Point is in private beta, and more firms are being let into it between now and the end of the year. It stays private, so there is no public release and nothing to download. What changes is how many practices are inside, and admission runs through one waitlist, on the home page.
- Opening wider changes who is admitted rather than what the software does. Nothing about Point is being repackaged for the occasion.
- The fit is narrower than “small business”. Mail on Google or Microsoft, a firm small enough that the person using Point is the person who signs for it, and enough daily volume that the order of the pile matters.
- A seat is the whole product. The beta holds itself to four jobs, which is a statement about what we are measuring rather than about what you get.
- Most of the recruiting lands in November, which leaves a firm that says yes a whole quiet December in which to be a beginner.
- No price, tier, trial length or discount has been published. Point is in private beta and priced per seat, and any number you have seen attached to it did not come from us.
Still private, only wider
The word “open” is doing less work here than it usually does. There is no self-serve sign-up, no card page, no download. A firm gets in because we let it in, and that is as true in December as it was in June.
What is actually being rationed is attention at our end rather than capacity at anyone’s. Settling a practice properly takes real people some hours, and the number of practices that can be settled well before February is finite in a way that server capacity is not. That is the whole reason admission is gated, and it is why the gate does not swing open all at once.
So being on the waitlist is not the same as being in, and a waitlist entry is not a ticket with a number on it. What it is, reliably, is the only door. There is no side entrance through a sales contact or a referral code, and nothing on the site is a trial in disguise.
For firms already inside, this changes nothing. No setup is migrated, no capability moves behind a different door, and the plan the quarter runs on is written down in what we’re building this quarter. Widening the beta costs us attention, not them.
The firm this is being opened to
Point was built for a particular kind of business, and the beta is narrower still. Five checks, and you can run all of them yourself in about a minute.
Your mail is on Google or Microsoft. Point connects to Gmail and Google Workspace, or to Microsoft 365 and Outlook. If your firm’s mail lives anywhere else, Point does not reach it today. That one is a hard edge rather than a preference, and it is worth checking before anything else on this page.
The person who would use it is the person who can say yes. Point is aimed at the owner of a five to fifteen person professional-services firm, where the buyer and the user are the same human being and there is no procurement chain between the two. A firm with an IT department, a security questionnaire and a committee is not disqualified by anything technical. It is just a longer process than a private beta is set up to run.
Enough mail arrives that its order matters. The practices Point was designed around run somewhere near a hundred messages a day per person. If you can still read everything that arrives in the order it arrived, you do not yet have the problem Point solves, and buying software for it is premature.
Somebody has had the client-data conversation, or will before December. A tool that reads client mail is a firm decision rather than an afternoon’s purchase. Our own answer, in the vocabulary a practice actually uses, is how we think about data, and the questions worth putting to any vendor including us are in what to ask an AI email vendor.
What you want is the mail sorted, not the work done. Point holds no job list and has no view of the workload queued behind any one preparer. Deciding which returns will miss the deadline is not something it can help with, and that call stays with whoever is running the season.
On the question of what kind of firm, this season’s attention is on accounting and tax practices. Not because Point is accounting software, but because a beta measured against several different kinds of year measures nothing. One kind of year, with one immovable date in it, gives a clear read. Management consulting and business coaching are the next two, and the rest of the professional-services firms Point is built for are set out on who it’s for. The practice-shaped version of the product is Point for accountants.
What a seat actually is
The beta being scoped to four jobs is the sentence most likely to be misread, so it is worth being exact about.
A seat is the whole product. Scheduling, briefings, summaries, standing watches, search, the desktop app, the phone app and the rest are all live and in daily use, and the full inventory is on the benefits page. Nothing is held back from a beta firm and there is no cut-down build.
The four jobs are what we hold ourselves to proving inside one season, which is a different claim. The pile ordered so the top of it is the part needing a person. A request buried in a reply landing on your list with the client’s own date on it. Dangerous mail stopped before you see it. A message you can lock so only its recipient opens it, Point included. Why those four and why not a fifth is what we’re building this quarter, which also names the things Point is deliberately not.
Three things a seat is not, because people reasonably assume otherwise.
