Somewhere your clients see exactly where things stand
A calm, private place your clients sign in to, see exactly where their work has got to, and get what they need without emailing anybody.
- Typically costs
- £30k–£80k
- Live in
- 8–18 weeks
Client portals
6 parts01Where this usually starts
A good deal of your week goes on answering where are we with this. The information exists, it sits in your systems and your inbox, and the only way a client reaches it is by asking a person.
02What changes
What you end up holding.
- 01Clients seeing progress, documents, invoices and next steps for themselves, at any hour
- 02The where-are-we emails largely gone, because the answer is already in front of them
- 03Approvals and signatures collected in the portal, dated and kept
- 04Each client seeing only their own, with their own people given their own access
- 05Something that looks and reads like your business rather than a supplier's login page
The where-are-we emails stop, because the answer is already in front of them at two in the morning.
03The pieces
What a system like this is usually made of.
You will not want all of it on day one, and you should not pay for all of it on day one. The estimator lets you choose, and shows what each one adds.
Customer records
Every customer, contact and site in one place, with the whole history attached.
Every conversation kept
Calls, emails and notes attached to the customer, so the history survives people leaving.
Signatures
Signed online with a full record of who, when and on what basis.
Finding the document again
Everything filed where anyone entitled to see it can find it in seconds.
Somewhere clients sign in
Progress, documents, invoices and next steps, without emailing anyone.
Who can see what
Permissions by role and by record, so people see the accounts they work on and nothing else.
The sort of detail that matters
- One record per customer, however many sites they have
- The full history, whoever handled it
- Email threads filed against the right customer on their own
- Notes from a call, dictated on the way back
04How it would run
8 to 18 weeks, in five phases you approve one at a time.
01
Getting to the truth
A written account of how your work really runs today, what the current way is costing you, and what your new system has to do about it.
02
Shaping it
Every screen and every decision your system will make, in front of you and signed off, with your live date fixed at the end of it.
03
Building it
Your system takes shape week by week in your own account, with something you can click on and try at the end of every fortnight.
04
Proving it
Your own people put it through real work with real records, and everything they find is fixed before anybody depends on it.
05
Going live
Your team moves across trained, with their history intact, on the date fixed months earlier.
05Asked most often
The questions that come up.
Will clients actually use it?
They use it when it beats emailing you, which means real progress rather than a status word, documents where they expect them, and no password to remember. Getting those three right is most of the build, and it is why portals added as an afterthought sit empty.
Can different people at the same client see different things?
A finance contact sees invoices, a project contact sees progress, and whoever signs sees what needs signing. They manage their own colleagues rather than asking you to.
Can we brand it as ours?
Entirely. Your name, your typeface, your colours, on your own web address. Nothing on it says who built it.
06The rest of it
Most projects are two or three of these at once.
- 01Customer and salesEvery customer, conversation and deal in one place, arranged the way your business works rather than the way a software company guessed it might.£45k–£120k
- 02Invoicing and paymentsInvoicing that matches your contracts however awkward they are, takes payment the way your customers want to pay, and follows up on its own.£38k–£95k
- 03Access and auditAccess controlled to the person and the record, every change recorded, and your answer ready the day an auditor, a client or a regulator asks for one.£32k–£85k
- 04Planning and schedulingWork, people and equipment scheduled against real constraints, reshuffled in seconds when something changes, and visible to everyone who needs to know.£48k–£140k
- 05ReportingOne honest set of figures drawn from every system you run, assembled by nobody, argued over by nobody, and ready on the first of the month.£30k–£75k
- 06Quoting and proposalsYour pricing rules, however involved, applied correctly by anyone on the team, inside a document that looks like it came from you.£34k–£88k
- 07Documents and approvalsForms filled in once, routed to whoever has to agree, signed, filed where you will find them again, and chased the moment they stall.£30k–£70k
- 08Field work and jobsThe job tracked end to end, your engineer given what they need on their phone, and the paperwork finished before the van leaves site.£55k–£160k
- 09BookingsAvailability your customers book against themselves, with every one of your real rules applied, and far fewer people failing to turn up.£30k–£70k
- 10Stock and assetsStock, tools, vehicles and installed equipment tracked accurately enough that you stop buying things you already own.£35k–£90k
- 11Joining systems upThe systems you already pay for, talking to each other reliably, so a thing entered once appears everywhere it belongs within seconds.£30k–£65k
- 12Leaving a systemA planned, reversible move off the system that is holding you back, without losing a single record or a day of trading.£35k–£110k
- 13Reading documentsPaperwork arriving by email or on a phone camera, read accurately, checked against what you expected, and put in front of a person only when it needs one.£38k–£95k
- 14MembershipsMembers joining, paying, renewing and getting what they pay for, without anybody in your office administering a single one of them.£32k–£85k
- 15MarketplacesA platform where your suppliers and your buyers find each other, agree terms and pay, with your commission taken cleanly every time.£65k–£200k
- 16Compliance recordsThe records your regulator, your insurer or your biggest client requires, captured as the work happens and produced on demand in minutes.£32k–£80k
Put a date on it.
Half an hour with whoever would build it gets you the shape of the work, a figure you can take to your board, and the week it could start. No deck, no discovery fee, no follow-up sequence.
Or ring 01603 552024. A person answers it.