Explainer
What is a client portal, and do you need one?
What a client portal is, what goes in one, who needs one and who does not, and what it costs to build, with a look around the one we built.
A client portal is a private part of your website where each of your clients logs in and sees their own things: the work in progress, your messages, the files you have shared, and their invoices. Instead of all of that living in email threads and attachments.
What goes in one
It depends on the business, but most portals do some of these:
- Projects or jobs, and where each one is up to.
- Messages attached to the project they are about, not scattered across inboxes.
- Files in one place, so nobody asks which version is the latest.
- Invoices, and whether each one is paid.
- Forms and documents the client needs to fill in or approve.
Who needs one
- Service businesses with ongoing work: agencies, consultants, accountants, architects, builders on long jobs.
- Anyone sending a lot of documents backwards and forwards with each client.
- Teams, where more than one person talks to the same client and needs to see what was said.
- Businesses whose clients keep asking "any update?" A portal answers the question before it is asked.
Who does not
If most of your customers buy once and leave, a restaurant or a shop for example, a portal adds a login nobody wants. A good website and clear emails will serve them better.
A look around ours
We built our own client portal. Each client sees their projects and the stage each one is at, messages with any files attached, and the invoices issued to them. On our side, an invoice goes out in one click as a branded email with the PDF attached, or opens in our own email to send from there.
Build one, or subscribe to one?
There are ready-made portal products, usually paid per user per month. They are a good fit when your process is standard and you are happy to work the way the product works.
A portal built for you makes sense when your process is your advantage, when it needs to connect to systems you already use, or when per-user fees across your clients would add up. We compare the two approaches in off-the-shelf or bespoke.
What it costs
On our estimator, a small client portal is £5,700 to £9,700, and a medium one, with several kinds of user or more screens, is £7,050 to £12,200. Invoices and PDF documents, automatic emails and links to your accounting software are listed separately.
Next step
Look at your sent emails from last week and count the ones that were really status updates, file resends or invoice chasers. That is roughly what a portal would take off your plate. If it is a lot, try our estimator, or tell us how you work with clients.