User guide › Customer portals
What a portal is
A portal is built the same way as a dashboard: pages, a menu, and blocks you place on the pages. You can run several — a client portal and a vendor portal, or a patient portal and a referrer portal. Each has its own audience, look, pages and sign-in.
People who sign in are customers, not members of your workspace. They take no seat, see none of your screens, and each one sees only what belongs to them.
Customer portals are part of the Business plan and above. If you downgrade, portals that are already live keep working; you just can’t create or change them.
Create your first portal
Open Settings → Workspace → Customer portals and choose New portal.
- Say who will use itPick the kind of record each customer is — your clients, patients, students, vendors. Every person who signs in is linked to one record of this kind.
- Start from your dataLeave Start from my data on. BackOffice drafts pages for everything linked to those customers (their orders, visits, shipments…), a request form, and a messages area. Switch it off to start blank.
- Make it yoursThe editor opens with a live preview using a real customer’s data. Change anything.
- Invite someone, then publishAdd a customer on the Customers tab, then press Publish. Customers never see unpublished edits.
The editor
| Part | What you do there |
|---|---|
| Pages (left) | Add, rename and delete pages; choose the home page. |
| Menu (left) | Choose which pages appear in the menu, their order, labels and icons. |
| Canvas (middle) | The portal as customers see it, with real data. Click a block to edit it; use the toolbar to move, copy or delete it. Switch between desktop and phone. |
| Settings (right) | The selected block’s options — or, with nothing selected, the page’s title and address. |
| Preview as (top) | Look at the portal as any of your customer records. |
Changes save automatically as a draft. Publish puts the draft live; History lists every published version and lets you bring an old one back into the draft.
Blocks
| Block | What the customer gets |
|---|---|
| Welcome banner | A greeting with shortcut buttons to other pages. |
| Number | One figure over their own records — how many, or a total. |
| My records | A searchable list of their records, as a table or cards, with filter buttons. |
| Record details | Everything about one record, in sections you choose. |
| Status tracker | Progress through the stages of a choice field. |
| Request form | Lets them send you something new. It lands in your normal workflow. |
| Messages | A conversation with your team about a record. |
| Documents | Files attached to their records. |
| Timeline | What changed, limited to the fields you pick. |
| Action buttons | Approve, confirm, cancel… Each button sets one field to one value you decided. |
| Text | Headings, paragraphs, lists and links. |
A list opens a page about one record. Build that page with a Record details block (plus a tracker, documents, messages, timeline or action buttons), then choose it in the list’s Opens the page setting.
What customers can see
Every block shows only records that are
- the customer’s own record, or
- linked to it through a relation field you choose in the block, or
- shared with them individually from the record.
Only the fields you tick are shown. Fields you have restricted by role can’t be added to a portal at all. If something is wrong, Publish tells you in plain words and nothing goes live.
Sharing one record
Open a record and press Portal. Search for a customer and share it — they see exactly that record. The same panel shows what customers wrote about it and lets you reply; the customer gets an email with a link back into the portal.
Customers
On the Customers tab you invite people by email, link each to their record, switch them off, and see when they were last in. Switching someone off cuts them off on their next click. An invite works once and expires in seven days; if email isn’t set up you can copy the link and send it yourself.
Customers sign in with an emailed link (no password to remember) and can also choose a password after their first visit — you decide which methods to allow under Look & sign-in, along with the colour, logo, font, corners, light/dark and languages (any language).
Languages
A portal can speak as many languages as you need. The first language is the default: the text you write in the editor is in it. Open Languages to add more — pick one from the list or type a code — and for each language you can
- see how much is translated, and show Only missing,
- type translations by hand, or press Translate missing with AI and read them over,
- translate the portal’s own buttons and hints, so even a language we don’t ship is complete.
Customers choose their language in the portal (also on the sign-in screen) and it is remembered. Anything you haven’t translated shows in the default language, so a half-finished language never leaves blanks. In the editor you can preview in any language. Customers can also switch between light and dark mode when you leave the theme on “Match device”.
Files from customers
On a Documents block, switch on Let customers send files. Customers can then send PDFs, images, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, text and CSV files up to 10 MB for a record they can see. Files are stored securely in the cloud, checked to be what they claim, and appear — with download and delete — under Portal on the record. Removing a customer deletes their files too.
Templates
A template can include a portal. When you install the template the portal arrives as a draft — never live — so you can review it, link your customers and publish when you’re ready.
The text block is plain formatted text (no custom HTML). That is deliberate for now.