Client portal overview
A branded space where the people you work with sign in to read documents you have shared, fill in the forms you ask for, and send files back — with every submission reviewed before you accept it.
The client portal gives a contact their own sign-in to a small, branded space that belongs to your organization. There they can read the documents you have shared with them, complete the forms you ask them to fill in, upload files back to you, and see where each request stands.
It replaces the loop most teams run over email — attach, chase, receive, chase again, re-attach the corrected version — with one place where the current state is visible to both sides.
Two sides, one feature
| Your team | Your client | |
|---|---|---|
| Where | CRM → Client portal (/crm/portal) | /portal, after signing in |
| Sees | every portal user, every form request, every template | only their own requests, uploads, and documents shared with them |
| Does | invites, form requests, review, approve or send back | fills forms, uploads files, downloads shared documents |
Everything a client sees is scoped to their own contact record. They never see your pipeline, other clients, internal notes, or documents you have not explicitly shared.
The four things the portal does
- Access — you invite a contact; they activate and get a sign-in. See Invite a client and manage portal access.
- Document sharing — you flip a document or a whole folder to shared; it appears in their portal. They can upload files back to you. See Share documents through the client portal.
- Form requests — you send a form template to a portal user with an optional message and due date; they fill it in and submit. See Send and track form requests.
- Review — every submission lands in your review queue. You approve it or send it back with specific fields flagged, and the client resubmits. See Review a portal form request.
What a client actually sees
Their portal has four pages: a dashboard with their counts and recent activity, Documents, Forms, and Profile. Nothing else in Vertiqa is reachable from it. If you need to walk a client through what they are looking at, see What your client sees in the portal.
Who can manage it
Anyone with CRM access can open the console and see the state of the portal. The actions that change something — inviting, suspending, removing, sending form requests, approving or requesting changes — require the portal-manage permission. Buttons you cannot use are disabled rather than hidden, so you can always see what the surface offers.
Where to start
- Make sure the person you want to invite exists as a contact in the CRM — portal access is granted to a contact, not to an email address on its own.
- Share the documents they need, or mark the folder on their contact record as shared.
- Invite them from CRM → Client portal → Invite contact.
- Send the first form request once they are active.