Client portal

Your clients can have an account with you. They sign in, see every quote, order and invoice of theirs in one place, pay what is open, ask a question on the document it is about, and send you a file.

What a client sees

One list, newest first, of everything you have sent them: quotes, orders, invoices, credit notes and projects. Drafts are never on it — an invoice appears the moment you issue it, not while you are still writing it. At the top, what they owe you and any credit they hold.

Opening one shows the number, the date, the status, the total and what is still due, with a button through to the document itself — the same page your share links open, so they can print it, sign it, pick their options and pay, exactly as they would from an emailed link.

They only ever see their own. There is no way to reach another client's paperwork from inside a portal account: every read is narrowed to the client the account belongs to.

A confirmed order can be paid for from its page too, before you have invoiced it — see Taking payment on an order. The invoice you raise afterwards deducts what they paid, so nobody is asked twice.

Giving somebody access

Open a client and find Portal access. Type their email address and press Give access. They get an email telling them they have an account and where to sign in.

• One address, one client. If the same person buys from you under two companies, give each address its own account — a shared login would mean one person seeing two clients' paperwork.
• Anyone at the client can have their own account. A workshop manager and the person who pays the bills usually want different things.
• Remove takes access away immediately, ending any session they have open. What they have already written and sent stays where it is.

Your portal lives at /portal/<your workspace address>. Set that address in Settings → Company before you invite anybody.

Its wording is yours

Two sentences on the portal are editable in Settings → Documents, beside the payment instructions that already show there:

• Portal welcome line — the line under a client's name when they sign in. It reads "Everything has sent you is below." unless you say otherwise. {{org.name}} and {{client.name}} are filled in.
• Paid invoice message — what a client sees on an invoice that is settled. It reads "This invoice has been paid in full — thank you!" unless you say otherwise. {{org.name}} is filled in.

Leave either empty and it keeps the wording above, so a workspace that never opens the setting sees no change.

Signing in

There is no password. The client types their email address and gets a link that works once and expires in twenty minutes; clicking it signs them in for a fortnight on that device.

That is deliberate. A password is a thing they have to keep and a thing you then have to hold — and clients who order twice a year forget them and stop using the portal. Note that the sign-in page answers the same way whether or not the address has an account: it will not tell a stranger who your clients are.

Messages

Every quote, order, invoice and project has a Messages tab, and the client sees the same thread on their copy. They ask "can we move the delivery to the 14th?" on the order it is about, and you answer there. No subject lines, no digging through email for which quote they meant.

You are notified when a client writes, by email and in the app; they are emailed when you reply. Nothing else about the document is in the thread — your internal notes stay in Activity, where the client cannot see them, and the two lists are never merged.

Files

Files are internal until you say otherwise. On any quote, order, invoice or project, each attachment has a toggle:

• Internal — only your team. Supplier invoices, cost sheets, the note to the fitter.
• Visible to client — appears on the client's copy of that document, and they can download it.

Click the toggle to switch. Nothing is ever shown by accident: a file you have just uploaded is internal until you show it.

The client can send you files too — artwork, a signed form, a photograph of the wall you are fitting to. Those arrive on the document, marked as theirs, already visible to both sides, and you are notified. Images, PDFs, spreadsheets and text documents up to 25 MB; nothing that executes.

Purchase orders they hand over

A shop or a stockist that buys from you regularly raises a purchase order in their own system. Until now that arrived as an email attachment and somebody retyped it. Switch on Let portal clients send you purchase orders in Settings → Documents and it arrives where the work is instead.

What the client sees is a Send us a purchase order box on their portal page: their PO number, the document itself, and anything they want to say with it. What you get is a row under Purchase orders in the sidebar and a notification in the bell menu.

Opening one puts the document they sent on the page with an order form beside it, already knowing whose it is and where they are billed and shipped. Where their document could be read, the form already has the lines on it — check them against the document and press Accept as a draft order:

• It raises a draft order, never a confirmed one. Nothing they send reserves stock, and confirming is still your press. The portal box says so, so nobody is under the impression an order is placed.
• Their PO number lands on the order's Customer PO, so your paperwork matches theirs from the start.
• A line left at zero takes that client's own price, from their price list. Where their purchase order states a different price you are looking at both numbers and choosing — which is the point. Taking theirs silently is how a maker loses money, and taking yours silently is how a relationship gets an argument.
• Unmatched lines are fine. A line whose part number you do not carry goes on as it reads; a purchase order never creates an item in your catalogue.

Reading their document

A purchase order raised in somebody's own system is a PDF whose words are already inside the file, so What the reader found fills the form in for you within a few seconds of it arriving. Nothing has to be configured for this, nothing is sent anywhere, and it costs nothing per page.

• The item and the quantity are filled in. The price is not. Every line is priced from that client's price list, and the price they stated sits in the card above it for comparison. That is the same choice as above, made on purpose: the reader does not get to price your order.
• A line whose numbers do not add up is marked "Check this one." The reader only trusts a line where the quantity times the unit price comes to the line total the document itself printed. Where it does not — a fax, a scan, an odd layout — the quantity still comes through and the price is left alone rather than guessed at.
• A code that matches nothing in your catalogue comes through as a plain line with their wording, counted at the bottom of the card. Pick the item, or leave it as a one-off line.
• A scan, a photograph or a fax needs a reader configured (OCR_PROVIDER), which is the same setting receipt photographs use. Without one, the card says the document could not be read and the form is blank — which is exactly where you were before, so nothing is lost.
• Nothing found? Some purchase orders are a covering letter with the detail attached separately. Read it on the page and type the lines in.
• Read it again re-reads the document: useful after configuring a reader, or when the first attempt failed because a service was down.

Decline instead, with a line saying why, and they read it in their portal and can send a corrected one. A reason is required: "no" on its own means they send the same document again.

It is off until you switch it on, and then it is open to every client who has a portal account. Switch it off for one of them — the retail buyer who has no purchase orders to send — on their Portal access card.

The document is stored as their file on the submission, is downloadable from both sides, and counts against the same 25 MB limit and the same hourly upload allowance as everything else the portal takes.

Their statement

The portal carries Your statement of account: everything on the client's account this period, with what is owed and how old it is, printable. It shows today's position rather than the end of a closed period — somebody signing in to check what they owe wants today's number. See Statements of account.

Through the API

Everything here is in the public API: list and create portal accounts on a client, revoke one, read and post the thread on a document, change an attachment's visibility, and list, accept or decline the purchase orders clients have handed over. See the API reference for the endpoints.