It is not a countdown. No trial length has been announced, and no tier or discount either. Point is in private beta and priced per seat, and that is the entire published position on money.
It is not a pilot running beside your real mail. Point is a layer over the mailbox you already keep. You connect the address you have, the archive stays where it is, and there is nothing to announce to your clients.
It is not the software deciding things for you out of the box. Each kind of work carries its own setting for how far Point may go, and each one arrives set to review, meaning Point proposes and waits. Pushed to the top, a setting lets Point act without checking in first, which is the only reason to push one there. Nothing moves up on its own. The whole of it is setting how much your inbox does on its own.
What joining asks of you
The exchange is simple enough to state in one line. You get the software early. We get to find out where it is wrong on real practice mail, which is the only place that can be found out.
That makes the specific complaint the most valuable thing a beta firm hands back. Not a rating, and not a survey answer, but the message that got ranked below something trivial, or the ask in paragraph four that never became a task, with the thread still in front of you. General praise and general frustration are equally useless to us. One thread we can look at is worth more than either.
Some of that correcting is not overhead at all. A summary you fix, a ranking you overrule and a habit you state once are the mechanism by which Point stops being generic and starts being about your clients, which is how a tool learns from your edits. The first weeks want a small and steady amount of it. A firm that connects a mailbox and touches nothing for a month gets the version of Point that knows nothing about it.
What none of this asks for is a migration. The address, the archive, the contacts and the account you already pay for are untouched by connecting and untouched by disconnecting, so a firm that stops is not left having to rebuild anything. What actually changes when a mailbox is connected, and what does not, is how to switch to an AI email client.
Anything binding lives in the terms and the privacy policy, which are the documents rather than this post, and the third-party services involved are listed and dated on subprocessors.
From the sign-in to the second Monday
The mechanics of starting are shorter than most firms expect, and the useful part is what happens after.
Connecting is a sign-in to Google or Microsoft. No forwarding rules, no MX record, no new address, no export. It takes a couple of minutes, and the walk-through is connecting your mailbox.
Day one gives you an ordered feed with a plain summary on every thread, and it is worth knowing what that ordering is made of on the first morning. It is Point reading your mail rather than Point knowing your practice. Which clients get an answer inside the hour and which threads can sit until Thursday is learned from weeks of traffic, not from a settings page, so the first days are competent and general and the useful part arrives later.
The first week is therefore the week to be picky in. Expect an ask that should have become a task and did not. Expect a task carrying the wrong date. Expect a sender held at the door who you wanted through, and check the held pile rather than assuming it is empty, because the whole point of holding unrecognized mail away from the software is that a stranger cannot give your inbox instructions. Everything Point did is listed with a timestamp in the activity log, and most of it can be put back. The exception is delivery itself. Once a reply has landed on the recipient’s server it is out of reach, and no product recalls it.
Leave the dial where it starts for that week. Then raise the routine settings first, the filing and the ranking and an acknowledgment you have already worded, and keep anything that puts new words in front of a client under your own eye for longer than feels necessary.
The real test is the second Monday. Either you are opening Point first, or you are opening your old client first and Point is a tab you feel guilty about. That signal arrives sooner than most software evaluations allow for, and it is worth trusting when it comes. What the change actually feels like from inside a practice is the morning after.
When the answer is not yet
Five situations where waiting is the better call, and one where something else is.
The partner conversation about client data is unfinished. Then that is the piece of work, and it is not this one. It does not compress and it does not go well in February. Is it safe to use AI on client data is where to start, and a simple AI policy is the version a small firm will actually follow.
Your engagement letters need a line about AI and have not had it agreed. Whatever a letter says on the day a client signs it governs the engagement from there, and the signing happens in December, which makes the wording a November job. What to put in your engagement letter about AI covers what a letter can and cannot carry.
You are already mid-way through another software change this year. Reaching February with one thing changed beats reaching it with three, and the seasonal arithmetic behind that is in getting ready for the 2027 tax season.
Your firm’s real problem is how much work there is. No inbox fixes that. A calmer mailbox makes an overloaded season legible, which is worth something, but it does not make it shorter.
