Customer portal – as an administrator

Instead of spending valuable time on back and forth communication, exchanging countless emails, and organizing frequent catch-ups with clients, invite them to Scoro. As a result, effortlessly work together on projects, and conveniently give them access to important information. This is a great way of strengthening customer relationships by providing a transparent and open ground for successful collaboration.

After adding the Customer portal add-on to your site on the self-service page (Settings > Administration > Plan, add-ons, and billing), first see to it that you have the relevant permissions to manage Customer portal user roles and settings. 

Go to Settings > Roles and permissions and click on Modules and actions on the relevant role line. Tick the permissions needed.




Now you’ll be able to see the Customer portal option under Settings > Site settings. 




You can now start managing user roles, users, Customer portal settings, etc.




1. Add user roles to manage Customer portal users' access rights, what they see and can do on your Scoro site. 

Click on the Roles and permissions tab and then on the Add role button.




Add a name to the role and tick the permissions relevant to that specific role (for example, a Designer might not need access to financial documents, yet the Project manager might need to get a full overview of the project, needing all possible access rights).




2. Invite users to your Scoro site. Click on the Add user button.




Note! Customer portal user accounts can be created for existing people in your Scoro database. The person must also be linked to a company to be able to access company-related information (projects, documents, files). If needed, start by adding the relevant companies and people to your Scoro site.

Select the person you wish to create a user account for.




Another option to link a person to the Customer portal is to open the contact card of that specific person and click on the button Give access.




Most of the data is filled out based on the person’s information in Scoro. Make changes, if needed, and select a user role for the user.




If everything is as it should, click on the button Save and send invitation. The person will receive an email inviting them to join your Scoro site. You can also just save the user (they will be listed under Awaiting users) and send an invitation later on.


In the user list, there are four types of users:

Active - the users who have accepted the invitation to join Scoro and can access your site.
Awaiting - saved users, the invitation to join still needs to be sent out.
Pending - users who have received the invitation to join, yet haven’t accepted it.
Inactive - deactivated user accounts, these users cannot access your site. You can reactivate these user accounts if needed.




To reactivate the user, open the user profile from the Customer portal user list (click on their name) and push the toggle (active toggle is green).




For Customer portal users to be able to open documents (quotes, invoices, orders) related to their company, add a default PDF template.

First, add a new PDF template for each document or select one from your existing templates. 
Make sure the PDF is marked as “For sharing”...




 If it isn’t, open the PDF template (click on the name in the list and push the Modify button) and just toggle off the option “For internal use only” and save.




Then select the default template for the relevant document under Site settings > Customer portal > Settings. 



 
When users have accepted their invitations and joined your site, you can easily add them to projects. As stated before, users (and the related people) are linked to companies, so when adding a new project and linking it to a company (just select the Client), the relevant users are automatically listed below. Just select the ones you want to give access to the project.




In the project detailed view, the Customer portal users have a green circle around their avatar, so it’s easy to tell apart external users and your team members.




In the project list, the projects with external users are badged with the green Customer portal icon.




The same goes for the People list.




In the contact detailed view, there’s a Customer portal button next to the name of the person. If it’s green, their Customer portal user account is active, and if orange, they still need to accept their invitation to join your site.




When clicking on the button, you’re taken to their Customer portal user profile.

What Customer portal users can do and see?

All internal information is kept strictly confidential. Even so, the Customer portal users have access to real-time information about their company and projects depending on their user role and permissions.

Make sure each user role has the access rights relevant to their needs. Possible use cases for different Customer portal users:

1. With customer number 1 you want to be fully transparent, so that at any point in time they can track how far you are with the project, which tasks have been completed, what still needs to be finished, and see an overview of the timeline for the deliverables. They also need access to financial documents issued for their company to keep an eye on the project budget.   
   
   
2. With customer number 2 you want to collaborate more efficiently (usually, designers communicate to the customer via email, thus you have no idea about the latest status or recent feedback about the mock-ups, etc.). You want to share design mock-ups with the customer and receive feedback directly in Scoro. This way, all information is accessible in one single place and all interested parties are in the loop. 
   
   
3. Customer number 3 is your long-term client with multiple projects running at the same time. Different Project Managers are involved in the projects, both from your side and their's. At times, they are late with the payments, because invoices do not reach their finance department on time (you send the invoice to the relevant PMs, who are responsible for approving and forwarding the invoice to their Finance team). Giving their Finance team access to all invoices (and quotes and contracts) right there on your Scoro site will eliminate this issue, as the finance team can see the outstanding invoices and has access to the necessary information sooner. 

With full access rights, the users see:
Invoices
Quotes
Orders
Projects 
Tasks/Events (also their descriptions)
Files
Comments
Notifications


Note! Customer portal is a paid add-on that you can activate for your site under Settings > Administration > Plan, add-ons and billing. Customer portal is included in the Scoro Ultimate plan.