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Share Portal Access

Turn the Client Portal on, share your portal link, choose which contacts can sign in, and handle the leads it brings in.

Giving customers portal access takes three steps: turn the portal on, share your company's portal link, and make sure the right people's email addresses are allowed to sign in. There are no invitations to send and no passwords to manage — clients request their own sign-in link by email whenever they need one.

Turn the portal on

  1. Open Settings and choose Features.
  2. Turn on the Customer Portal toggle. Its description sums it up: it lets clients sign in at your portal link to view and accept proposals and view invoices; when off, the portal is unavailable.
  3. Click save.

Turning the toggle off later shuts the whole portal down — the link stops working for everyone, immediately.

Your account has one portal link, shared by all your clients. Find it under Settings → Company Info, in the Customer Portal link field, which includes a copy button and a preview link. (If the field shows "The Customer Portal is turned off, so there is no shareable link yet," enable the portal first.)

Share the link anywhere your customers will find it: email signatures, your website, invoice and proposal emails, or a bookmark you send new clients. The link only opens the sign-in page — visiting it reveals nothing about your clients.

Choose who can sign in

When someone enters an email address on the portal sign-in page, BranchSite sends a sign-in link only if the address matches one of:

  • The email on a client record. A client whose own email is filled in can always sign in — no extra setup.
  • A contact with portal access. On any additional contact, tick the Portal access checkbox — it appears in the Add contact panel and when editing a client's contacts. Contacts with access show a Portal access badge on the client's detail page, so you can see at a glance who can get in.

A signed-in visitor sees every client account their email is attached to, which is handy for property managers or spouses who handle billing for more than one account.

To revoke someone's access, untick Portal access on their contact (or change the email on the client record). The change applies immediately — even a device that is currently signed in loses access on its next page load, without waiting for the session to expire.

Handle leads from the portal

The portal's Request Service form creates a new lead job each time it's submitted. Leads created this way carry a Portal Lead badge on the Jobs list and job detail page.

  • Requests from signed-in clients attach directly to that client and the address they chose.
  • Anonymous requests (from the form's no-sign-in entry) can't be trusted to attach to a real client, so they arrive under a placeholder client instead. On the job's detail page, click Confirm Client to resolve it: choose Create new client to make a real client record from the requester's name, email, and phone, or attach the lead to an existing client — BranchSite flags it when "A client with this email already exists."

To hear about new portal leads right away, open Settings → Emails and fill in Who should we email when a new lead comes from the Customer Portal? with one or more addresses.

Control what portal invoices show

If you'd rather clients not see itemized pricing, Settings → Features has three toggles that trim the Invoice Summary clients see in the portal and on emailed invoice links: hide line-item names, hide line-item descriptions, and hide per-line prices. Invoice totals stay visible either way.