The portal is the door a client walks through to reach their own work: their brands, whatever is waiting for approval, the calendar, the messages, the files and the documents. They sign in with their own user, they see only their own company, and whatever they decide there shows up in your workspace instantly, with no export in between.
An agency feature, and the reason is not the price
The portal exists because there is a company on the other side that is not yours. That is why it belongs to agency workspaces and is not sold to the other two: a creator or a business running their own brands has nobody to let in, and a portal with no third party inside it is one screen too many.
That said, the interesting question is not who can have one but which problem it closes. An agency without a portal spreads a client's work across email, a messaging group and a shared folder. All three work until the day somebody insists they never saw a piece that went out, and then it turns out none of the three recorded who said yes, when, and to which version.
A portal answers that by construction. Every person on the client side signs in with their own account, and from then on each decision carries a name. It is not a convenience feature, it is the difference between having a conversation and having a record.
Thirteen rows, and what the client does in each
The portal is not one screen, it is thirteen, and every one of them shows that client's work alone. This is the list as the person signing in sees it.
| Row | What they go there for |
|---|---|
| Overview | What is happening with their brands, on one screen |
| Analytics | This month numbers, without waiting for the report |
| Campaigns | What is running right now |
| Calendar | What is going out and when |
| Approvals | Approve a piece or send it back with a comment |
| Messages | Talk to your team without opening email |
| Drive | Upload material and download finished work |
| Briefs | Fill in the form a project starts from |
| Connections | Connect their own social accounts |
| Contracts | Look up what has been agreed |
| Quotes | See what is waiting to be accepted |
| Payments and invoices | Review what has been charged, with the documents |
| Team | Give access to their own people |
Two of those rows tend to surprise people. Connections, because it reverses the usual flow: instead of asking the client for a password over email, they connect their own accounts from their portal, so nobody shares credentials with anybody and access is withdrawn from the same place the day the relationship ends. And Team, because the client's lead signs up the rest of their own people without asking you, which is the row that saves you the Tuesday morning email.
The briefs row deserves a mention of its own, because it is the one that turns a vague request into something that can actually be produced. A brief is a form you build yourself with the fields that kind of work needs, and the client fills it in from their portal instead of writing you three paragraphs of email with half the details missing. It can also start from a document that already exists: you upload the PDF and the brief is built around it.
And analytics is the row that lowers the temperature of the relationship without anybody noticing. A client who can look at the numbers whenever they feel like it asks fewer questions, and asks better ones: they arrive at the monthly call with a specific doubt rather than the vague sense that they do not know what is going on.
What they cannot see matters as much as what they can
A portal account reaches its own client and that client's brands, and nothing else in the workspace. There is no overview, no list of your other clients and no way to guess how many you run. That is not decorative: it is the condition under which you can use the same tool for two brands that compete with each other.
Internal work stays out too. Your team's task board, your private conversations and your written procedures remain where they are. The portal shows the result and the points where a decision of theirs is needed, not the process that gets there, which is a distinction worth keeping even when the relationship is an excellent one.
There is a practical consequence of everybody having their own account, and it is worth having in mind before you need it: access is withdrawn as fast as it was given. When somebody leaves the client's company, or when the engagement ends, you remove them from the same screen and they stop reaching the material immediately. With a folder shared by link, absolutely nothing happens on that day.
And there are degrees inside the client as well. What each of their people can reach depends on the permission they hold, which is the same model that governs yours and is described in roles and permissions. A marketing lead who approves and somebody in finance who only looks at invoices have no reason to see the same thing.
From the invitation email to the first approved piece
Setting a client up is short, and it is worth doing the whole of it on day one rather than when there is already a deadline.
- Create the client with its fiscal details and hang its brands off it.
- Invite the person you actually talk to by email, from the client access screen.
- That person signs in, sets a password and gives access to the rest of their team.
- Send them a piece to approve and check together that the circuit works.
Step four is the one almost everybody skips and the one that saves the most trouble. A first rehearsal approval, on a real piece and with no urgency, shows the client where the button is and shows you whether the person you invited is the one who genuinely decides. The rest of the kickoff, including what to ask for before the first piece goes out, is in the client onboarding guide.
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Try it freeApproving from the portal: one yes is enough
Client approval is switched on per client. With it on, a piece waits for a single approval: either somebody on your team from the app or the client from their portal, and whichever arrives first is the one that counts. There is no order between them and both are never required. With the switch off, which is the normal setting for a client who does not need to review anything, the piece is scheduled straight away.
What the client sees when approving is the piece exactly as it will publish, with its text, its files and its date, not a screenshot and not a link to a document. They can approve or send it back with a written reason, and that reason stays attached to the piece rather than living in an email nobody can find three weeks later. Every decision lands in the history with a name and a timestamp.
Two details head off most of the accidents. A reminder goes out before the date of a piece that is still waiting, so silence does not quietly become a hole in the calendar. And a piece whose hour passed while it waited is not published late: it is parked for rescheduling, which is what you would want it to do. The whole circuit is in content approvals.
Files and documents, with no loose links
The client Drive works in both directions. They upload the material production needs and they collect the finished work from the same place, through folders you share explicitly. What there is not is a public link somebody without an account can open: whoever wants to see a file signs in, which is why it is known who opened it and when. That is a decision rather than a missing piece, and it is what keeps a client's material out of reach of a forwarded mailing list.
Commercial documents follow the same logic. Quotes waiting to be accepted, contracts and invoices sit in their rows with their PDFs, and the client looks them up whenever they like instead of writing to ask for the August one again. Monthly reports reach the contacts who hold a portal account, which is the same circle of people.
There is one more layer that changes how all of the above is perceived. The portal, the emails that leave it and the documents can carry your palette, your logo and your name rather than ours, which is the personalization pack and is covered in white label branding. How the portal is assembled row by row, with what the client sees in each, is on the client portal page.