CLIENT PORTAL
Give Clients Visibility Without Giving Them Your Internal Workspace.
Clients want to know what is happening and what has been delivered. They do not need to see who reviewed what, how many revisions it took, or what your team is paid. The portal is built around that difference rather than around hiding columns.
One Business, Two Purpose-Built Views.
The Client Portal is not your workspace with sections switched off. It is a separate set of pages with its own sign-in and its own queries, which never read the internal record at all.
Your team sees
The full working picture
- Every internal status, from assigned through submitted, under review and revision required to approved.
- Who the work is assigned to, and who is checking it.
- Submission and review history, including every revision and the reason for it.
- Pending, approved and paid cost, and the margin on the Engagement.
- Internal team discussion on the Engagement and on each Task.
- Internal notes, working files and Secure Access Details.
Your client sees
What they actually need
- Their Engagements, and only the ones you have made visible to them.
- Two honest states on their work: In Progress, or Completed.
- Files that have been explicitly delivered to them.
- Their conversation with your business.
- Scheduled work that concerns them.
- Payment information, where you have chosen to show it.
In Progress and Completed, and Nothing In Between.
Internally a Task moves through as many states as the work needs. To the Client it is doing one of two things: it is being worked on, or it has been handed over.
That mapping is not a display preference. Completed is computed from whether the work has actually been delivered, so it cannot say Completed while something is still sitting in review.
Simpler is also more honest. A Client watching a status flick between Submitted and Revision Required learns nothing except that something went wrong, three times.
Deliveries the Client Can Actually Find.
Delivered files sit in the Engagement they belong to, available whenever the Client wants them, instead of buried in an email thread from three weeks ago.
Working files stay internal. Whether a file is client-visible is an explicit choice made when it is uploaded, not a consequence of which folder it landed in.
Conversation, In One Place.
Clients can write to your business, and read your replies, in a thread attached to their work. It stays with the Engagement rather than in somebody's inbox, so a colleague picking it up later has the whole exchange.
Money, on Your Terms.
Client Money in the portal is off unless you turn it on, and it is controlled twice: once for the business as a whole, and once per Engagement, where you choose between showing nothing, a summary, or the full payment schedule.
What a Client can see is what concerns them: what was agreed, what has been received, what is outstanding, their invoices. What they never see is what the work costs you, or what the margin on it is. Those figures are handled by a separate path that explicitly whitelists what may reach a Client, so an internal figure cannot arrive by accident.
Scheduled Work That Concerns Them.
Where work happens at a specific time, a Client can see what is scheduled and when. Any Secure Access Details attached to that work stay out of the portal entirely.
Access Is Something You Grant, and Can Take Back.
Portal access has its own lifecycle, separate from the Client record: invited, active, suspended, and revoked. Suspending pauses access and reactivating restores it. Revoking ends it, and starting again means a fresh invite rather than a quiet reactivation.
A portal session is its own identity. It is not a staff account with fewer menu items, and it cannot become one.
Visibility is opt-in at both levels. An Engagement has to be marked visible for a Client to see it, and so does each Task inside it.
What clients never see
- That a Checker exists, or who it is.
- Internal assignments, submissions and review decisions.
- Revision history and the reasons behind it.
- Staff compensation, payouts and advances.
- Cost, exposure or margin on their Engagement.
- Internal notes and internal team discussion.
- Secure Access Details.
One Source of Truth, Two Audiences.
The portal is a client-safe projection of the work your team is already doing, not a second copy of the project that somebody has to keep up to date. Deliver a Task internally and the Client sees it as Completed, because it is the same record.
That is what makes a client portal survive contact with a busy month. A portal that needs maintaining is a portal that goes stale.
Two things this page does not claim: there is no way to preview the portal as a specific Client from inside the app, and there is no custom branding or client subdomain. The portal carries your invoices' branding, not a fully white-labelled skin.
Questions About the Client Portal
No. A Client record and portal access are separate things. Most Clients in most businesses never need a login, so access is something you grant deliberately by sending an invite.
Two. In Progress means the work has not been formally delivered yet, whatever stage it is at internally. Completed means it has been delivered to them. A client never sees submitted, under review, revision required or approved.
No, and the difference matters. Approval is an internal quality decision. Delivery is the act of giving the work to the Client. Work can be approved and not yet delivered, and until it is delivered the Client still sees it as In Progress.
Only files explicitly marked as client-visible, on work that is visible to them and has actually been delivered. All three conditions are checked on the download itself, so knowing a file address is never enough to retrieve it. Every client download is recorded.
No. Client conversation runs between the Client and your business. Your team can be looped in internally on a client message, and a reply reaches the Client only when someone on your side sends it.
Yes. Access can be suspended and reactivated, or revoked entirely. Suspending is reversible on the spot. Revoking ends it, and restoring access afterwards means sending a fresh invite. The Client record itself is untouched either way.
Not today. Bikabo supports one portal user per Client. Support for more than one contact is a planned capability, not a current one.