The client portal

The client portal is a page on your ERPNext site, at /projects, where customers follow their projects, see where the hours are going, and add tasks, comments and files without needing access to the desk. It ships in the same app as Task View and shows the same budgets and time logs.

Two guides follow this overview:

• Using the client portal is written for the customer.

• Giving customers access is written for the administrator who grants it, and explains who can see what.

Pages

<project> and <task> are the document names, such as PROJ-0001. Older ERPNext links such as /projects?project=PROJ-0001 and the old /project list redirect to the new portal. Someone who is not signed in is sent to the login page and brought back afterwards.

The left sidebar lists the person's projects. Below them, an Account section carries the other portal pages your site has enabled in Portal Settings, such as orders, invoices and issues. The menu at the top of the sidebar has My account and Log out, and Open desk for staff. The sidebar shows your site's logo and application name, and the portal follows the person's desk theme setting (Light, Dark or Automatic).

What customers can do

• Follow every project they have access to, with its status, budget and task counts.

• Read a task's description, time entries, files and the whole comment thread.

• Add a task, optionally under an open phase, unless the project is Completed or Cancelled.

• Comment on any task, and attach files.

• Move a task between Open, Working, Pending Review and Completed by dragging its card on the board or with the Status menu in the task panel. Phases follow their tasks and cannot be moved.

A customer holds no permissions on the Project or Task documents themselves. Every portal call is checked against the access rules first, and only then reads or writes on the customer's behalf. This is why a customer can comment on a task without being able to open it in the desk.

What stays out of sight

• Cancelled projects: they are not listed, and a customer cannot open one by its address.

• Template tasks: they are never shown or opened.

• Cancelled tasks are left out of the lists, the board and the counts.

Limits the portal enforces

Staff who use the portal are not held to the list of file types.

How the team is told

When a customer adds a task, comments, attaches a file or moves a task, the team gets a Client Portal notification in ERPNext, and an email according to each person's Notification Settings. The people notified are, in order of preference:

1. The people assigned to the task.

2. If nobody is, the people assigned to its parent phase.

3. If nobody is, the project team: the project owner, anyone assigned to the project, the project's users and staff assigned to its open tasks.

Only enabled staff accounts (System Users) are notified, never the person who made the change, and staff who work through the portal themselves do not trigger notifications.