Client portals: when they pay off and when they are a waste

“We could do with a client area.” We hear it often, and roughly one time in three the honest answer is no, you could not.

The sign that it pays off

It is not turnover, and it is not the number of clients. It is this: how many times a week does somebody ask you for something that is already written down somewhere?

“Where are we with this?” “Can you resend the contract?” “Did the deposit arrive?” “Where did I send you those photos?”

If those questions come several times a week, from the same client, and the answer already exists in an email or in a system, then you are the glue between the systems — and the time you spend being it is the cost a portal removes.

The sign that it does not

If you have a handful of clients, each on a long project, and the communication is real conversation rather than status requests, a portal adds one more place to keep updated without taking anything away. That is a second job, not a tool.

And if your clients will never open it because they would rather ring you, the portal does not solve the problem: it moves it. No software talks anyone out of a habit that works.

The question that decides it

Before building anything, try answering this one: what stops happening on the day the portal goes live?

If the answer is concrete — “the status emails stop”, “I stop chasing signatures” — there is a project. If the answer is “we would look more professional”, there is no project: there is a website to redo, and that costs a tenth as much.

What it actually needs

In the portals we build, the four things used every day are always the same:

• Project status, updated automatically from what happens in the internal system — not by hand, or it will not get updated.
• Documents, with online signing: it is the feature that pays for itself, because it removes the print-sign-scan-email loop.
• Payments, with the status visible. Half the phone calls about deposits disappear.
• One place for files, one only, replacing the three separate chats.

Everything else — statistics, charts, custom notifications — gets added later, if anyone asks. Usually nobody does.