Pertavo for accounting firms

Pertavo runs one product for law firms and accounting firms. Your firm picks which one it is, and the words on every screen follow.

The rest of the site is written for law firms, because that is who we build for first. This page is the whole of the difference for everybody else.

What the setting changes

The vocabulary, and nothing else:

A law firm reads	An accounting firm reads
Matter, matters	Engagement, engagements
Matter number	Engagement number
Practice area	Service line
Attorney, Lead attorney	CPA, Lead CPA
Court and limitation deadlines	Filing and limitation deadlines

Every screen, every heading, every empty-state line. The General matter a new firm is created with is called the General engagement on the accounting side, because a firm whose very first screen says “General matter” has been handed the wrong product.

What it does not change

Everything else. Same screens, same permissions, same data model, same API. An engagement is a matter with different labels: it has a reference, a client, staff, documents, messages, deadlines and time in exactly the same way.

That is worth being plain about rather than dressing up. This is a vocabulary setting. It is not a different product, a different plan, or a different set of features — nobody gets less because of which one they picked.

Setting it

At registration. The signup form asks which kind of firm you are, and the choice applies from your first screen.

Afterwards, in Settings → Organization. An owner or admin can change it, and the change takes effect everywhere at once. Nothing has to be migrated and nothing is rewritten: the words are chosen when a screen is drawn, so a firm that picked wrong on Tuesday can correct it on Wednesday and lose nothing.

If you were onboarded by hand

Firms that arrived through the contact form rather than the signup page have this set for them, from the answer to “what kind of firm?” on that form. If it is wrong, change it in Settings — you do not need us to do it.

What is not tailored

Being direct, because the setting can suggest more than it delivers:

• There is no tax-specific behaviour. No returns, no filing calendars, no integration with any tax software.
• Deadlines are still dates somebody types. Nothing computes a filing date from a rulebook — see Deadlines.
• Conflict checks work the same way, and have the same limits, whichever profession you are. See Conflict checks.