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.

Two independent switches, per client

The portal is really two halves, and each client's copy of each half starts off until you turn it on for that job:

Financials — the money tiles, estimate breakdown, variations table, and cost graph.
Project portal — the photos, timeline, decisions and everything else built on the page editor above.

You'll find both switches together on a "Client portal" card in the Portal tab of the deal's own page in Pipeline — no need to dig into the template editor to find them. Turn on just the half a client is ready for: a client mid-quote might get Financials only so they can watch their numbers, while a client who's started build gets the Project portal switched on too so they can see progress photos. A client with neither switched on sees a portal page with nothing on it yet, rather than an error.

Once there's something to look at, the same Portal tab shows a prominent Edit live on page button — it takes you straight into that job's portal editor, open on the real page your client sees, ready to make changes.

Ticking a switch doesn't publish anything on its own — the card has a Save button, and only what's ticked when you press it goes live for that client. Until then the card tells you there are changes not published yet, and once the save lands it says Saved ✓. Unticking works the same way: untick, press Save, and that half goes dark for the client. If one of the two halves can't be saved, the card says which one and leaves it ready to try again — the half that did save stays saved.

If client portals are switched off for your whole account (Admin → Portal Templates), both switches on the deal are greyed out with a note explaining why — neither of them changes what a client sees while the account-wide switch is off, so there's nothing to be gained by flipping them. Turn client portals back on and they come straight back to life at the settings you left them on.

This is also how a small trial works: switch the Project portal on for one real client while every other client's stays off, see how it lands, then roll it out more broadly once you're happy.

Where enabled for your account, the same Client portal card also carries a Template picker, so you can choose which template a job's portal opens with instead of always getting your account's default (see "Choosing a template per job" below).

How to use it

Go to Admin → Portal Templates. 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, questions, checklists, forms, 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.
Documents work the same way as photos — drag a file straight into a document slot (or click to browse) and it saves instantly. A document added here in the template editor is shared with every deal built from that template, so a brochure, warranty, or T&Cs only needs uploading once instead of on every job; it shows up read-only on each deal's own portal editor and in the customer's rendered portal. Remove it the same way, from the same list — deleting only works here, in the template, since every deal is sharing that one file.

A PDF your client clicks now opens, rather than downloading. It comes up in a new tab, so they keep their place in the portal. If you'd rather they didn't have to click at all, tick Show PDFs on the page on the document slot and the PDF is displayed right there in the portal, with the link still underneath it for anyone who wants the full-screen version or a copy to keep. That's off unless you turn it on — a slot holding several long documents is easier to read as a plain list. Anything that isn't a PDF (a spreadsheet, a Word file) still downloads when clicked, as before.

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. A document slot on a deal's own portal also still takes its own per-deal upload alongside anything shared from the template — handy for a one-off file (a signed variation, a client-specific spec) that shouldn't go to every other deal. 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.

Publishing a template doesn't change portals that already exist

This surprises everyone once, so it's worth stating plainly: when you publish a new version of a template, projects that already have a portal keep showing the version they started on. They don't quietly change under your client's feet.

That's deliberate. A live portal is something your client may be halfway through — answering decisions, reading a timeline, working from a document you uploaded for that job specifically. If every template edit rewrote every live portal, a quick wording fix on the template would reshuffle forty clients' pages at once.

So a template edit reaches an existing project only when you say so:

One project. Open the project's portal editor. If it's behind, the toolbar shows

Update to latest template (v5) with a note explaining exactly this. If it's already current, it says Up to date with template v5 instead, so you're never left guessing.

All of them. Right after you press Publish, the template editor tells you how

many portals are still on an older version and offers to update them all in one go — asking you to confirm the number first, because those clients see the change straight away. It updates exactly the projects it counted — if a colleague puts another project back on an older version while that notice is sitting open, it is not swept in by a button that never named it. Changed your mind? Undo this update puts them straight back — except any project someone else has updated in the meantime, which is left where it is and counted for you rather than quietly pulled backwards. The offer then comes back for just the projects that went back, so pressing it again can't sweep in the ones Undo left alone.

Later. Admin → Portal Templates lists your templates, and any with projects

still on an older version shows an N portals behind note with an Update all button right there on the template — it updates exactly the projects that count is taken from, so the number it asks you to confirm is the number that change. The project's own Portal tab in Pipeline says the same thing for that one job, with an Edit live on page button right there that takes you straight into that job's portal editor.

Every update is written into the project's portal activity, with the version it moved from and to — so if you ever want a project put back the way it was, that record says where it was.

If you've used Restore to put a template back on an earlier version, that restored version is the one that counts as current: projects already on it aren't flagged, and updating a project moves it onto that version rather than past it.

Updating a project to the latest template keeps everything you or your client did on that job — their answers, your per-project wording, hidden blocks, uploaded documents and photos. What changes is the shape that comes from the template: the wording, the layout, which tabs exist and what order they're in.

