Systems we build and run
Bespoke customer and supplier portals
Customers, subcontractors and suppliers looking at their own jobs, documents and history instead of ringing the office to ask, on a login that shows them nothing else.
What it is, and where it fits
Where this kind of system fits
- Legal, accountancy and professional services
- Plant, tool and equipment hire
- Waste, skips and recycling
- Builders, contractors and trades
- Wholesale and distribution
A portal is a login that shows somebody outside your business their own side of it. Their jobs, their documents, their history, their outstanding paperwork, straight off the same records your office works from.
It suits any business answering the same four questions all day. Where is it up to, have you got my certificate, what have I got out on hire, when is it coming back.
A read-only view of live work is weeks. Requests raised in the portal that become work in your system, with permissions per contact, is a larger job built the same way.
What it usually grew out of
It usually grows out of four phone calls a day and an inbox.
Somebody in the office looks the answer up, copies it into an email, attaches the document and sends it. That's a good service, and it costs the same every time it happens, so the only way to do more of it is to hire somebody.
A portal isn't meant to stop people ringing. It takes away the calls that were only ever asking for something the customer could have read for themselves, and leaves the ones worth having.
What it does
Their own records, only
A login sees one customer's or one supplier's work, enforced by the system rather than by everybody being careful.
Status without a phone call
Where a job is up to, in the words your office would use, updated as the work moves rather than when somebody asks.
Documents to fetch themselves
Certificates, transfer notes, reports and invoices there to download, and the current version rather than the one that got emailed.
Requests that become work
A collection, a call-out or a change asked for in the portal arrives in your system as a job, not as another email to read.
Their history, kept
What they've had, when, and what it said, so a disagreement about last March is a screen rather than a search.
Yours, not ours
Your name, your branding and your domain. It reads as part of your business, because it is.
A portal can carry AI features too, such as a chat that answers a customer's questions from their own records and takes new requests, with anything unusual passed to the office. More on AI and automation.
Usually built alongside job and works trackers, document and certificate stores or systems that join up what you already run. The rest are on the services page.
How it gets built, and how it gets run
| Fixed price | Scope, price and dates in writing before anything starts, with what isn't included written as plainly as what is. It doesn't move because the job turned out harder than we thought. |
|---|---|
| Timescale | A first portal is weeks rather than months, and it usually starts as one view for a handful of customers rather than everything for everybody. |
| Onboarding and training | We set the first logins up with you, help write the sentence you'll send your customers, and stay close while the first ones come through. |
| Hosted in the UK | UK infrastructure, backed up nightly to somewhere that isn't the machine running it, kept thirty days, and checked every few minutes that it's up and answering. |
| Changes | Another field shown, a new document type, a request form. What that covers is agreed at the start, so nobody works it out on the day. |
Ask about our free Business Systems Assessment
An hour with whoever runs the day to day. Clear recommendations to act on.
We look at how the work actually runs and what it runs on, then send you a list of what we would change, what each change would do for the business, and what it would take. In person or online, whichever suits you. Nothing to pay, nothing to sign.
- One hour
- In person or online
- Recommendations we talk you through
Honest answers
- Will customers actually use it?
- Some will and some never will. It's worth building for the ones who do, because they take their own calls off your desk permanently, and everybody else carries on ringing and gets a better answer.
- Is it safe letting people in?
- It's a separate login onto a restricted view, hosted in the UK, backed up nightly, and built by a Cyber Essentials certified firm. We'll walk you through exactly what a portal user can reach before it goes live.
- We don't want everything on show.
- You choose what's visible, field by field if it comes to that. Most portals show less than people expect, and that's the right instinct.
Talk to us
Tell us what your customers ring up to ask, and what you'd be happy for them to see. That's usually enough for us to say whether we can help.
Ring, 8am to 6pm Monday to Friday and Saturday mornings, or use the form below. Pick what you'd like to keep track of, add a line if you want to, and leave a name and a way to reach you.