The client portal

Who can use it. Staff build and publish portals; each customer sees only their own project's portal, and only the parts you've published. Owners control which template new projects start from.

What it's for

The client portal gives every customer a live, branded window into their build — where the job is up to, the decisions they need to make, the documents you've shared, and a running cost picture — so they stop ringing to ask "what's happening with my job?" and your team stops fielding those calls.

Every account starts with a ready-made portal, not a blank page. From your first login there's a complete starter template already laid out with a welcome home page, a build timeline, interior-design decisions, a documents area, a notes-and-changes page, and a feedback page. It's stamped with your business name and carries no one else's details, so you can publish it as-is or reshape any part to match how you run a job. Where the richer page-building tools below are enabled for your account, the starter also shows a couple of example sub-pages and a notify button already in place, so you can see how they're meant to be used before you build your own.

How to use it

Go to Admin → Client Portal. Your account already has a default template — the starter portal.
Open the template to edit it. Sections become tabs; fill each with the blocks you want — headings, photos, photo galleries, short looping videos, decisions, checklists, contact cards, document slots, a stage tracker, link-preview cards, and more. Drag to reorder or lay blocks side by side.
Add pictures by dragging them straight in (or browse for a file) — no image links needed, though pasting a URL still works. As you add one you can crop it to a shape (square, wide 16:9, standard 4:3), reposition it inside the crop, and pick how wide it should sit on the page. Changed your mind on the framing later? Use Edit crop on an already-uploaded photo to re-crop it without finding the original file again — the previous version stays recoverable in its version history — or just drag the reposition sliders to re-centre the crop any time, with no re-upload needed at all. Two small or medium-width photos placed one after another automatically sit side by side instead of stacking, so a quick "before/after" pair or a couple of finish samples read as a pair without needing the side-by-side row tool.
Make any image a button. Give an image a link and an optional label and it becomes a large clickable tile — perfect for "Browse our colour range" or "View your plans" style links out to suppliers or resources. A link can point out to the web, or — where enabled for your account — straight to another page in the same portal (see "Sub-pages" below). A photo gallery card can be clickable too — add a link URL alongside its caption and the picture becomes a tap-through to a supplier page, a spec sheet, or anywhere else.
Tuck bulky content behind a drop-down. The Collapsible block hides anything big — a colour reference table, a long checklist — behind a header your client taps to expand, so pages stay short and visual.
Drop in a short video and it just plays — no play button for your client to find. Drag a video file straight in (or browse), up to 50 MB, MP4 or WebM. It autoplays silently and loops on the page like a moving photo — perfect for a quick site walkthrough or a finished-room pan. Add a caption if you want, and turn on playback controls if you'd rather your client be able to pause or turn the sound on.
Fill in the blank contact cards (Business Owner, Project Manager, Office Manager, and any others you add) with your real people, and adjust the timeline stages and design prompts to your process.
Save draft as you go — drafts stay private. Publish when it's ready; every published version is kept so you can compare or restore later.
Each project gets its own portal from the published template. Open a project's portal to tailor it for that client — override content, hide blocks, or set up per-project tables and photo galleries — and use Preview as client to see exactly what they'll see before it goes out.
Perfected a project's portal? Save it back as your template. On the project's portal editor, Save as template draft copies that project's reusable setup — table layouts you've built and gallery images you've added — into your template as a new draft, so every future job starts from it. Your client's answers, filled-in details, and uploaded documents are never copied; review and publish the draft in the template editor to roll it out.

Sub-pages, notify buttons, and link-preview cards

Where these tools are enabled for your account, a page can hold more than one screen's worth of content — and a client can raise a flag without leaving the portal.

Sub-pages. A Pages panel next to your section tabs lets you add a page that sits *below* a tab rather than beside it — useful for a design option, a build stage, or anything with its own set of details that would otherwise clutter the main page. Give it a title, an emoji icon, and (optionally) a banner cover image, then fill it with the same blocks as any other page. A sub-page only shows up when something links to it — it never appears in the tab strip itself.
Link to a sub-page from anywhere a link normally goes — an image button, a "View details" link on a decision option, a table cell, or a checklist item. When you're setting the link, choose Portal page instead of typing a web address, then pick the page or section from the list. Your client taps through and gets a Back button to return exactly where they were.
A notify button lets a client tell your team something's ready — "I've made my selections," "I've finished my feedback" — with one tap. It records the moment on the page (so the client can see they've already notified you), adds a note to that project's activity feed for your team, and sends your assigned staff (or your whole team, if no one's assigned yet) an email. Tapping it again is safe — it just re-notifies, it never blocks a second nudge.
Bookmark cards turn a plain web link into a preview card with a title, description, and thumbnail — the same kind of card you'd see pasting a link into a chat app. Paste the URL and use Fetch preview to pull in the page's title/description/image automatically, then tweak any of it by hand before saving; or skip the fetch and fill the card in yourself.
Give a page (or a whole section) a cover image and an icon — a banner photo across the top and a small emoji beside its title, the same visual treatment Notion-style pages use. It's a nice touch for a page that deserves its own identity, like a design stage or a supplier's range.
A checklist item can carry its own link, and a long checklist can lay out in up to four columns instead of one long list — handy for a big reference list like bathroom fixtures.
Personalise the welcome message. Typing {{client.name}} or {{client.firstName}} anywhere in a heading, paragraph, or callout swaps in the signed-in client's own name — so "Hi {{client.firstName}}, welcome to your portal" reads as "Hi Sarah, welcome to your portal" for each client automatically. Leave it out and the text just reads as written.
A table column can hold a picture. Set a column's type to Image on the project's portal page (where every other column is already set up) and drop a picture straight into each cell — a small thumbnail with drag/drop, browse, replace, and clear. Your client sees the picture but can never upload or change it themselves.

