Your booking portal and your event portal — Help

Every client you work with has two portals, not one, and they do two different jobs. The booking portal is the money side: the quote, the terms, the deposit and the invoices. The event portal is the job side: the run of show / runsheet, the BEO, the requests and the event's files. They are opened in different ways and they carry different things.

This article covers what each portal is, how you open and close them, which links appear at the top of each page, how to rename the booking portal to your own word, and the one rule that decides what a reader is allowed to see.

Why there are two

Neither portal is something you create. Each is the set of things one client can already open, gathered under one name, so each exists the moment they hold anything. What differs is how they open:

The booking portal fills one document at a time. Every document carries its own private link, minted when you send it, so there is no switch. Send a quote and the booking portal has a quote in it. There is nothing else to do.
The event portal is one link for one person, so it does have a switch, and you throw it yourself.

The portals panel

Expand any lead, or open any booking, and you will find both portals near the top: what each one is called, whether it is open, and what is in it. Every entry has a link that opens exactly what the client sees.

The booking portal lists the quote, the booking (the terms and deposit page) and any invoices, each with its status. The quote is listed even before you have written one, so you can see at a glance that nothing is sitting there for the client to read.

A lead with no booking still shows both. The booking portal fills from the lead's own quotes, because quotes belong to the lead rather than to an event. A quote sent before anybody made a booking is real, the client is reading it, and it shows here. The event portal is the half that needs a booking, and it says so rather than hiding.

Opening, sending and closing the event portal

Open event portal creates that client's own private link to the booking. They can read the run of show, the running order and anything you share there, with no password and nothing to sign up for. There is one link per person per booking, so pressing it twice does not issue a second.

Opening emails nothing on its own. Unless you tick Send event portal client invite first, the link exists and the client does not have it until you send it. That is on purpose: most people open the portal early, build the run of show, and hand the link over once there is something worth reading.

Email the link sends the client their link, in an email you can edit. It appears next to Open as soon as the portal is open, and the panel tells you underneath whether the client has been sent it and when, so you are never guessing. To do both at once, tick Send event portal client invite next to the Open button before you press it, and the same press opens the portal and emails the link.

The wording of that email is yours. It is the Event portal client invite on the Automations page, alongside the quote and invoice emails, and it uses the client's details: their first name, the event name and date, and the link itself.

You need a verified email address on your own account before you can send it, and the client contact needs an email address to send to. The panel says which is missing.

Close the event portal stops that link working immediately. Their quote, booking and invoice links are separate and keep working, which the confirmation says before you commit.

You do not need a quote to open an event portal. What you do need is a booking and a client contact on it, because the portal is that person's way into that booking. On a lead with neither, the panel says so and names the step rather than hiding the button.

A live event portal counts as one active crew place on your plan while it is open.

Closing means closing. If an automation later goes out carrying the [portal link] field, the email is sent with the link left out rather than quietly issuing a fresh one. A portal you closed stays closed until you open it again, and opening it again gives that client a new link, so send it to them.

What a reader sees

At the top of every page in either portal, above the content itself:

The home icon and the portal's name, in small capitals. That is the "you are here" line.
Your business name beside it, so a forwarded link still says who it is from.
Underneath, links to the other pages they can open, grouped under each portal's name. The page they are on is in bold.

Home goes back to the link you sent

Neither portal has a front page. Every page is its own private link, so "home" means the link you actually sent them.

That is what the home icon does. Click it from anywhere and it returns to the page this browser arrived on, whether that was the quote in their inbox, an invoice, or the event portal. On that arrival page itself the icon is not a link, because there is nowhere to go back to.

Opening a fresh link from a later email resets it, so a client you invoice in March is taken home to the invoice, not back to a quote from January. 1pm remembers this in the reader's own browser and never in the address bar, so a forwarded link carries no trace of the other documents that client holds.

The strip stays out of the way of the document's own buttons, Accept, Sign and Pay. It is never printed and never appears on the PDF.

Which links appear where

The links are not a fixed menu. Each page offers only what it can already prove the reader is entitled to, so a portal with one thing in it shows the name and nothing else.

Where they are	Links they see
A quote	The quote itself, Your booking once a live confirmation exists for it, and Your event when they hold an event portal link
An invoice	The name only. An invoice is the document a client forwards to their accounts team, so it links nowhere
The agreement and deposit page	Your quote where the booking came from one, Your booking, and Your event when they hold an event portal link. Invoices open over this page from the list below the document, so there is no invoice link
A proposal	The name only. A proposal is read before there is a booking, and it carries no bill-to, so there is nothing to check the reader against
The event portal	Your event, plus Your booking when the reader is the client. Their invoices are listed further down the page under Your invoices. Crew get the name and no links

When there is only the page they are on, the row of links is left off and the name stands alone. This is normal early on.

Crew see the event portal too

The event portal is the page your crew, suppliers and duty manager open, and they see it named at the top just as the client does.

What differs is the links. A crew member is entitled to their event and nothing else, so they get the name and no row of links. Nobody sees a link to a booking or an invoice they could not already open.

An onboarding portal calls itself an onboarding portal. Same page, same behaviour, its own name, matching what the sidebar and the list already call it.

The rule that decides what they see

A link into somebody's event portal is a credential. The strip only offers a reader a link the page had already worked out they were allowed to open.

In practice the Your event link appears on a document only when that document is addressed to the person the link belongs to, either because it is billed to the booking's Client contact or because the bill-to email matches theirs exactly. Quotes get forwarded far more freely than people forward their own working pages: to a partner, to a parent paying for the day, to an accounts inbox. If 1pm cannot prove who is reading, it shows the name of the portal and no way in. Sharing the run of show with your client covers that rule and the link behind it in full.

Renaming the booking portal

"Booking portal" is the shipped wording, and plenty of businesses want a different one. Somebody whose clients are hosts rather than buyers may prefer Client Portal. A caterer billing accounts departments may want Payment Portal.

Go to Account > Profile > Wording and set Booking portal wording. Pick one of the suggestions or type your own, up to 40 characters. It is one word for the whole account rather than something set per booking, so a client who books with you twice sees the same name both times.

Renaming it changes it everywhere at once: the strip, the browser tab titles, and the label on the link in the emails you send.

The event portal cannot be renamed. If it took your Event wording, an account that renamed Events to "Bookings" would end up with an event portal called "Booking portal", which is the name of the other one. For the same reason "Event Portal" is not offered in the booking portal's suggestions.

Which portal your emails link to

Quote emails link to the booking portal, and the label reads Open your Booking Portal, in your own wording.
The [portal link] field in automations links to the event portal, and reads Open your Event Portal.
The seeded quote email describes what the link opens, not just that a quote is ready. If you have already edited your quote email, yours is untouched: 1pm never overwrites wording you have written.

Invoice reminders are the exception and say View invoice. An overdue invoice is "read this and pay it", and inviting somebody into a portal at that moment reads as a detour.

Sharing the run of show with your client covers giving a client their event portal, and the credential rule behind it.
Quotes and invoices covers the documents the booking portal holds.
Event confirmations covers the terms and deposit page.
Automations covers the [portal link] field and the seeded quote email.
A fully branded workspace covers the accent colour the strip is tinted with.
Portals covers onboarding portals, the third kind, used for onboarding somebody rather than running a job.