Point has a phone app, and it is the same inbox rather than a smaller copy of it. What changes is the shape. One column, three tabs, a thread that arrives as a single line, and a swipe that files it in the mailbox your firm already keeps. It is built for the six minutes you get standing up rather than the hour you get at a desk, and nearly everything about it follows from that.
- Every thread starts as one short line. One tap opens the summary, one more opens the original, with real headers and the full body underneath it.
- A swipe files what is finished, in Point and in your real Gmail or Outlook mailbox at once, and undo waits in the corner where a thumb can reach it.
- The phone is quiet by default. It lights up for what you asked to be told about, and a tap lands you on that message rather than on an inbox you then have to search.
- The app we have shown runs on Android. We have not published an answer about iPhone, so if that is what decides it for you, ask before you join rather than after.
- A notification reaches the phone through Google’s push service and can carry a fragment of the message with it. That is itemized on our subprocessor list, and how much of it a locked screen shows a room is a setting worth choosing on purpose.
One column, and one line per thread
The app is a single column with three tabs: inbox, tasks and calendar. That is the whole of the navigation, and all three sit where a thumb already is.
The unit you work with is the line. Every thread arrives as one short line saying what it is, so a screen holds eight or nine of them and you can read the visible pile without opening anything. One tap opens the summary, and four paragraphs from a client become a few lines. One more tap opens the original, with real headers and the full body, so nothing is hidden behind the summary and nothing has to be taken on trust. That last part is the difference between a summary you use and a summary you keep checking, and it matters more on a phone than anywhere else, because a phone is where you have the least appetite for verifying anything. Why a plain summary is a better first line than a subject line at all is a plain summary of every email, before you open it.
The back button always brings you home. That reads like nothing, and it is the reason the app works at a walking pace. You can go three taps into a thread you were not sure about and get out with one press, which is what makes opening things cheap.
The other two tabs answer the two questions a phone actually gets asked. Tasks holds what has been lifted out of your mail carrying the date the client named, which is adding a task in five seconds seen from the far end. Calendar is there so “can you do Thursday” can be answered while you are still standing in front of the person who asked, and what Point does with the rest of a scheduling thread is a meeting scheduler without the email chain.
Six minutes standing up
A desk session and a phone session are different jobs, and most mail apps are built as though they were the same one.
At a desk you are working. On a phone you are almost always deciding, and there are only three decisions in it. This needs me now. This needs me when I sit down. This is finished. The app gives each of those a gesture and then gets out of the way.
Finished. Swipe the thread away. It is filed in Point and in your real mailbox at the same time, so the desk agrees with the phone when you get back to it, and nothing is deleted. Undo waits in the corner, which is worth more on a thumb than on a mouse: a swipe is the easiest accidental action there is, and an app that hands you a gesture without an undo has given you a way to lose things quickly. What undo covers, and the one thing no product in this category can reach, is undoing what Point did.
Needs me when I sit down. Set it aside and say when it comes back. It returns exactly then, at the top rather than buried where you left it. What people actually mean by later, and why a flag has never carried it, is snoozed email, and where later actually goes.
Needs me now. It is already near the top, because the ordering happened before you picked up the phone rather than when you looked at it. Mail is read and ranked as it lands, so the pile you open on a train platform is as current as the one on your desk. That is a property of the account rather than of any app, and the case for it is triaged the moment it lands.
Which brings up the thing worth understanding about phones specifically. A screen this size shows eight lines, so the ordering of the pile is not a convenience on a phone, it is the whole of what you get to see. On a desktop, a bad ordering costs you scrolling. On a phone, a bad ordering means the message that mattered is below the fold of a device you are holding in a hallway, and you will not find it, because you are not going to scroll a hundred messages one-handed. An inbox sorted by arrival time asks you to run that lottery every time you take the phone out. It is the same defect it has always had, and the phone is where it finally becomes expensive.
A phone comes to dinner
The desktop app stops mattering when you shut the laptop. The phone does not, and that changes what a notification is allowed to cost.
The way Point is meant to be used is that the phone stays quiet until it matters. You say once, in plain words, what you are waiting for. Point holds the watch. You close the app and go and do something else. When the thing you named arrives, the phone lights up, and one tap puts you on that message rather than on an inbox you have to search through to find it. The notification is already read by the time you get there, so there is no second pass to clear a badge that is telling you about something you have already dealt with. Setting one of those in words rather than in a rules builder is setting your first watch.
How loudly Point speaks is a set of separate switches rather than one setting, and those live on the account, which means the phone and the desk stay in step without being configured twice. That whole apparatus is described in Point’s desktop app, and there is no need to set it up again here.