One knock-on worth knowing: the tab a client lands on is the first tab of the version their project is pinned to. So if you reordered tabs in the template and a client still lands somewhere unexpected, that project is almost certainly on an older version — update it and the landing tab follows.

Choosing a template per job

Where enabled for your account, the Client portal card on a deal's own Pipeline page carries a Template picker next to the Project portal switch, so a job doesn't have to use your account's default template — pick the one that fits, tick Project portal, and press Save.

A job with no portal yet: pick a template and it provisions the portal against that

template's latest published version. It stays private until you also tick Project portal and save — picking a template on its own never makes anything visible to the client.

A job that already has a portal: picking a *different* template is a bigger change,

so it asks you to confirm first. The confirmation is clear about what happens: any blocks you'd hidden just for this client are reset (they follow the new template's defaults again), but everything the client has already answered, typed or uploaded is kept — it simply won't show unless the new template has a matching block for it.

Picking the template this job is already on does nothing — there's nothing to

confirm or reset.

An automation can also turn a job's portal on with a chosen template (or your

account's default) the moment a deal reaches a stage/trigger you set up — see docs/features/workflow-canvas.md. Automations only ever set a job's portal up for the FIRST time; they never switch an already-provisioned job onto a different template, so a live client portal is never rewritten by an automation running again.

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. (For a table cell, that choice sits right in the cell on the page itself, beside where you'd type a web address.) 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.
Answers stay practical and safe. Client answers have sensible size limits (including roomier tables) so one response cannot slow the portal for everyone. If a save is temporarily refused after very fast repeated edits, wait a minute then try again; unchanged autosaves do not create a new response.

Where it's enabled for your account (a separate switch from the tools above), you can also add a tick-box block — a single, labelled checkbox anywhere in a page, its own block, separate from a table. Give it a label ("I've reviewed the plans") and your client ticks it; you'll see whether it's ticked in the same place you see their other answers — Checked, Unchecked if they ticked it and then changed their mind, or *No answer yet* if they haven't touched it at all, so a deliberate "no" never looks like silence. (A tick-box inside a table is unrelated and always available — set a column's type to Tick box on the deal's portal page, same as any other column type.)

Sharing a link to a portal page

Pages inside a project portal now have their own web address. Open a page and the address bar updates — copy that link and send it to your client and it opens straight on that page. Your browser's Back button works the way you'd expect too: from inside a page it takes you back to the project's Home tab, not out of the project. (The "← Back" button on the page does the same thing.)

If a page has since been renamed away, deleted, or hidden for that client, the link quietly opens the project's Home tab instead — nobody sees a page they shouldn't, and nobody sees an error.

One caveat while you're sharing these: the link only opens straight on the page for a client who is already signed in. If they aren't, they'll be asked to sign in and land on their projects list instead — send them the link again once they're in, and it will take them where you meant.

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. Backspace (or Delete) removes the selected block, and ⌘C / Ctrl+C then ⌘V / Ctrl+V drops a copy of it — including everything inside it — just below the original. Anything you delete or paste comes back with one ⌘Z. None of these fire while you're typing in a field, so Backspace still just deletes a letter.

Fill in a table where it sits. Drop a Table block onto the page and start typing: the column headings and row labels are editable straight on the canvas, with + to add a column and + Add row below. On a deal's portal you can type into the cells themselves too, and what you type saves as you move out of each cell. In the template editor the cells show a dash — a table's contents belong to each deal, so the template holds the shape (the columns and rows every deal starts from) and each deal fills it in. On a deal's portal, the canvas table is now the only place rows and cells are edited — column type (text, date, tick box, status…), who can edit a column, and picture cells (which have no on-canvas control of their own) stay on the block's edit card underneath, alongside a small Images list for uploading into any picture cells.
Type straight over more than headings, on a deal's portal. On the deal's page (not the shared template), click a selected heading, paragraph, callout, link label, or bookmark title a second time and it turns into a text box right there — the same click-to-edit as a heading, now covering the wording you'd otherwise fill in from the Client portal fields box below. Paragraph and callout text open as a multi-line box; Enter adds a new line, and blurring the box (or clicking elsewhere) saves it. Leave it blank and that client goes back to seeing the template's wording, exactly like clearing a Client portal fields box.

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.

Adding blocks to just one job's portal

Where enabled for your account, a deal's own portal editor can go further than overriding wording and hiding blocks — you can add brand-new blocks that exist only on that one job's portal, right on the same canvas, without touching the shared template or any other deal.

Insert. The same faint "+" lines you use in the template editor appear on a

deal's canvas too — click one, pick a block from the palette, and it drops in at exactly that spot. (Video and Table aren't offered here — a video needs uploading in the shared template, so an added video block would have nowhere to put its file, and a table added this way would have no place to set up its columns and rows yet.)

