Your clients see their own work. Nothing else.
A portal gives clients, agents or suppliers a secure window onto exactly their own work: submit a request, approve a fee, download a report. The back office stays the back office.
The people outside your business need a tenth of what the people inside it do.
01 — The problemYour staff need depth: assignment, drafting, review, history, invoicing. Your clients and partners need almost none of that. They need to send you something, approve something, and collect the result — and today they do it by email, which means someone on your side re-keys it.
A portal is the answer when the same few interactions happen many times a week with people outside the company. It removes the re-keying, gives them a live view of where things are, and gives you a precise answer to “who can see this?”
What we build.
02 — What we build- ✦Secure accounts for outside usersClients, agents, brokers, suppliers — each sees only their own organisation’s work. Invitations, password resets and access that can be revoked in one click.
- ✦Requests and submissionsA form that captures what you actually need, first time, with the files attached — so nothing arrives half-complete in an inbox.
- ✦Approvals and statusA fee to approve, a document to sign, a stage to acknowledge. Each one a button, each one recorded, each one visible to both sides.
- ✦Documents and downloadsFinished reports, invoices and files, available the moment they are approved, with signed links rather than attachments.
- ✦One database with your internal systemThe portal is a second front door onto the same record, not a copy of it. What staff change, partners see; what partners submit, staff work on.
- ✦Notifications that people wantEmail when something needs them, silence otherwise. Configurable per user, because the alternative is everything going to spam.
How it runs.
Every project runs the same five steps, and you see working software every week from the first sprint.
- 01CallHalf an hour. You describe the business problem; we tell you what we think it takes.
- 02Scoping sprintOne to two weeks. We work out what the system is, who uses it, and which features come first.
- 03PlanScope, architecture, sequence and cost in writing before any production build starts.
- 04Build in the openOne team designs, builds and tests. Working software on a staging site every week.
- 05Launch and keep goingLive, monitored, documented, in your accounts. We stay on for what comes next.
Questions about portals.
05 — QuestionsDo we need a CRM before we can have a portal?
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A portal needs a system of record behind it — otherwise there is nothing for it to show. If you already have one we integrate with it; if you don’t, the two are usually built together over one database, which is how the valuation platform in our case study works: staff get the CRM, partners get the portal.
How do you keep one client from seeing another’s data?
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Access is enforced in the data layer, not just the interface: every query is scoped to the user’s organisation, and roles decide what they can do within it. It is designed in from the first sprint and tested as part of every release, because it is the one thing a portal cannot get wrong.
Can partners upload documents and sign things?
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Yes. File upload with signed storage links is standard; e-signature is an integration with the provider you prefer. Both are scoped and recorded like everything else.
How long does a portal take?
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Weeks rather than months, and often less than the internal system it sits beside, because the surface is deliberately small. The scoping sprint gives you a date in writing.
Will it work on a phone?
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Yes. Portals are used from wherever the partner happens to be, so they are built for the phone first and the desktop second. Where a real app would earn its place, we build one — see mobile apps.
Tell us what you’re trying to build.
Half an hour on a call with our team. Bring a spec, a rough idea or a system that has stopped keeping up, and you leave with our view on what it takes and what comes first.
Zeki Mirza — Founder & product lead
Your first call is with the team that scopes and builds it