launch.
We will email you when Pinsta opens, and about nothing else. Your details are stored in the UK and never sold or shared. Ask us to delete them at any time and we will, the same day.