Senta has been a popular choice for UK accountancy firms looking to move their practice management into the cloud. It's been around since the mid-2010s, it's reasonably priced, and it does the basics well enough that a lot of small firms have built their workflows around it.
So why are some of those firms now looking elsewhere?
What Senta does well
Credit where it's due. Senta was one of the first UK-focused practice management tools to go fully cloud-based, and for a while that was enough to make it stand out. It offers workflow automation, a client portal, email integration, document storage, and a CRM — all the pieces you'd expect.
The workflow templates are probably its strongest feature. You get pre-built workflows for tax returns, accounts, payroll, and other common jobs, and you can customise them to match how your firm actually works. For a sole practitioner or a small team of two or three, that's often all you need.
Pricing starts at £31 per month for one user, with discounts as you add more. No long contracts, no per-module charges. Straightforward.
Where things get tricky
In 2021, IRIS acquired Senta. If you've worked with IRIS products before, you'll know that acquisition doesn't always mean "investment." Some Senta users have noticed the pace of updates slowing down, and there's a recurring question on AccountingWeb about whether IRIS is prioritising Senta or gradually steering firms toward its own suite.
Then there are the outages. In May 2025, Senta went down for what some users reported as five days. Five days without access to your practice management system. That's not a minor inconvenience — that's your entire workflow, your client records, your document storage, all gone dark during what might be a busy filing period.
The interface, too, is starting to show its age. It's functional, but "functional" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Several reviews mention the dated look and feel, and some users report that automation features don't always behave as expected — to the point where they've gone back to tracking things in spreadsheets. Which rather defeats the purpose.
How Fortium compares
We built Fortium specifically for the problems that tools like Senta leave on the table.
Real-time collaboration. Senta is cloud-based, but it wasn't designed for multiple people to work on the same client simultaneously. Fortium was. You can see who's looking at what, who's made changes, and what's outstanding — in real time. No more "I think Sarah's working on that" guesswork.
A client portal that clients actually use. Senta has a portal, but it's fairly basic. Fortium's portal is built into the core of the product — clients log in, upload documents, see what you've shared, and check the status of their work. It's designed to be simple enough that the client who still prints their bank statements can figure it out.
No per-seat pricing. This is probably the biggest practical difference. Senta charges per user, which means every new hire or part-time bookkeeper adds to your bill. Fortium doesn't. Your whole team gets access for one price. For a growing firm, that changes the maths significantly.
Modern interface. This sounds superficial, but it matters more than people think. Your team will spend hours every day in this software. If it feels clunky or dated, that friction compounds. Fortium is built on modern web technology — it's fast, it works properly on mobile, and it doesn't look like it was designed in 2015.
Built-in compliance. AML checks, KYC verification, HMRC MTD integration, e-signatures — all included. With Senta, some of this exists but it's limited, and you'll often need third-party tools or Zapier integrations to fill the gaps.
The IRIS question
Here's something worth thinking about if you're currently on Senta. IRIS has a pattern of acquiring smaller software companies in the accounting space. Sometimes they invest in them. Sometimes they slowly fold the customer base into their existing products.
Nobody outside IRIS knows exactly what the long-term plan for Senta is. But if you're choosing a tool to run your practice on for the next five years, it's worth asking: will this product still exist in its current form in 2028? With an independent product like Fortium, the roadmap is public and the team behind it is focused on one thing.
Which one's right for your firm?
If you're a sole practitioner or a very small firm (one to three people), Senta might still work for you. It's established, it's affordable at that scale, and it covers the basics.
But if your firm is growing — or if you're fed up with per-seat pricing, outages you can't control, and an interface that hasn't kept pace — Fortium is built for where UK practice management is heading. Real-time collaboration, proper client portal, flat pricing, and a team that's focused entirely on making accountancy firms more efficient.
Join the Fortium waitlist to see it for yourself.