Part 2 — Set Up Your Company · Chapter 14
Customer & Partner Portals
The portal is your service operation with the curtain partly open. Customers watch their own jobs, partners work the jobs you share with them, all inside the same BigWave with visibility scoped by login. There’s no separate portal product to configure. A portal is what BigWave looks like to a customer, site or partner login.
What a customer login sees
A contact with customer access logs into the same address your team uses and gets the customer’s own world:
- their profile, editable
- their sites and site details
- their work orders, with status, comments and documents as your project options allow
- Create Work Order, for raising service requests directly
- their approved invoices
Everything else doesn’t render. Their projects panel shows only projects connected to them, and within a project, the statuses and details they see are shaped by Project Options (chapter 9). You decide per line of work how much of the sausage-making is visible.
A site login is the narrower cousin: one location’s contact seeing that location only. Give the store manager at HG-014 a site login and they can watch their own repairs without seeing the other eleven restaurants.
Commercial (Harbor Grill): the facilities manager gets a customer login and stops emailing “status on the Fremont store?” because the answer is on her screen. Store managers get site logins where the customer asks for them. More logins to support is a real cost.
Residential (the Okafors): no login. Chapter 4 made this call, and chapter 13’s emails deliver the same visibility without the account. The exception is a homeowner who asks, usually a landlord with several properties, which is the multi-site case portals are for.
What a partner login sees
Partners are companies you exchange work with, with the full mechanics in chapter 21. A partner login sees the partner’s own record: the projects shared with them, their assignments, their technicians and contacts, their documents, and the custom fields you’ve exposed. Partner technicians log in and see their assignments the way your own techs do.
The practical effect: you can subcontract a work order to a partner, and their office manages their own techs against it inside your system, without seeing your other customers, your rates, or anyone else’s work.
Setting portal access up
- The person must exist as a contact on the customer, site or partner record. Chapter 8 for customers and sites, chapter 21 for partners.
- Grant the contact a login with the matching access level.
- Assign a role, chapter 4, if you maintain different flavors of portal permissions.
- Check the relevant Project Options to confirm what work order detail portal users see for each line of work.
- Log in as a test contact once yourself. Two minutes looking at what they’ll look at prevents most portal support email.
Deciding who gets one
The portal is leverage when the login holder has recurring reasons to look: many sites, many jobs, contractual reporting. It’s overhead when they’ll log in twice and then email you anyway. Multi-site commercial contacts, yes, immediately. Partners you dispatch monthly or more, yes. Homeowners, email first and a portal on request.
That closes Part 2. Your company is configured: people, statuses, customers, projects, fields, rates, templates, alerts, portals. Part 3 runs the operation on top of it, starting with the record everything else orbits.