You need a published price or a certification report to satisfy a checklist. A private beta will not give you either today. What does exist is privacy and subprocessors, both public and both dated, and a badge goes up here when there is a held certification and a document to hand over, not before.
And the one that is not a waiting problem. A practice wanting a status board, the kind where every client has a row and every requested document has a column, is asking for something an email client is the wrong shape to be, however good it gets. The argument for keeping that register on one list rather than in a mailbox is worth reading before you decide which tool you are actually shopping for.
How a firm actually gets in
The waitlist on the home page is the door. The form asks for a work email and a box confirming you are happy to be contacted about the private beta, and that is the entire form. There is nothing to fill in about firm size, no questionnaire, and no call to book before you have heard from anyone.
Most of the recruiting happens in November rather than spread evenly across the fall, so that is the month to be reachable in. The reason is capacity rather than urgency, and the seasonal case for December over February belongs to getting ready for the 2027 tax season.
Three things are worth settling on your side before you say yes, because they are the ones that take a firm longest and none of them is technical. Whose mailboxes are connecting, which is usually fewer people than the first answer. How many seats, which is a per-seat decision and therefore a real one. And whether the engagement letter needs a line, which has the December deadline attached to it.
If you would rather read before joining anything, the version written for a practice is Point for accountants, the full capability list is on the benefits page, and the account of where the earliest firms hit trouble, our own errors included, is lessons from the beta.
Common questions
Is this an open beta I can sign up for myself?
No. It is a private beta and stays one, and there is no self-serve sign-up, download or card page. Firms are admitted from the waitlist, and admission is limited by how many practices can be settled properly at our end rather than by anything technical. The waitlist on the home page is the only way in.
What does it cost?
Point is in private beta and priced per seat. No number, tier, trial length or discount has been published, and anything you have seen attached to Point that looks specific did not come from us. The part of the decision you can make now is how many seats you would actually want, which is usually a smaller number than a firm’s first answer.
Do we have to leave Gmail or Outlook?
No. Point runs as a layer on top of the mailbox your firm already keeps, on Google or on Microsoft. You keep your address, your history and your contacts, there is nothing to migrate, and nobody has to be told a new address. Disconnecting puts you back on the setup you had this morning. How to switch to an AI email client has the detail, including the parts people expect to change that do not.
We are two people. Is that too small?
No. Point works for one person as readily as for twelve, and a two-person firm is well inside what the beta is for. The size that sits awkwardly is at the other end, where a firm has an IT function, a vendor review process and a committee. Nothing about Point rules that out, but a private beta is not the shape of purchase that suits it.
Who at the firm needs to agree before we can say yes?
Whoever owns the decision about software reading client mail, which in a firm this size is usually one or two people and occasionally a conversation that has been postponed twice. That is the only approval this really needs. Getting it is not a technical review, and the questions it turns on are in what to ask an AI email vendor.
What if we cannot look at this until after April?
Then look at it after April. The waitlist does not expire and the beta is not a door that closes, so nothing is forfeited by a firm that decides this is a question for May. What the fall specifically offers is quiet mail to be wrong on, and December is the last stretch of the year that supplies it. After the season, the next comparable window is the summer, and that is a perfectly reasonable plan to have.
The short version
Point’s private beta is admitting more firms this fall, and it stays a private beta. The waitlist on the home page is the only door, admission is limited by attention rather than capacity, and November is the month most of it happens in, which leaves an incoming firm a quiet December to be a beginner in. The fit is specific. Mail on Google or Microsoft, a small professional-services firm where the person using Point is the person who signs for it, enough volume that the order of the pile matters, and a client-data conversation that has happened or can happen before December. A seat is the whole product rather than a stripped build, the four jobs describe what the season is measuring, and each kind of work sits on review until somebody at the firm moves it. Nothing migrates, so leaving costs what joining cost, which is a sign-in. If the partner conversation is unfinished, or another change is already underway, or a checklist needs a price and a certificate, waiting is the right call and the waitlist will still be there. If none of those apply, the fall is the cheapest stretch of the year in which to be new at something.