The Customer Portal: Let Your Customers Look Up Their Own Orders

The customer portal gives your customers somewhere to check their upcoming and past orders, open the quotes you have sent and sign in to your online order form. They use an emailed sign-in link, so there is no password to create or remember.

The walkthrough below covers turning the portal on, choosing who has access and placing an online order as a signed-in contact.

Turn it on and choose who can use it

As an account administrator, open Settings → Account Details and choose Customer Portal in the settings sidebar. Turn on Enable customer portal, check the settings and save. The same page is where you choose whether the order list shows invoices and card payments.

Puree suggests a portal address based on your account shortname. You can keep that address or choose another. Portal emails use your catering company’s account name as the sign-off when the Sign-off name field is blank; enter a different name if you prefer.

You have two ways to manage access:

• Only the contacts I choose: enable portal access on each contact you want to invite to use it.
• Every contact, unless I say otherwise: contacts of live customers have access by default, with individual contacts able to be blocked.

Access belongs to the contact, the person with the email address, rather than being a single shared login for the whole customer. You can change a contact’s access without changing the rule for everyone else.

See the portal as your customer sees it

Open a customer, find a contact with portal access and choose View portal. This lets you preview their portal without signing in as them.

Customers can browse upcoming and past orders and open an order to see its quote. The quote keeps your existing customer-facing template.

The next order sits at the top as a docket, and the rest is a table below it grouped by month: the date, the order, its status and the total, then what has been paid. Where you are connected to Stripe, each card payment links the customer to their own receipt. Where you are on Xero or QuickBooks, they can see what is still owing on the invoice and download the PDF. Both of those are switches on the portal settings page, Show invoices and Show card payments, so you decide whether customers see money alongside their orders at all.

Orders hidden from the customer view and expired quotes are excluded. Order visibility also respects a contact’s privacy settings: a contact can choose to hide their own orders from other contacts at the same customer.

Sign in with an email, not a password

A customer enters their email address and asks for a sign-in link. They open the email and select the sign-in button. The link is single-use and expires after 30 minutes.

They must use the email address associated with their contact record and have portal access. If someone should no longer use the portal, turn access off on their contact.

Your customer-facing quotes also provide a route to the portal when it is enabled.

Make the next online order easier

Customers can also choose Sign in on your online order form and follow the same emailed-link process. Once signed in, their details can be filled from their last online order, with their contact record used as a fallback.

They can select a saved delivery address rather than typing it again. The distinction matters here: the addresses belong to the customer record linked to the contact. A contact ordering for a company may therefore see that company’s saved office addresses.

The customer selects the address and items, checks their details at checkout, and completes the form’s payment and submission steps as usual.

If you are testing the experience yourself, use a private browser window and open the emailed link in that same private browsing session. This helps keep the customer’s sign-in separate from your own.

Saved addresses can carry delivery fees

A saved customer address can have its own Default delivery fee. When a signed-in customer chooses that address, the saved fee can apply to the order, including an agreed customer-specific rate.

Check the address settings and the resulting checkout fee when setting this up. A fee entered manually on a quote takes precedence, and the form’s free-delivery threshold can still apply. The Customer Portal guide explains the delivery-fee rules in detail.

Start with a contact you can check

Choose your access setting, review a contact’s details and saved customer addresses, then use View portal to check their order history. Test signing in and placing an order through your form so you can see the experience from start to finish.

The portal is currently in beta, and its screens and features may develop. If you enable it but customers cannot use it, contact Puree to check availability for your account.

For the step-by-step guide, see Customer Portal. For the records behind it, see Customers, Contacts & Addresses and Online Order Form.