Customer Portal

A page of their own where your customers sign in and look up the orders they have placed with you — what is coming next, what they had last winter, and the quote for any of it. No password, no account to set up, and nothing for you to send: they ask for a link, it arrives in their inbox, and they are in.

Turning it on

Everything is under Settings → Customer Portal.

• Portal address — where your portal lives, as puree.app/portal/yourname. Lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens. We start you off with your account shortname; change it if you like, but it cannot be blank.
• Enable customer portal — the switch itself. Until it is on, nobody can sign in and no portal link appears anywhere.
• Who can sign in — see below.
• Sign-off name — how portal emails sign off, as “Thanks, name”. Leave it blank and they use your account name.

Who can sign in

Two ways round, and you can change your mind 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.

How a customer signs in

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.

Access therefore follows the email address rather than a secret that outlives the job. Somebody who leaves the company loses their work inbox, and loses the portal with it.

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.

What your customer sees

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 ledger below it, grouped by month. Each row carries the date, the order reference, the time and guest count, the address, the total and its status, with a coloured spine down the side so the shape of the list reads before the words do. They filter with All, Upcoming and Past, and by kind of order where they have more than one.

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

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.

Signing in from your order form

The portal doubles as a way to make a regular’s next order quicker. Your online order form carries a Have an account? Sign in here button; they sign in without leaving the form, in a modal, and the form fills itself in — name, email, company and phone from their last order, and a picker holding every delivery address on file for them.

A customer who orders to two offices picks between them instead of retyping either.

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

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