What is different on a phone is not the volume. It is the hour. A banner at nine in the morning is information, and the identical banner at nine at night is your firm following you into the kitchen, which is the reason so many owners end up turning notifications off entirely and then checking the inbox compulsively instead, which is a worse arrangement than either. So the phone question worth deciding is when rather than how much: the hours in which you want to be reachable by a client matter, and the hours in which you do not. Everything that arrives outside them is still read, ranked and waiting in the feed when you next look, and nothing is lost by not being told about it at the moment it happened.
The related habit, which is not ours to prescribe but is the one thing beta firms changed on their own, is to add one thing at a time rather than switching everything on in the first week. That pattern, including why almost nothing ever moves off its starting setting without a prompt, is in lessons from the beta.
What a lock screen shows the room
This is the part of the phone question that a desktop page never has to answer, and for a practice handling client mail it is the one worth reading twice.
There are two halves to it, and only the first is about us.
A push notification does not go from our systems to your phone directly. It goes through Google’s Firebase Cloud Messaging, which is on our subprocessor list as a subprocessor with its role written out: mobile push-notification delivery, handling device push tokens and notification payload fragments, which may include message-derived snippets. In plain terms, the words on that banner traveled through a Google service to reach you. The list carries a version and an effective date, so it is a thing you can check rather than a thing you have to infer, and the whole of our position on what is held, by whom and for how long is how we think about your clients’ data.
The second half has nothing to do with Google and is the one that actually catches firms out. A banner is visible to anybody who can see the screen. A phone lying face up on a conference table during a meeting is a small broadcast, and in a professional-services firm the sender’s name on its own can be the disclosure. A preview saying a company’s name and a few words about a transaction tells a room something you did not decide to tell it, and the people most exposed to this are the ones who deal with matters nobody is supposed to know about yet.
Two settings sit between you and that, and they belong to different owners. What Point sends is yours, on the account, and can be narrowed to the categories that genuinely need to reach you. How much of what arrives is displayed on a locked screen is your phone’s own setting rather than ours, and it is the one almost nobody makes deliberately. It costs a minute to decide, and the moment to do it is before the meeting rather than during it.
If a firm is writing any of this down, it belongs with the rest of the practice’s own rules rather than in a vendor’s documentation, and the version a small firm will actually follow is a simple AI policy.
The device most likely to be left in a cab
A laptop gets carried between two buildings. A phone goes everywhere, including the places where things get left behind, so it is fair to ask what a lost one exposes.
The useful fact is that there is no password of yours in our systems to be taken. Sign-in is password-less, and Point reaches your mail through the authorization you granted at Google or Microsoft. Where that key is actually held, and where the off switch sits, is where your email credentials are kept.
That has a practical consequence. Ending Point’s access to a mailbox is something you can do at your provider without asking us to do anything, and it takes effect everywhere at once. What it is not is a device-level answer, since it disconnects the mailbox rather than the handset. Whether a single phone can be signed out on its own is a fair question, and it is better asked before you need the answer than after. It is a short thing to put to us while you are joining.
None of that is unique to Point, and a firm whose real exposure is a phone with no screen lock has a problem that no email client solves.
What to leave until you sit down
Three things the phone is a poor place for, and one it does not make any worse.
The reply that will be read twice. You can write from the phone, and for a two-line answer that is exactly right. What a phone reliably produces past two lines is short and blunt, and in a practice short and blunt reads as annoyed. A client who asked a careful question and got seven words back has learned something about their standing with you that you did not mean to teach. Set that one aside and write it at the desk, where it takes four minutes instead of four minutes of frustration.
The setting that decides what Point may do unsupervised. Every kind of work has one of its own, and every one of them ships on review, meaning Point prepares the thing and then waits for you. The phone is exactly where you would be tempted to raise one, because you are in a hurry and it is in your way, and a hurry in a hallway is the worst state in which to decide that something should stop checking in with you first. That decision wants a stretch of the log in front of you and ten quiet minutes, and it is worked through properly in setting how much your inbox does on its own.
Anything made of files. Reading an attachment on a phone is possible and gathering a client’s documents on one is not. That is a different surface with a different job, and it is working with documents.
And the one the phone does not make worse. Owners running a second business alongside the practice tend to worry about a reply leaving one-handed under the wrong name. The separation Point holds is between businesses you operate, it belongs to the account rather than to any device, and it travels with you. What it holds and the four places it stops are in keeping one business isolated from another.
Which phone, and how you get the app
Two plain answers, and the first one is a limit rather than a feature.
The app we have shown and can describe runs on Android. On iPhone we have published nothing, and speculating here would only give a firm something confident to plan around and be wrong about. So if the handset in your pocket settles this for you, it is a two-line question to ask while you are joining rather than something to find out afterward. Nothing else about Point depends on it: the browser works on any phone, and every part of the sorting happens whether an app is installed or not.
