Frequently asked questions

Clivanta is a document collection platform — a secure portal where your team requests specific documents from clients and third parties, tracks each one from request to receipt, and keeps a complete audit trail. Instead of chasing files over email, you send a structured list of requests; each recipient uploads against the exact item you asked for, and you can see at a glance what is outstanding, submitted or accepted. It is built for teams that collect documents on a recurring basis, such as audit, corporate services, accounting, legal, HR and procurement.

Clivanta is for any team that repeatedly asks people outside the organisation for documents. That includes audit and tax firms gathering prepared-by-client (PBC) items, corporate service providers collecting KYC and UBO documents, bookkeeping firms running month-end close, law firms running discovery and due diligence, HR teams onboarding new hires, property managers onboarding tenants, and procurement teams onboarding vendors. If your work depends on getting the right files from someone else, on time, Clivanta is built for you.

Email and shared drives were never designed to track document requests. With email you lose the thread — you cannot tell at a glance what is still outstanding, versions pile up, and the real status lives in someone's head. Shared drives and data rooms become dumping grounds with no record of who was asked for what. Clivanta makes each request a tracked item with its own status, version history, conversation and audit log, and it chases overdue items automatically so nothing slips.

A virtual data room is a place to store and share files; Clivanta drives the request-and-response loop around them. Rather than dumping thousands of documents into a folder and hoping the right ones are there, you request specific items — the signed 2024 lease, the updated certificate of insurance — and Clivanta shows exactly which are still missing. You get the structured collection and audit trail a data room cannot give you, and recipients only ever see the items that concern them.

No. Clivanta is entirely web-based. Your team signs in through a browser, and the people you collect from open a secure magic-link portal — no account, password or software required — or simply reply to the request by email. Because everything runs in the cloud, there is nothing to install, update or maintain on either side.

No. Anyone you collect documents from opens a secure, personalised portal through a magic link sent to their email — there is no signup, password or app to install. If they would rather not use the portal at all, they can reply to the request by email and their attachments are routed to the right item automatically. Keeping the barrier to responding as low as possible is a large part of why documents come back faster.

Yes. Every request can be answered simply by replying to the notification email and attaching the files. Clivanta parses the reply, attaches the documents to the exact request item they belong to, records the sender, and moves the item into your review queue — with no forwarding or manual filing on your side. The portal is there for people who prefer it, not a wall for the people who do not.

Each person sees only the items that concern them — a clean checklist of what you have requested, what they have submitted, and what is still outstanding. They never see your internal notes, team-only comment threads, internal tasks, or anything relating to other clients or matters. Access is scoped per person, so sensitive information stays where it belongs.

Yes. The recipient-facing portal adapts its wording to the recipient's language, so the people you collect from read requests and instructions in a language that feels natural to them. This is particularly useful for cross-border work and for finance or operations teams whose first language is not English, and it typically improves response rates.

All documents and client data are stored on EU-hosted infrastructure, with no transfer outside the European Economic Area (EEA) for storage or processing. Data is encrypted in transit with TLS and at rest with AES-256, and encryption keys are rotated by the platform rather than left to your IT team. For teams handling regulated or sensitive documents, EU data residency is a core part of the product rather than an add-on.

Yes. Clivanta's audit log is insert-only, which means every request, upload, revision, comment, acceptance and access event is written permanently and cannot be edited or deleted — not by a client, not by an administrator, and not by us. When someone later asks how a document was obtained or when it arrived, the answer is a timestamped chain of events with the actor recorded, rather than a reconstructed email thread.

Access follows the principle of least privilege. The people you collect from see only their own items; internally, roles separate what an admin, a manager and a member can do. Every view, download and export is logged alongside the document itself, so you can always answer 'who saw this, and when'. Team members can also be federated through your identity provider with SSO on the Enterprise plan.

Yes, at any time. You can export a complete pack per engagement — all accepted files, their full version history, and the audit log as CSV — including after you cancel. Your documents and their chain of custody are yours, so there is no lock-in and nothing to reconstruct if you move on.

Yes. Team users can sign in through your existing identity provider using SSO / SAML on the Enterprise plan, so access follows your normal joiner-mover-leaver process. The external people you collect documents from never use shared passwords at all — they authenticate through single-use magic links, which removes a common source of credential risk.

Clivanta is priced per team on simple monthly plans — Starter, Growth, Firm and Enterprise — scaled by the number of team seats and active engagements you need. Every plan includes unlimited client contacts, the full reusable-pack library, reply-by-email intake and the immutable audit log. You only pay for your own team; there is never a per-document or per-client charge.

Never. Clivanta is paid for entirely by the team doing the collecting. The clients, counterparts and third parties you request documents from always use the portal for free — charging someone to hand you documents would defeat the purpose. Because every plan includes unlimited client contacts, onboarding more of them never increases your bill.

Yes. Every plan starts with a 14-day free trial that includes the full reusable-pack library, and no credit card is required to begin. You can build real request lists, invite real recipients and run a live document collection during the trial, so you are evaluating Clivanta on your own work rather than a sandbox.

Yes, and it is how most teams start. Rather than switching everything at once, you run a single engagement — one audit, one onboarding, one claim, one vendor — through Clivanta alongside your usual process. That gives you a low-risk, side-by-side comparison before you roll it out across the team.

Yes — automatic chasing is one of the main reasons teams adopt it. Each request has its own escalating reminder schedule, so overdue documents are chased on your behalf without anyone remembering to send a follow-up. Recipients can pause a reminder with a stated reason when something is genuinely blocked, and the pause is logged, so chasing stops being a person's job without becoming a nuisance.

Yes. You build your standard list of document requests once as a reusable 'pack' — your house checklist for an audit, an onboarding, a KYC review or a vendor intake — and launch it for every new client, matter or vendor in seconds. Packs are copied as a snapshot when you launch them, so later edits to your template never rewrite the history of work already in progress.

When a recipient uploads a file or answers a request, the item moves into your review queue rather than an inbox. You review it and either accept it — at which point it locks as evidence and counts toward completion — or request a revision with a reason the recipient can see. Every step is recorded in the audit log, and previous versions are always kept rather than overwritten.