The Client Portal is the window you give your clients onto their project — a space you control, where they see progress, documents, photos and invoices, make their selections, approve variations, and message you. This guide has two parts: setting it up (what you do as the builder) and what your client sees and does.

Part 1 — Setting up the portal

Giving a client access

A client reaches the portal by invitation. You send the invitation from CRM (see CRM & Client Selections), and you manage who has access from client portal management:

Manage a client’s access to grant or revoke their portal login, and control which of their projects they can see.

Portal settings — turning features on and off

You decide exactly what the portal shows. Settings work at two levels:

Company portal settings — your defaults for every client portal.
Project portal settings — per-project overrides, so one job can differ from another.

For each, you can switch features on or off:

Project updates — progress posts you publish.
Documents — client-visible files (and whether clients may upload documents back).
Messaging — two-way messages.
Invoicing — show invoices and payment.
Variations — let clients review and approve variations.
Selections — let clients make their finishes selections.
Schedule — show the program, with options to show milestones only and whether to reveal task completion percentages.
Photos — the progress photo gallery.

You can also set the portal title and a welcome message clients see, and control email notifications to clients.

Keeping the portal alive

Project updates — post an update with a title, content, and an optional image or video link (YouTube/Vimeo). Mark it visible to the client and choose whether to notify them. This is the simplest way to keep clients feeling informed.
Progress photos — upload site photos to the project’s gallery.
Selections — set up the finishes selections clients choose from (covered in detail in CRM & Client Selections).
Messages — reply to client messages from the client messages screen.
Activity log — see what a client has done in the portal (viewed, downloaded, selected, messaged), so you know they’ve seen what matters.

Part 2 — What your client sees and does

When a client logs in, they get a clean view of their own project (and can switch between projects if they have more than one). Depending on the features you’ve enabled, they can:

Dashboard & project detail — an overview of where their build is up to.
Documents — view and download the documents you’ve marked client-visible, and upload files back to you if you’ve allowed it (see Documents).
Progress updates & photos — read the updates you post and browse the photo gallery — the feel-good part that keeps clients engaged.
Schedule — see the project timeline at the level you’ve chosen (milestones only or full tasks, with or without progress).
Selections — work through their finishes selections and choose their options. When a choice differs from the allowance, CortexPM raises an allowance adjustment so the difference is captured properly (see CRM & Client Selections and Contracts).
Variations — review and approve variations you’ve issued to them, which feeds the contract action workflow in Contracts.
Invoices — see their invoices and pay, if invoicing is enabled (see Accounting).
Messages — message you directly, keeping the conversation in one place rather than scattered across email.
Profile & help — manage their own details and find help.

Tip: the portal is as useful as you make it. Posting regular updates and photos, and keeping selections and variations moving through it, is what turns it from a static login into the thing clients log in to check each week.

Progress claims in the portal

Where a claim has been issued to a client with portal access, they get a Claims page showing Progress claims and Tax invoices side by side, with statuses worded for them rather than for you — Awaiting your response, Under review, Approved, Paid, Changes requested.

On a claim they see the breakdown, the summary lines (Claimed this period, Less retention held, GST), the claim document, and two buttons:

Accept claim — “Accepting confirms you agree with this claim. It does not process payment.”
Request changes — requires a note saying what’s wrong.

Accept moves the claim to Under Review, not Approved. Your client agreeing is not you certifying — only your staff approve a claim. Their response lands on the claim’s Progress & Timeline tab, the project team is emailed, and their note is there for whoever picks it up.

Defects

Clients with portal access get a Defects page — their handover snag list — with statuses softened for them: Logged, Scheduled, Being fixed, Fixed · awaiting sign-off, Verified. Closed items collapse out of the way, and when there’s nothing open the page reads “Nothing outstanding”.

They can raise them too. Report a defect asks Where is it?, What’s the problem? and takes up to five photos. It lands in your defect register and notifies your team.

They only ever see the location, the issue and the status — never who it’s assigned to or what it’s costing you to fix.

Tip: this is worth turning on at handover even if you’ve kept the portal quiet during the build. A client photographing snags into your register beats a list on the back of an envelope at the final inspection.

Open-book costs

For cost plus and construction management jobs, Show the Costs page gives your client a live view of actual cost against budget by cost code.

It’s off by default — it shows commercially sensitive figures, and turning it on should be a decision, not an accident.

When on, the client sees Cost incurred to date and Builder’s fee as two separate blocks with a total beneath, then a table of Cost code, Description, Budget, Spent to date, Remaining.

A second toggle, Let clients open the supplier invoices behind each cost line, goes further — clicking a cost line opens the actual supplier invoices making it up. On a genuine open-book contract that’s exactly what the client is entitled to. On anything else, leave it off.

What gets emailed

When you issue a document — a variation, a claim, an invoice — the client gets an email headed “You’ve got a new variation” (or whichever it is) with the reference, type and project, and a button through to it. Where a response is needed it says so plainly.

A client without portal access gets a secure link instead, and can respond from it without an account. Accepting or signing requires them to tick a confirmation box; signing also requires them to type their name. They can attach files — a marked-up drawing, a signed copy. Their response — including the time, a fingerprint of the document they saw, and anything they attached — is recorded against the issuance and applied to the document’s record.

Documents issued by secure link also appear in the Communications register, with a due date where the document carries one. Documents issued into the portal don’t — the portal is their record.

The client’s mobile app

Clients get their own app, with Today, Documents, Messages, Selections, Defects and More. Today shows overall progress and what’s new; More holds the schedule, progress photos (tap to view full-screen), invoices, notification preferences and a larger-text setting.

A client on one job has it selected automatically; a client with several chooses the job from a row of buttons at the top.

See The Mobile App.

Where to next

The portal ties together several modules: invitations and selections come from CRM & Client Selections, documents from Documents, variations and claims from Contracts, the schedule from Program, and invoices from Accounting. For the trade-facing equivalent, see Subcontractor Portal.