Edit. A block you've added to a deal gets its own card, **"Blocks added to this

deal," further down the page, with the same settings form the template editor uses — change anything about it there and press Save**.

Move and delete. An added block gets its own ↑ / ↓ to reorder it among its

neighbours, and a 🗑 to remove it — removing a block you added also removes anything you'd added inside it. A block that came from the shared template doesn't get these controls; it keeps the usual hide-from-this-client eye instead, since moving or deleting a template's own block would affect every job built from it.

Anything you add this way behaves exactly like a template block for that one client — it can be hidden, it keeps its own answers if it's a question or decision, and it shows up in the client-responses panel just the same. It's never copied into the shared template, never touches any other deal, and switching that deal onto a different template — or moving it to a newer version of the same one — never removes it either (though it stops showing if the block it was tucked inside is no longer there; add that block back and it reappears). Save as template draft on this same page, which turns a deal's reusable table layouts and gallery images into a starting point for the shared template, deliberately leaves blocks you've added here out of that copy — they're this job's own, not a pattern for every future job to inherit.

Wording just for one client

Your template's wording is shared by every client on it, so changing a heading in the editor changes it for everyone. When you want one client to see something different — their own welcome line, their own set of plans — you fill it in on their deal, not in the template.

There are two ways to fill this in on the deal page — pick whichever is faster for what you're changing.

Straight on the page. On the deal's Client portal canvas, click a selected heading, paragraph, callout, link label, or bookmark title a second time and type right over it (see "Type straight over more than headings" above). This is the quickest way to fix one thing you can already see.

The Client portal fields list. Under the Client portal switches, a Client portal fields box lists every piece of text in that client's portal you can personalise: headings, text and callout blocks, link labels and addresses, and bookmark cards — including the link address/description and bookmark URL/description fields the canvas doesn't offer a click-to-edit box for. Each box is grouped under the section it belongs to, and where a section holds two of the same kind of box they're numbered ("Text", "Text 2") so you can tell them apart.

Type into a box and only that client sees your wording.
Leave a box empty and they see the template's wording — shown greyed inside the

box so you always know what they'd get.

Clear a box you'd filled in and that client goes back to the template's wording.
Only the boxes you actually changed are saved, so working here and typing on the

page itself can't undo each other — if a colleague (or you, in another tab) reworded the heading while this list was open, pressing Save here keeps their wording and saves yours.

Nothing is sent until you press Save, so you can work through the whole list and

publish it in one go. If one box fails to save, what you typed stays put and Save stays available so you can try it again — the boxes that did save are left alone.

Both routes write to the same place — a change made on the canvas shows up in the fields list (and vice versa) the next time either one loads. The box only appears once the deal has a portal (opening the deal page never creates one), and it lists the fields of the exact template version that client's portal is on — so editing the template later never disturbs the values you've already typed in here.

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.

What a Timeline section shows

A Timeline section is a list of project milestones. Only milestone blocks appear in that list.

If you add another kind of block to a Timeline — a question, a rating, a table — it still shows, but it appears below the milestone list rather than among the milestones. That keeps a client's answers out of the progress list, where they read as project stages. To have a question sit alongside its milestone, put both in a normal section instead of a Timeline.

