Customer and client portals
Document access, order history, support tickets, invoices, statements. Everything a customer currently emails you for, available to them at two in the morning.
02 — Web portals
Web Portals and Platforms
Places where your customers, members and partners get things done themselves.
The short version
Customer portals, member areas, booking systems and marketplaces. Accounts, permissions, payments and a front end that does not get in the way.
A portal is where your customers, members or partners do business with you without picking up the phone. Get it right and it quietly removes a whole category of admin. Get it wrong and it becomes another channel your team has to babysit. The difference is almost always in the details: how accounts are recovered, how permissions are structured, what happens when a payment fails.
What this covers
Six things we are asked for most.
Accounts, roles and permissions
Multi-tenant structures, organisation-level accounts, granular roles, audit trails and sensible account recovery. The unglamorous work that decides whether a portal is trusted.
Booking and scheduling
Availability rules, capacity, resources, cancellations, reminders, calendar sync. Booking logic is deceptively hard, and we have done it enough times to respect it.
Payments and subscriptions
Stripe and GoCardless integrations, recurring billing, failed-payment recovery, VAT handling and invoice generation that your accountant will accept.
Admin and reporting
The back office is half the product. Search that works, exports that open in Excel, and dashboards that answer the question your team actually asks each morning.
Security and data protection
Encryption in transit and at rest, rate limiting, hardened sessions, UK data residency where you need it, and a data map you can hand to a DPO.
What you end up with
Deliverables, not deliverable-shaped promises.
- Fewer inbound calls and emails for routine requests
- A single, searchable record of every customer interaction
- A portal your team can extend without a rebuild
- Accessibility tested against WCAG 2.2 AA
Typical stack
- Laravel
- WordPress multisite
- Next.js
- React
- Stripe
- GoCardless
- PostgreSQL
- Redis
- S3-compatible storage
- SSO / OAuth 2.0
How it starts
A thirty-minute call, then a short paid discovery that produces a written specification and a fixed price. If you walk away after discovery, the specification is yours to take to anyone.
The path
Same five steps, every time.
01
Conversation
Thirty minutes, no charge, no deck. You describe the problem in your own words and we ask the awkward questions. By the end of it we both know whether this is worth taking further.
You get: Outline of the problem, rough budget range, honest yes or no
02
Discovery
A short paid engagement where we sit with the people who will use the thing. We map the current process, find the edge cases that break naive designs, and write it down.
You get: Written specification, wireframes, milestone plan, fixed price for phase one
03
Build
Two-week cycles with something you can click at the end of each one. You see progress continuously, which means course corrections cost days rather than months.
You get: Working software on a staging URL, updated every fortnight
04
Launch
Data migrated and reconciled, team trained, rollback rehearsed, go-live in a planned window. We stay close for the first month while real use finds the last few edges.
You get: Live system, trained team, documentation, thirty days of included support
05
Operate
Monitoring, patching, backups and a monthly written report. Or a clean handover to your own team with everything they need. Both are a good outcome for us.
You get: Retained support, or full handover with documentation
Questions
The ones people actually ask.
Not on the list? Email us — we would rather answer it now than after you have signed something.
Very often a plugin will do, and we will say so. Custom pays for itself when your rules are unusual, when the portal is central to how you trade, or when you have outgrown what a plugin can be configured to do without becoming fragile.
We design for it rather than bolting it on. Data minimisation, defined retention, export and erasure routines, a written data map, and UK or EU hosting where that matters to you. We are not your data protection adviser, but we build so that yours has an easy job.
Usually yes. Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, HubSpot, Salesforce, Companies House, HMRC and most modern SaaS tools expose an API. Where one does not, we look at scheduled file exchange before we give up on it.
We build to WCAG 2.2 AA as standard: keyboard operation, sensible focus order, real contrast ratios, labelled forms and error messages that say what went wrong. It is not an add-on line on our quotes.
Retained support, hardening, migrations and the quiet maintenance that stops small problems turning into a bad Monday morning.
Start here
Tell us what you are trying to build.
A short conversation is usually enough to tell whether we are the right team for the job. No sales script, no obligation.
We reply within one working day. No sales sequence, no pressure.