Give your client a login: the customer portal

Three phone calls, every week, from the same client: where are we up to, did you get my approval, and can you send me that docket again.

None of those calls needs you. They need a screen the client can open themselves.

What a customer is here

A customer is someone outside your business who has been given a login pinned to one account — theirs. They are not a member of your company, and the system is emphatic about it:

• Every role-gated page denies them.
• They never appear in anyone's team list, never appear as assignable, and never show up over the AI connector or the API.
• They cannot be seen by, or see, another client.

Their world is two screens: their portal, and their own settings.

That narrowness is the feature. The reason most contractors never give a client a login is the fear of what else they might see. Here the answer is nothing, and it is enforced in the data layer and again in the page layer — deliberately twice, because a mistake in one place would be one customer reading another's job.

What can a client do in the portal?

See their jobs. The work you are doing for them, in one place.

Read and accept quotes. Only quotes actually sent to them — drafts never appear. They accept by typing their name, the same share page that works without a login.

Approve variations. Same mechanism: what changed, the quantity, the rate, the value, and a typed name to approve or decline with a comment.

Sign dockets for their site.

Do the prestart on plant you dry-hired to them. This one is worth pausing on. When a machine is on hire to a client without an operator, the daily prestart is their obligation, and it is usually the thing nobody can produce when something goes wrong. The client does it in the portal, and it files against the machine in your records.

Notice that none of those is a permission you grant. They are consequences of what has been assigned to that client — their account's jobs, the quotes you sent, the machines on hire to them. There is no permission matrix to get wrong.

Does a client need a login to do business with you?

Quote acceptance, variation approval and docket signing all work from a one-time link with no account whatsoever. A client who wants nothing to do with another login never needs one.

The portal is for the other kind of client — the regular one, the one with four jobs running, who would rather look than ring. Give them a login and the three phone calls stop.

The honest costs

A customer consumes a licence, the same as a team member. Your ten free licences are a pool you can spend on crew, sites or clients however suits you. A business with six crew, two active sites and two regular clients is exactly at ten.

It is not a project-collaboration workspace. There is no shared document library, no RFI workflow, no comment threads between you and the client. If you need that, you need a different class of tool and probably a much larger budget.

Turn it on for one client

Portal access is granted from the account page, not from your member list, which keeps clients and crew clearly separate. Pick the client who rings most and give them a login.

The app is free up to ten licences. Sign in with Google, Microsoft or Apple at app.sitesai.net, or read Quote, scope, variation, claim — all one record for what the client is actually approving.