Your client has two portals, and now they say so

Everything a client can open in 1pm already existed. What was missing was any sense that the quote, the terms page, the invoice and the run of show were parts of the same thing. Four links in an inbox with nothing joining them up.

There are now two portals, and they do 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, the BEO, the requests and the files.

Neither is something you create. Every page in either one now carries a strip at the top with a home icon, the portal’s name, your business name beside it, and the rooms the reader is entitled to, the current one in bold and the rest as links. Home means the link you actually sent them, so a client you invoice in March lands back on the invoice, not on January’s quote. It never prints and never appears on the PDF.

The panel, and the switch

Expand any lead or open any booking and both portals sit near the top: what each is called, whether it is open, and what is in it, with a link that opens exactly what the client sees. The booking portal fills itself as you send documents. The event portal is one link for one person, so it has an Open button, and closing it stops that link immediately while their quote and invoice links keep working.

What the client sees

The client’s booking page now shows the three stages every booking goes through, Accept, Agree and Pay deposit, with the one they are on marked, and their invoices and payments listed on the booking itself. The wording is careful on purpose: accepting a quote is not having a booking, so the heading reads “Quote accepted” or “Terms agreed” until the deposit lands.

Rooms only appear when the reader can prove they are entitled to them, so a forwarded quote shows the portal name and no way in. And “Booking portal” is only the shipped wording: rename it to Client Portal, Payment Portal or your own word at Account, Profile, Wording.