As for getting it, nothing on this site downloads. Point is a private beta with no public release and no sign-up of your own, so the app comes with a seat rather than from a store page. A seat carries everything, and the inventory it carries is on the benefits page. We have published no price and no length of anything. The terms a firm joins on, and the fit test worth running first, are in the beta opening wider this fall. The waitlist on the home page is the only way through.
One thing to do rather than decide. Leave whatever mail app is on your phone where it is for a couple of weeks, and watch whether the two stay in agreement. They should, since filing in Point files in the mailbox underneath. What does need handling on day one is the buzzing, because two mail apps on one handset announce everything twice and the newer one gets blamed for it. The order to do all of it in is switching to an AI email client. What this looks like inside a practice rather than in general is Point for accountants.
Common questions
Is there an iPhone version?
The app we have shown runs on Android, and we have not published anything about iPhone. That is the honest state of it rather than a hint in either direction, and if it is the fact that decides your answer, ask us while you are joining rather than assuming one. Admission to the beta runs through a conversation, and this is a reasonable thing to spend two lines of it on.
If I swipe a thread away on my phone, what happens in Gmail?
It is filed in both places at once, and it is not deleted. The thread leaves the inbox and goes where the rest of your archived mail already lives, so opening Gmail or Outlook afterward shows you a mailbox that agrees with the one on your phone. That write-back is the thing worth checking in any client you try, because a product that keeps its decisions in its own window leaves you with two inboxes to keep tidy instead of one.
Do I need the phone app for Point to sort my mail?
No. Ranking a thread, summarizing it and pulling an ask out of the fourth paragraph all happen as mail lands, on the account, and they do not wait for any app to be open on any device. What the phone adds is a place to work from in the gaps and a tap on the shoulder when something you asked about arrives. A firm that never installs it loses those two things and loses none of the sorting.
Can I keep the Gmail or Outlook app on my phone as well?
Yes, and for a couple of weeks it is the sensible thing to do. Nothing about the account changed, so the app you have keeps working, and the two agree with each other because Point writes its filing back to the mailbox underneath. The one thing to handle deliberately is notifications: turn the old app’s off before you turn Point’s on, or every message buzzes twice and the new software gets the blame for it.
Can a notification show client information to somebody looking at my phone?
Yes, in the same way any mail app’s can, and it is worth deciding rather than discovering. Two separate controls sit between you and that. What Point sends is a set of switches on your account, so you can narrow it to the categories that genuinely need to reach you. How much of any notification a locked screen displays is your phone’s own setting rather than ours. Separately, and on the record, push notifications are delivered through Google’s Firebase Cloud Messaging, whose role and the data it touches are itemized on our dated subprocessor list.
What should we do if somebody’s phone is lost?
Point holds no password of yours, because sign-in is password-less and access runs through the authorization granted at Google or Microsoft. That authorization can be ended from your provider without asking us, and it takes effect everywhere at once, which is the blunt answer available to you immediately. It disconnects the mailbox rather than the single handset, so if what you want is to sign out one device and leave the rest running, ask us how that works before you need it. Everything Point did, from whichever device, is a timestamped line you can read afterward.
Is the phone app a fair way to evaluate Point?
Partly. It shows you the ordering, the summaries and the tasks, which is most of what there is to judge, and it shows them in the situation where they are hardest to fake. What it will not show you is the depth work: a long client thread read properly, a draft checked before it goes out, a week of the activity log. Judge the ordering on the phone and judge the rest at a desk, and give both of them longer than the first two weeks before drawing a conclusion, because the first two weeks are calibration rather than a verdict.
The short version
Point’s phone app is the same account in a shape that suits a thumb. One column, three tabs, and a thread that arrives as a single line you can read without opening it, with the summary one tap away and the full original with real headers one tap past that. A swipe files what is finished, in Point and in your real mailbox at once, with undo in the corner. Set something aside and it comes back when you said. The pile is already ordered when you pick the phone up, which matters more here than anywhere else, because eight lines is all a phone shows and arrival order buries the rest. Notifications are quiet by default and loud for what you asked about, and the phone-specific decision is the hour rather than the volume. Two things deserve a minute of thought before you rely on it: what a locked screen displays to a room, since a banner can carry a fragment of a client’s message onto a table full of people, and what happens to a phone that goes missing, which runs through the authorization at your provider rather than through a password we hold. Leave the long replies, the autonomy settings and anything made of files for when you sit down. And the app we have shown runs on Android, with no iPhone answer published, so if that is your deciding fact, it is a question to ask before you join rather than after.