Edit on the page

You edit the portal directly on the page your client sees. The template editor has two views — Edit on page (where you make changes) and View (a clean preview) — and it opens on Edit on page, so the preview *is* the editor:

Click any block to select it. Its settings open in a panel on the right — change the block there and the page updates live, so what you see is exactly what your client gets. Click empty space on the page, press Escape, switch tabs, or use the panel's ✕ to put the panel away; deleting a block is its own clearly-marked Delete button in the panel (with a confirm), so closing the panel never touches your content.
Type straight over a heading or title. Click a selected heading — or a section or timeline's title — a second time and it turns into a text box: type the new wording and press Enter to keep it, or Escape to leave it as it was.
Set the widths of side-by-side tiles. Select a side-by-side row and the panel gives each tile a width slider — drag one and its neighbour gives up (or takes back) the space, so the tiles always add up to a full row and none can shrink to nothing.
Hide a block from every client. Each block's panel has an eye you can click to hide that block from *all* your clients' portals at once (a whole section too). A hidden block stays on your editing page, dimmed, so you can always find it and switch it back on.
Add, move and reorder blocks in place. Wherever you can insert a new block, a faint "+" line marks the spot — between each pair of blocks inside a section, timeline or similar container; a slim "+" at the end of a side-by-side row instead. Hover the block right next to one and it brightens a little; hover it directly (or tab to it) and it lights up fully — click to pick a new block exactly there. Drag images straight onto the page, and use the block's own controls to move, duplicate or remove it.
Check it on a phone. A Desktop / Phone switch above the canvas narrows the view to a phone-width column, so you can see how the portal reads on the screen most clients will actually use.
Use the keyboard. Once a block is selected, the up/down arrow keys step through the blocks, Escape deselects, and Enter starts typing over the block's heading or title where it has one — for any other block, Enter takes you to its settings panel on the right.

Everything you change here saves, undoes and publishes the same way — it's the same portal underneath, edited on the page instead of in a list.

What it affects

Customers see their project's portal under their sign-in — the sections, decisions, documents and cost chart you publish, and nothing from other projects or other companies.
Your branding (business name, logo, accent colour) — set on the Branding settings tab — flows into the portal and the feedback wording.
Stage changes on your deal board flow into the portal timeline automatically; decisions a client makes land back on the deal with a timestamp — as does a notify-button tap, wherever this is enabled.

Good to know

The starter template is a launch pad, not a lock-in — rename sections, swap prompts, and change decision options freely. Editing it never affects any portal you've already published.
Uploaded photos never show their filename to your client — add a caption if you want words under a picture, or leave it clean.
Videos are capped at 50 MB and only play if they're a genuine MP4 or WebM file — renaming another file type to .mp4 won't get it past the upload check.
A drop-down block needs a title before you can save — it's the header your client taps, so the editor asks you for it rather than publishing an unnamed one.
New builders never inherit another company's staff, suppliers, office hours, or review links. The starter is deliberately generic; the specifics are yours to add.
If you haven't set your business name yet, the feedback page reads with a neutral "us" until you do — set your name on the Branding tab and future portals pick it up.
The cost summary (the estimate total, variations, and project total tiles) can now appear as soon as a client has an accepted quote, even before the job is set up in your estimating tool — so a customer sees their agreed price from day one, not only once the build is underway. Only accepted quotes are ever shown; draft or unaccepted pricing stays private. If a lead has several quotes, the portal shows the single main (largest accepted) quote — the same figure your team quotes them — never a combined total.
Once you've built up a few templates or have a long list of deals, the Admin → Client Portal page gives each list its own filter box — type to narrow the templates by name, or the deals by name, with a live count — so you can jump straight to the one you want.
A Fetch preview on a bookmark card only pulls in details at the moment you fetch — it never keeps checking the link afterwards, so if the target page changes later you'll need to fetch again (or just edit the title/description/image by hand).
A sub-page with nothing linking to it is invisible to your client — it's not deleted, just unreachable. Delete a link and its sub-page stays put; delete a sub-page and any link that pointed at it quietly stops navigating rather than showing a broken link.
Availability: the portal is on every plan. Plans differ on how many portal clients and templates you can have — see the pricing page.
Know when a client's actually looked. On a deal's own page, staff get a

"Client activity" card showing when the client last opened their portal — and, if you sent a quote for e-signing, when they last opened that link — so a quiet client doesn't have to mean a forgotten one.