Customer Portal

The customer portal is a public, self-service area where your customers can see and act on everything you've shared with them — without an account password and without staff involvement. It pulls together records from across the app (Sales, Appointments, Rentals, and Inventory loans) into one branded view, scoped to the signed-in customer.

Signing in #

The portal is passwordless. A customer enters their email on the sign-in page and receives a one-time magic link that signs them in for the session. Links are single-use and expire after 24 hours.

• If the email matches an existing customer, they're signed straight in.
• If it doesn't, the email is still sent — and the customer record is only created after they click through, so a stray address never creates a contact.

Reminder emails (below) embed a magic link, so a customer can jump from an email straight into the relevant record.

Requests are rate-limited. A given address can be sent three sign-in links in a fifteen-minute window, and there is a wider ceiling per origin address. Ask for a fourth and the page says so — that a link has already gone out, to check the spam folder, and roughly how long until another can be requested. The wording is the same whether or not the address belongs to one of your customers, so the form can't be used to find out who your customers are.

Branding #

The portal and its emails are branded to the account, not to Knowledge ERP:

• The account name and uploaded logo appear on the sign-in page, the dashboard header, and outgoing portal emails. Both live under Account Settings → Branding; the logo is stored once and resized automatically for each surface, and also appears on document PDFs.
• You can rename your business at any time, under that same Branding section. The new name is used everywhere the moment you save it — portal, booking pages, PDFs, and the sender name and subject line of new emails. Renaming does not change the web address you sign in at, so nothing your customers have bookmarked breaks; ask support if you need the subdomain changed as well. Emails already sent keep the name they were sent under, which is what your customers will see if they go looking in their inbox.
• The settings your customers see are administrators-only — the business name, the logo, the timezone your booking page publishes, and the support email in the footer. Anyone with the manage settings permission can still open the page and edit the welcome message; see Who can change what.
• The subject line and the sender name are yours. A customer sees "Invoice INV-0020 from Tallgrass Outfitters" from Tallgrass Outfitters, not from us — which is what decides whether they open it at all. The same applies to quotes, purchase orders, statements, appointment and booking emails, survey invitations and automation emails. Replies go to your portal support address when you've set one.
• The underlying sending address stays ours (no-reply@ on our domain). Sending from your own domain would mean verifying it with our mail provider and would tie your deliverability to every other account's, so we send under our verified, monitored domain with your name on it. Some mail clients show this as "Tallgrass Outfitters via …" the first time; nothing else changes.
• A per-location support phone and an account welcome message / support email tell customers how to reach you.
• Every page carries your contact details. The account's portal support email and the location's support phone and address appear in the footer of every portal page, every survey page and the public booking pages — so a customer with a question about an order always has somewhere to put it. Fill these in under Account Settings → Customer Portal and Location → Appointments; the block is hidden entirely when none of them are set.
• No route to the staff sign-in. Nothing a customer can reach links to the Knowledge ERP login. If a customer hits an error — a magic link already used, a survey already answered, a form left open too long — the page is branded as your business and points back at your portal, not at our sign-up.

In production each account's portal lives on its own subdomain.

The dashboard #

After signing in, the customer lands on a tabbed dashboard. Tabs appear only when relevant — a tab shows when the account has the related module or the customer has records there. That second rule means that if you later drop a module, customers can still review their prior records (read-only) instead of losing their history. Clicking a tab updates the URL (?tab=…) without a reload, so links and the back button behave naturally.

A customer only ever sees their own records; the session is scoped to the linked customer.

Drafts are never shown. A Draft quote, invoice, or sales order has not been sent yet, so it is not visible in the portal — and for quotes and invoices the PDF is refused even over a direct link, so the list and the document itself always agree. A quote that has been Converted to a sales order is likewise hidden, since the order supersedes it. Terminal-but-already-sent records stay visible: a Declined or Expired quote, a Voided invoice, and a Cancelled order are all more useful to a customer shown than silently withdrawn.

Quotes #

Customers see their quotes with line items, total, and expiry. Each quote can be viewed as a PDF in the browser or downloaded, and a Sent quote can be accepted or declined in one click. The Quotes tab badges quotes awaiting a response.