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.
A timeline phase's caption can be reworded for one job. Open the project's portal, find the phase, and its Caption box shows the wording your client is reading right now — the template's, unless you've already changed it here. Type over it and only that client sees the new wording; leave it alone and the phase keeps following the template version this job is pinned to — as the bullet above says, editing the template doesn't reach an already-published portal, so a later caption edit arrives on this job only when someone uses Update to latest template on it (see "Publishing a template doesn't change portals that already exist" above). Empty the box and save to put that phase back on the template's caption. (Clear goes further — it resets the whole phase card for this job, caption, status, key dates and notes together.) The Status box on that card starts at No status shown, which is what it sounds like: the client's timeline carries no badge on that phase. Rewording a caption leaves it there, so a caption edit never quietly announces "Not started" to your client — pick a status only when you actually want one shown.
A contact card works the same way, field by field. On the project's portal, a card's Name, Email, Phone and Website boxes show the details your client is reading right now — the template's, unless someone has already changed them for this job. Swap a phone number and only this client sees it; the other three boxes keep following the template. Empty a box and save to put that detail back on the template's, or use Clear to reset the whole card. The Role above the boxes (Project Manager, Office Manager, …) is the card's label and is set on the template, so it's shown but not editable per job.
Anywhere your client types, there's now a Save button. The notes-and-changes page, any question you ask them, and the note under a design decision each carry their own Save underneath, with "Saved ✓" beside it once the write lands. It stays greyed out until there's actually something new to keep, and if a save fails it comes back to life so they can press it again. Their answers were always saved automatically a moment after they stopped typing — that hasn't changed — but the button means they can see it happen instead of hoping.
Your client always lands on Home. Opening their project puts them on the portal's first page every time, rather than dropping them back wherever they happened to stop last visit — so the welcome, the directory, and anything you've put on Home is what greets them. That holds for a client with more than one project too: switching straight from one to another opens the second on Home, not on the tab they were reading in the first. It also holds *within* a visit: if they step across to the Financial tab and then come back to Overview, they land on Home rather than back on whichever page — or sub-page — they had open. Anything they'd already answered, chosen or typed is still saved; only the page they're looking at goes back to the start. If a portal opens somewhere other than Home, it's because Home has been hidden for that project — check the client-visibility toggle on the Home section in the portal editor. It's no longer ever the tab *order*: see the next bullet. The starter tabs run Home → Timeline → Notes & Changes → Interior Design → Important Documents → Feedback: the page they write on sits early, before the read-only reference pages. Reorder the tabs in the template editor whenever a different order suits you better — an order you set is yours and won't be changed back.
Home is always the first tab, and always where a portal opens. Wherever the Home section happens to sit in a template, it's shown at the front of the tab strip — for the client, in the read-only preview, in the template editor, and in a deal's own portal editor. That holds for portals you published a long time ago, too: a project still pinned to an older version of its template opens on Home next time it's loaded, with no Update to latest template step needed. Home can be renamed, duplicated or deleted like any other tab, but it can't be moved out of first place — its drag handle is greyed out and its Move up / Move down arrows are switched off, rather than the editor taking a move it can't show you. Reordering the other tabs works exactly as before. If you'd rather a portal opened on something that isn't Home, rename the Home section to whatever you like and the tab order becomes entirely yours again.
A client with one job skips the project list entirely. Signing in used to land them on "My Projects" — a page holding a single card they then had to click. Now they go straight into that job. A client with two or more jobs still gets the list to choose from, and the ← Back to My Projects link only shows when there's actually a list to go back to.
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.
You can save a half-finished block and come back to it. Add a link or a bookmark card before you have the web address, and it stays put — the editor shows it as "Link URL not set" so you can find it again, and your client now sees that same grey note until you fill the address in — see the next bullet if you'd rather they saw nothing. Where a field genuinely can't be left blank (a checklist item's wording, a decision option's title), the editor now says so *before* it saves — naming the block and pointing at the exact field — instead of failing the save with a message no one could act on. Either way the rest of your work is never lost.
You can have your clients see the empty fields too, rather than nothing. Normally a field you've added but not filled in yet is simply left out of what your client sees — a contact card with no details, a link with no address, a photo or video block with nothing in it, a checklist with no items, a table or form you haven't set up. That keeps their portal tidy, but it also means a field you meant to fill in later looks exactly like one that was never added, and a page you're part-way through building can read as empty to them. Your client now sees the same short grey note you see while building — "To be confirmed", "Link URL not set", "Checklist not set up yet" — so the shape of the page is there and it's obvious something is still coming. Nothing you've actually filled in changes either way, and your own view of the template is the same as it's always been. This is on by default for every client portal. If you'd rather your clients saw nothing at all, that's a platform-wide setting rather than a per-account one — talk to Summit.
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. This whole cost summary only shows once the Financials switch is on for that client (see "Two independent switches, per client" above) — an accepted quote alone is no longer enough.
Where the Client portal card isn't showing on a deal yet, the Financials switch itself may not be turned on for your account — ask whoever set up your account to enable it.
Turning the Financials switch on shows the client a Financial tab straight away, even before anything is costed. They see the full layout with every figure reading TBC — the estimate, variations and project totals, the cost-tracking summary, and the cost-usage table with its column headings — under a short note saying their costings aren't ready to share yet. Each box fills in on its own as the job progresses, so a client knows from day one exactly where their numbers will appear and what will be tracked. With the switch off, the tab stays greyed out exactly as before.
Once you've built up a few templates, the Admin → Portal Templates page gives the list its own filter box — type to narrow the templates by name, with a live count — so you can jump straight to the one you want. Per-deal portal state (status, which template it's on, whether it's behind) lives on that deal's own Portal tab in Pipeline, not on this page.
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

status-strip chip showing when the client last opened their portal — and, if there's anything waiting on the client, how many items, 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.

**"View as client" opens the actual client page, and it's genuinely

look-only. Clicking View as client** from a deal's portal editor opens the same page your client uses — same layout, same content, nothing simulated — so what you see there is exactly what they'll see. A banner across the top reminds you it's a read-only preview, with a link straight back to the editor. Every decision, question, checklist, rating, form and editable table cell shows its current answer but has no button or field to change it — a deliberate choice, so a colleague looking through a client's eyes never accidentally overwrites what the client actually chose. To try changing an answer yourself, use the editor's own preview, not this page.