Appearance
The client portal
A sign-in of their own where a client reads their invoices, answers estimates, follows their jobs and talks to you.
Professional plan.
Giving a client access
Settings → People → Invite, with the Client role, using an email address on that client's record.
They accept like anybody else: an email, a link, a password they choose. They land in the portal and nowhere else.
What they can see
- Their invoices, with the PDFs, and the balance outstanding.
- Their estimates and change orders, with the PDFs.
- Their jobs — progress, not internals.
- Hours by category, if you leave that on.
- Documents you have marked as shared.
- Notes you have marked client-visible.
What they cannot see
Everything else, and not because a screen hides it.
Hours reach a client as totals by category — "Labour, 46 hours". Never the individual entries, so they cannot see who worked which hour or what that person is paid. Their browser is never sent those details in the first place, so there is nothing hidden on the page for anybody to dig out.
Only approved hours are counted. An unapproved hour is still a draft of your own record, and a number that later goes down is worse than one that arrives slightly late.
Internal notes work the same way. A note you have not marked client-visible is never sent to them at all.
Turning hours off
Settings → Client portal → Show hours. On a flat-rate job the hours have nothing to do with what is owed, and showing them invites an argument about how long something took rather than what it was worth.
What they can do
- Accept or decline an estimate, with a signature — see Estimates.
- Pay an invoice by card, if you have connected Stripe — see Taking card payments.
- Upload a document to one of their jobs: a policy page, a photo, a signed form.
- Reply to a note, which arrives as a comment on the job.
A client's reply is always client-visible. They cannot file an internal note, so nothing a colleague believes is private can appear in a thread the client started.
Why one client cannot see another
The portal works out who somebody is from their sign-in, and nothing else. There is no customer number in the address bar for anybody to change to somebody else's, because the portal never asks who you are — it already knows.
The rest of SimpliWork is closed to client accounts completely. The portal is all they have, whatever address they type.
If your subscription lapses
The portal keeps working for reading. Invoices, the list, and the PDFs stay available even after a workspace is closed.
That is on purpose: those are your client's own records — what they were billed, what they paid, and the documents to prove it — and somebody may come looking at tax time, long after a bill that was never theirs went unpaid.