SpidNums vs Liscio: consolidating the client-communication layer

What Liscio does well

This section comes first deliberately. Liscio is a serious product with real customers, and a comparison that pretends otherwise is not worth reading.

• Genuinely strong at the one thing it does: getting client conversations out of email and into a secure, trackable channel.
• High client adoption relative to portals bolted onto larger systems, helped by a good mobile experience.
• Clear security posture around client communication, which matters for firms handling sensitive financial data.

Where the fit differs

These are differences in model rather than claims about missing features. Where a capability is not listed for Liscio, that means we did not verify it — not that it is absent.

• Scope: Liscio is a communication layer. SpidNums is the practice platform — client records, services, tasks, deadlines, letters and branding — with a client portal included.
• Firms consolidating away from point solutions typically want fewer systems, not a better one of each.
• Branding: SpidNums renders the firm's brand across the app, emails and engagement letterhead.
• Pricing: one flat firm fee rather than a separate subscription per layer.

Pricing

Liscio does not publish pricing we could verify, so this page does not state a number for it — ask the vendor for a current quote. SpidNums is a flat USD $1,200 per firm per year with every feature included, including white-label branding.

What SpidNums is, plainly

SpidNums is practice management for Canadian accounting firms: the client list, the services each client buys, the deadlines those services generate, the person who owns each one, and the engagement letter that defined the scope. It is not a general ledger, it does not prepare or transmit returns, and it does not calculate payroll — those stay in the tools your firm already files with.

The list below is the complete set of claims this site makes about the product. If a capability is not on it, we do not claim it.

• Multi-tenant white-label branding per firm — name, logo, colours, emails and letterhead
• Colour-coded SLA deadline dashboard ranked by proximity
• Aggregated reminders across tasks, service cadences and fiscal year-ends
• E-signed engagement letters with a public, no-login client portal
• Per-tenant Google Workspace integration
• Client portal
• Staff roles with confidential-client gating
• Canadian-hosted data (Supabase ca-central-1)
• Flat USD $1,200 per firm per year, all inclusive
• CSV/XLSX client import and export

Questions worth asking both vendors

Comparison grids converge because feature names converge. These six questions separate products that look identical on paper, and they are worth asking of Liscio and of SpidNums alike.

• How is a deadline generated — from a rule tied to the client's fiscal year-end and reporting period, or from a recurring task somebody configured by hand?
• When a client's filing cadence changes, is that one field or a rewrite of every future date?
• Whose brand does the client see on emails, on the portal and on a signed engagement letter — and on which plan does that become true?
• Where is client data hosted, and is tenant isolation enforced in the database or only in the application? Get the answer in writing.
• What is the total annual cost at three seats and at ten? Ask for the total, not the per-user figure.
• What comes across on migration, and what does not? Clients usually move; documents, notes and completed work usually do not.

Who should choose Liscio

A firm whose practice management is otherwise fine, and whose specific failure is that client conversations are lost in inboxes, should buy the thing that fixes that. Replacing a working system to get a communication feature is the wrong trade.

If that describes your firm, take the other product seriously. If it does not, the practice management overview covers what SpidNums does in full.

Switching

Firms consolidating point solutions typically move client records first by CSV or XLSX, then migrate communication gradually. Message histories do not transfer — keep read access for the retention period.

SpidNums imports and exports clients as CSV or XLSX. There is no direct migration connector, so historical documents, notes and completed work do not come across automatically — plan the cutover around a period boundary rather than mid-season.