Customer Portal

The customer portal lets your contacts view upcoming and past orders, open their quotes and sign in to your online order form with an emailed link. They do not need a password, and saved contact details and customer addresses make repeat ordering easier.

1. Enable the customer portal

As an account administrator, open Settings → Account Details, then choose Customer Portal in the settings sidebar.

1. Turn on Enable customer portal.
2. Check the Portal address. Puree suggests your account shortname, which is a good starting point. You can choose another address using lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens; it cannot be blank.
3. Check the email Sign-off name. Leave it blank to use your catering company’s account name, or enter a different sign-off.
4. Choose who can sign in, and whether the order list shows invoices and card payments, then save.

2. Choose which contacts have access

Portal access belongs to a contact of a customer. The customer is the company or individual you cater for; the contact is the person signing in with their email address.

There are two access options, and you can change the setting at any time.

Only the contacts I choose. Nobody gets in until you tick portal access on their contact. This suits a few named people per client, and a list you would rather keep deliberately.

Every contact, unless I say otherwise. Any contact of a live customer can sign in with their own email address, and you untick anyone who should not. This suits a book where the contacts are all customers anyway.

Either way the tick on the contact is the last word, so one person can always be let in or shut out without changing the setting for everybody. Untick a contact when they leave and they lose access immediately — the portal re-checks on the way in, not once at sign-in.

You will find the tick on the contact itself — This contact can sign in to the customer portal — and on the contact block of any quote, as a Customer portal access switch you can flip without leaving the quote.

3. Sign in with an emailed link

There is no password anywhere in the portal, by design. A customer types their email address, and a link arrives that signs them in when they open it. The link works once and lasts 30 minutes, and asking again spends the old one.

The contact needs access to the email inbox associated with their contact record. If someone should no longer have portal access, turn it off on their contact.

Two things worth knowing about what the screen says:

• It always says to check your inbox, whoever typed the address. Whether an address is known, whether it has access and whether a link went out are facts for the inbox’s owner, not for whoever is standing at the form.
• An address you have not given access to gets an email too, but a different one — About your account, telling them to get in touch with you. Nobody is left wondering whether the link is lost in the post.

There is a limit of one link a minute to any address, so the form cannot be pointed at somebody’s inbox as a nuisance.

4. View upcoming and past orders

Their own order book, headed Your orders. The next order sits at the top as a docket — the day, the time, the kind of event, the address, what it comes to and whether it is accepted — because that is what somebody signs in to check.

Everything else is a table below it, grouped by month, one line per order. Each row carries the date, the order — which opens the quote — its status and the order total, with a coloured spine down the side so the shape of the list reads before the words do. The kind of event, the time, the guest count and the address hang off the order’s name as a tooltip rather than wrapping the row onto a second line. There are two tabs and nothing else: Upcoming, which the page opens on, and Past.

Note that totals are part of it: the portal shows a customer what their orders came to, the same figures as the quote.

What has been paid, and the invoice

To the right of the total sit the columns about money, each headed with the mark of the system it comes from:

• Deposits received — what you have banked against the order so far, with a bracket saying how much of it came by card.
• Paid by card — every card payment Stripe has taken against the order, on a link to the customer’s own Stripe receipt.
• Invoice outstanding — Not issued, Paid, or what is still owing. A draft invoice reads as not issued, which is what a draft is from the customer’s side.
• Download invoice — the invoice itself as a PDF, named by its number. The download goes through Puree rather than out to Xero, so a customer only ever gets the invoice for an order that is theirs.

A column only appears when there is something behind it. The card column needs a Stripe connection; the two invoice columns need a live Xero or QuickBooks connection, and carry the name of whichever one you are actually on. You can also turn either off yourself, on the portal settings page — Show invoices and Show card payments, both on by default. A caterer on neither system gets neither set of columns, because a column about a system you do not use tells your customer nothing.

On a phone the table becomes a stack of cards: eight columns on a narrow screen either scroll sideways or crush, and both are worse than not being a table.

Opening an order takes them to the same quote you sent, on the same template — not a stripped-down copy.

An order appears in the portal once it is a real order for that customer. Deleted orders, orders you have hidden from the customer view and expired quotes never appear, and a draft only appears when it came in through your online order form.

An email you have given access to but never linked to a customer sees a short note saying so, pointing them back at you.

5. Sign in to an online order form

On your online order form, the customer chooses Sign in, enters the email address on their contact record and requests a link. They open the email and follow its sign-in button to return to the form signed in.

The form can fill in their name, email, company and phone from their last online order, with contact details used as a fallback. The customer should review those details at checkout.

They can also select a saved delivery address. These addresses belong to the customer record linked to the contact, rather than being a separate personal address book for that contact. For a company with several offices, the contact can choose the appropriate saved address for this order.

The customer then selects their items, proceeds to checkout, confirms their details and completes the available payment and submission steps for your form.

Delivery fees follow the saved address

This is the part worth setting up. Every address you hold for a customer can carry its own Default delivery fee, set on the address itself, with Charge it saying whether that fee is once per order or once for each delivery time. Leave the fee blank where it varies; set it to zero to say you deliver there for nothing, which is a different answer from not having said.

When a signed-in customer picks that address on your order form, that is the fee they are charged — the address answering for itself, rather than your postcode rules working it out from what they typed. It is how you charge a regular the flat rate you agreed with them, or deliver free to the office two streets away that happens to sit in a zone you charge for.

Where more than one figure could apply, this is the order:

1. A delivery fee you have typed onto the quote yourself. It is never overwritten.
2. The chosen saved address’s own default fee.
3. Your order form’s postcode rules — which only apply when no saved address was picked.
4. Nothing yet: the checkout tells the customer the delivery charge will be worked out once you have processed the order.

Your free-delivery threshold is applied last, and only to a fee that is actually known. “Free” and “not worked out yet” are different promises, so an unknown fee is never quietly turned into a free one.

One detail worth knowing if you have merged customers: where the same office is on file under two of them, the picker offers the priced copy, so a customer cannot pick their own office and be charged nothing to deliver to it.

The link on your quotes

Every quote carries a View customer portal prompt — the standard customer view and all of the bespoke templates, without any of them needing to be edited. A customer who has no use for it can dismiss it and carry on reading.

Seeing what a contact sees

Open Customers, choose the customer and find the relevant contact. On a contact with portal access there is a View portal link, which opens their portal as they see it. It is a view rather than a session: nobody is signed in, nothing is written, and the page says so. Useful before you tell somebody their history is there.

What your customer controls

One setting, on their side: Hide my orders from other contacts. It stops colleagues at the same customer seeing the orders they placed. Their own orders are always visible to themselves — the setting only ever hides them from other people.

The emails we send

Two, both signed off with your sign-off name and sent on your behalf:

• Your sign-in link — each time someone with access asks to sign in.
• About your account — when someone without access asks, telling them to talk to you.

Related

• Online Order Form — the form a signed-in customer fills in faster
• Customers, Contacts & Addresses — where contacts and their portal access live
• Hiding the Customer View — hiding an order from the customer view, which also hides it here