The Chartered Institute of Taxation (CIOT) and the Association of Taxation Technicians (ATT) are the UK's two leading professional bodies for tax. Together, they support tens of thousands of members and students - from trainee tax technicians sitting their first exam to chartered tax advisers at the top of the profession.
The digital portal sat at the centre of that relationship. Members used it to manage their subscriptions, access CPD records, and register for exams. Students used it to enrol, track progress, and receive results. In a membership body where trust and reliability are fundamental to the value of membership, the portal was not a peripheral system - it was the primary touchpoint for a large share of member activity.
By the time CIOT and ATT approached Distinction, the portal was struggling under the weight of that responsibility. It had been built on an ageing infrastructure that had not kept pace with member expectations or operational demands. During peak examination periods - when traffic was highest and reliability mattered most - the system slowed, threw errors, and in some cases failed entirely. Support teams fielded a high volume of calls from members and students who could not complete basic tasks online and had no alternative but to phone the office.
Two previous attempts to overhaul the portal had stalled. Both had run into the same problem: the portal's deep integration with a legacy CRM and a set of third-party vendor dependencies made like-for-like replacement impractical. Each attempt had tried to rebuild everything at once, and each had hit complexity it could not resolve.
CIOT and ATT needed a partner who understood that kind of environment - and who would take a more considered approach to getting out of it.
"Previous attempts to modernise the portal had always come unstuck because of the complexity underneath. Distinction took a different approach - they understood the constraints, proposed a phased plan that would deliver real improvements without putting live services at risk, and executed it exactly as promised. The reduction in support calls has been significant, and for the first time in years, our team is not dreading exam season."
We started with a 14-day assessment. Two senior consultants reviewed the existing portal architecture, interviewed stakeholders across IT, membership, and student services, and mapped the precise points where the system was failing members and creating operational overhead.
The assessment produced a clear picture. The portal was not failing because it was built badly - it was failing because it had never been designed to scale, and because years of incremental additions had created technical debt that made every subsequent change harder. A single large rebuild would carry the same risks as the two previous attempts. The right answer was a phased approach that delivered immediate improvements while progressively modernising the underlying infrastructure.
Phase one focused on access. We replaced the portal's fragmented login system with a new Single Sign-On (SSO) implementation, giving members and students a single, consistent way to authenticate across all CIOT and ATT services. SSO sounds like a technical detail, but for members it was transformative - one login, no more forgotten credentials for different parts of the system, no more being locked out during renewal or exam season.
Phase two addressed the student registration system - the highest-traffic, highest-stakes part of the portal, and the area generating the most support calls. We redesigned the registration flow from the ground up, with a simpler process, clearer progress indicators, and proper error handling that told students what had gone wrong and how to fix it, rather than returning a generic failure message. We also addressed the underlying performance issues that had caused the system to slow under load, replacing the components most prone to failure with more robust alternatives.
Both phases were delivered without disrupting live services. We worked around exam cycles, planned releases for low-traffic windows, and ran parallel systems during critical periods to ensure that if anything went wrong, members and students would not notice.
Subsequent phases are ongoing, with further improvements to the member dashboard, CPD tracking, and the groundwork for a public-facing tax adviser search tool.
The operational impact was immediate. Support call volumes related to portal access and student registration dropped by 47% within three months of phase two going live. Members who had previously called the office as a first resort - because the online alternative was too unreliable - were completing tasks independently. The support team, which had spent a significant proportion of its time on portal-related calls during exam periods, was freed to focus on more complex member queries.
Self-service task completion - measuring the proportion of members who successfully completed key portal tasks without contacting support - increased threefold. For a membership body where operational efficiency is directly tied to the value it can deliver to members, that is a meaningful shift.
During the exam period following phase two's release, the portal maintained 99.9% uptime - a significant improvement on previous cycles, where the team had come to expect some level of disruption as normal. The performance work done as part of the student registration rebuild removed the bottlenecks that had previously caused slowdowns at peak demand.
CIOT and ATT now have a portal that members and students can rely on - and a platform that the internal team can extend with confidence. The failed overhaul attempts of previous years have been replaced by a programme of incremental, measurable improvement, with each phase building on a foundation that has already proven itself in production.
The Portal transformation improved operational resilience and reduced technical disruptions, ensuring members and students could access services without interruption.
System scalability allowed ATT & CIOT to handle peak demand without performance issues, reducing IT overhead.
Despite CRM vendor delays, both organisations are now positioned to expand digital services, reinforcing their leadership in tax education and compliance.
Future phases will continue to enhance the Portal’s capabilities, further strengthening its role as a vital resource for members and the wider public.
