Client portal development
A private, secure area where your customers, suppliers or staff do their own work: accounts, documents, orders and approvals, connected to the systems you already run.
What a client portal actually is
A client portal, also called a customer portal, is a private area of your website where customers, suppliers or staff log in and do their own work: checking an order, downloading a statement, submitting an application, approving a quote. It is custom software development rather than web design, because almost all of it sits behind the login.
The point is to take work off your team. Every request that a customer can answer themselves is a phone call your staff do not take and an email nobody has to find three days later.
What we build into one
The specifics differ by business, but most portals need the same foundations:
- Accounts, roles and permissions, so each person sees only their own organisation and only what their role allows
- Documents: statements, invoices, certificates and contracts, filed where the right people can find them
- Orders, jobs or applications, with their current status and full history
- Approvals and submissions, with a record of who did what and when
- Email notifications when something needs attention, without becoming noise
- An audit trail, because sooner or later someone will ask what happened
Connected to what you already run
A portal is only useful if it shows the truth. That usually means system integration with your accounting package, ERP, CRM or job management system, so that balances, orders and documents come from the same place your staff see.
We build that link so failures are visible and retried rather than silently lost, and so nobody has to retype anything between systems.
Security and data
Access is per user and per role, passwords are stored properly, and sessions expire. Everything runs over HTTPS on infrastructure we control, hosted in South Africa, with nightly database backups.
We host and run the portal for a monthly fee, which covers the server, updates, monitoring and backups. Your data is yours: ask and we export it. Buying out the software to run it yourself is possible and quoted separately.
How the work runs
We start with a short paid discovery: how the process works today, who the users are, what the portal must do on day one. You own that document whether or not you continue with us.
From there we build in slices, with a test environment you can open at any time, so the first useful version is in your hands early. After launch the portal moves onto a monthly arrangement to maintain it and keep improving it.
Signs this is what you need
- Your team answers the same customer questions by phone and email every week
- Customers ask for statements, invoices or job updates one message at a time
- Documents live in email threads and shared folders, and nobody is sure which version is current
- Approvals happen by forwarded email, with no record of who agreed to what
- You want to give partners access to their own data without giving them your systems
Sound like your situation?
Describe what you're working with and we'll tell you what we'd build, what it would take, and whether you need us at all.
Start a conversation