Invoices #

Invoices list with invoice date, due date, invoice total, and balance due, each with view/download PDF. The tab opens with the customer's total balance due, and flags how much of it is overdue — so they do not have to add their own invoices up.

Each row's status is written for the customer rather than for you: Unpaid, Partly paid, Overdue, Paid, or Cancelled. It is worked out from the balance and the due date at the moment the page loads, so an invoice becomes Overdue on the day it passes its due date whatever the internal status says.

When an online payment gateway is connected, a customer can pay an open invoice from the portal. When one is not, the balance panel tells them to contact you instead of leaving them with a figure and no next step. The Invoices tab badges any Sent or Partially Paid invoices.

Orders #

Sales orders show both their status and their delivery status. Once any of an order has gone out — Partially Shipped, Shipped or Delivered — the customer can request a return — choosing items and quantities (capped at what shipped), a reason, and a note. That opens a Submitted return for your staff to process; see Customer Returns.

Rentals & Loans #

Rental agreements and loan agreements are clickable to a detail page showing the return/due date and the items in the agreement (rentals also show the rate breakdown, total, and a link to the invoice PDF). From there a customer can request a due-date extension (see below). A row is flagged Extension requested while one is pending.

Appointments #

Each appointment opens to a detail page with the location's address and support phone, the requested equipment, and status-aware actions:

• Pending appointments can be cancelled, have their details edited (contact info, notes, and — when the type allows equipment selection — the requested equipment, re-held against on-hand stock), and be rescheduled directly to any open slot (validated against the same availability rules as the public booking flow).
• Confirmed appointments can be cancelled, and a reschedule becomes a request for staff to approve — or applies immediately when the location opts into auto-approval. Cancelling can notify the location's cancellation-notice email, and so does a move that goes through: a customer moving their own appointment used to change your diary with nothing to tell you. The customer gets a fresh confirmation with a calendar entry that replaces the old one.
• Every time on the page names the clock it is on — the appointment itself, the slots offered when rescheduling, and a request waiting on you.
• Completed appointments show the records they produced — the related sales order, rental, loan, or return.

Pre-visit forms #

Outstanding pre-visit forms tied to the customer's appointments are listed for completion.

Due-date reminders & extensions #

Both rentals and loans support automatic due-date reminder emails and customer-requested extensions:

• Reminders. When a rental or loan is within its location's reminder window, the borrower is emailed once — with the equipment list and a magic-link button into the portal. Each agreement is reminded only once per due date (the marker resets if the due date is extended).
• Extensions. From the agreement's detail page the customer picks a length:
  • Loans: 1, 2, 4, 8, or 16 weeks.
  • Rentals: 1 or 2 weeks, or 1 month — with a live estimated additional cost for the chosen length. Extending a rental only moves the return date; the extra rental is billed through the normal cycle/return billing, so no separate invoice is created at extension time.
• Approval. By default an extension waits for staff approval (each module has an Extension Requests queue with a pending-count badge). With the location's auto-approve toggle on, it's applied immediately. A customer can withdraw a pending request, and approving/declining emails them the outcome.

Configuration #

Portal behavior is configured per account and per location:

Setting	Where	Effect
Business name, logo	Account Settings → Branding (administrators only)	Portal + booking pages + email sender and subject + PDFs
Welcome message	Account Settings → Customer Portal	Sign-in page
Support email	Account Settings → Customer Portal (administrators only)	Sign-in page + footer of every public page
Support phone	Location → Appointments	Appointment details
Cancellation-notice email	Location → Appointments	Notified on portal cancellations
Auto-approve confirmed reschedules	Location → Appointments	Apply reschedules immediately
Default quote validity (days)	Location → Sales	Pre-fills a new quote's "Valid Until"
Loan reminder days / auto-approve extensions	Location → Loans	Reminder lead time + extension approval
Rental reminder days / auto-approve extensions	Location → Rentals	Reminder lead time + extension approval

Security & audit #

Magic-link tokens are validated and consumed on use, and the session is limited to the linked customer's data. Every portal change — cancel, reschedule, edit, return request, extension request, quote decision — is recorded in the change history attributed to the customer who made it. Reminder emails are sent by the scheduled loans:send-due-reminders and rentals:send-due-reminders commands.