The customer portal

The portal is the customer-facing side of the system. A contact with a login sees their own records and nothing else: their quotes to approve, their invoices to pay, their tickets, and any files you have shared with them.

Switching it on

The portal is part of the customer plugin and is available as soon as a contact has a login. What you choose is how much it shows — the options are in Settings → Customers.

Give a contact a login from their contact record. See Contacts.

What a customer can do

• Approve a quote. They can sign it on screen, which records a drawn signature against the quote along with the date and their IP address.
• Pay an invoice, if you have connected a payment gateway. See Payment methods.
• Raise and reply to tickets. See Support tickets.
• Download files you have attached to their records.

The public signup form

There is a signup form customers can fill in themselves, which creates a customer record and a contact with a login. It is useful for a lead capture form on a website; it is also the thing to be careful with, because it is a public form that writes to your database.

Two templates control what happens afterwards:

• customer_signup_email_welcome_template — what is emailed to the person who signed up.
• customer_signup_email_admin_template — what is emailed to you.

Both are edited under Templates. Set them both before switching the form on, or the first signup arrives silently and the customer hears nothing back.