Client portal

A client opens the portal at the /portal page of your Atlas address and signs in with their own account. They see none of your internal workspace and nothing beyond what you share with them.

Access is granted one engagement at a time. A client invited to several engagements, including engagements with other firms that use Atlas, sees them all in one list and chooses which to open.

The portal presents your firm rather than the software. The name, tagline, accent colour and logo you set in Settings, Branding appear throughout, and every email a client receives is signed with your firm's name.

Owners and administrators set these once, in Settings, Client Delivery, under Client portal. Everybody who works in client delivery can read them.

• Client portal on or off. Off refuses every portal page, every new invitation and every acceptance. Clients keep their access, and it returns when you turn the portal back on.
• Share the budget summary. On, clients see how much of the agreed budget is used, as a percentage. Off, the commercials page is not offered.
• Days a finished engagement stays open, from 0 to 365, 90 unless you change it. When an engagement closes or ends early, its client can still read it for this many days.
• Days an invitation can be accepted, from 1 to 30, 14 unless you change it.
• Default access level for new invitations, restricted guest unless you change it. Whoever issues an invitation can still choose the other level.

Open Settings, then Branding. The display name, tagline, accent colour and logo you set there appear across your workspace and in your clients' portal. Upload a logo as a PNG, JPEG, WebP or GIF image of up to 256 KB.

The client contact is on file with the email address they will use. The invitation is sent to that address, and the account that opens the portal must be the same address.

1. 1

   Choose how much the client will see

   Choose what the client may do. A restricted guest can read everything you share but cannot approve, reply, upload or answer a request. A guest can do all of those. A new invitation starts at the level your firm sets in Settings, Client Delivery, which is restricted guest unless you change it.

2. 2

   Issue the invitation

   Open the engagement, go to its people tab, and use the portal invitations panel. Choose the contact and the level of access, and limit the invitation to particular workstreams if the client should see only part of the work. Atlas creates a single-use link addressed to that contact.

3. 3

   Confirm that it reached them

   Atlas reports what actually happened rather than assuming success. The invitation was delivered to an address, or the contact has no address on file, or this workspace is not configured to send mail, or the mail provider refused it. In every case other than the first, the link is shown on screen so you can pass it to the client yourself through a channel you trust.

4. 4

   The client signs in

   The portal opens only for a signed-in account, so that nobody holding a copied link can read a client's work. A client who already has an account signs in with the invited address, and a client who does not creates one with it. An account with a different address is told so and asked to sign in with the invited one.

5. 5

   The client arrives

   The first time a client opens an engagement portal, they are met by a short introduction that says what the portal is, what is being asked of them, and where to raise a question. It appears once for each engagement and then stays out of the way.

A client who accepts holds a guest seat on your plan for as long as their access lasts. Withdrawing access releases it.

Both levels see the same shared work. They differ in what the client may do.

• Restricted guest: reads, cannot act
• Guest: reads, approves, replies and uploads

They hold restricted guest access, which reads but cannot act. Invite them again as a guest. Their access changes when they accept.

Nothing reaches the portal by accident. Each kind of record has its own rule, and a record marked confidential never reaches it.

• Status reports appear once a report is issued and shared with the client.
• Change requests appear once they are submitted and shared. A draft is never shown.
• Threads appear once you share them from the thread, under Who can see this.
• Deliverables appear once you share them from the deliverable, where the client can follow them and sign them off.
• Meetings appear once you share their forum on the meetings tab, and only after the minutes are circulated or approved.
• Documents appear once someone at the firm shares them. Documents the client uploads are always in their library.
• Any share can be withdrawn, and the engagement record keeps who shared or withdrew it, and when.

Internal conversation. A thread reaches the client only after you share it, and a message you mark as an internal note stays within the firm even on a shared thread.

Atlas emails a client when something needs them, signed with your firm's name and linking to the right page of their portal. Nothing is sent while the portal is off.

• A status report is in their portal.
• A deliverable, minutes or a change request is waiting for their approval. Only a client who can act receives these.
• Your firm replied in a thread they can read.
• A request or an action they owe is overdue, once when it falls overdue and then once a week while it stays overdue.
• Each client turns these on or off for themselves on the Notifications page of their portal. All four are on until they choose otherwise.

When a client replies in a thread, the person at your firm who owns the thread is told in Atlas.

The portal is at your firm portal web address once you have set one up, and always at the /portal page of the address your team uses for Atlas. A client signs in with the account they used to accept, and sees every engagement they have been invited to.

A link in a portal email opens the right engagement directly, even when the client works with more than one firm.

A client who also works in an Atlas workspace of their own reaches their portals from Client portals in their account menu.

Owners and administrators set this up in Settings, Client Delivery, under Client portal web address. There are two kinds of address, and a firm can use both.

An address under the portal domain

• Choose a name for your firm of 3 to 40 lower-case letters, numbers and single hyphens, beginning and ending with a letter or a number. The portal is then at that name followed by the portal domain shown on the screen.
• The screen says whether a name is free as you type. Names that read as part of the platform, such as www, api, login or support, are reserved for it.
• Once saved, new invitations and emails link to the new address at once, and links already sent keep working.
• Clearing the name returns new links to the main Atlas address. Clients who already have access keep it.
• There is nothing to set up in DNS for this kind of address.

A domain your firm owns

1. 1

   Choose the address

   Use a subdomain of your firm domain, such as portal.yourfirm.com. The bare domain, yourfirm.com, cannot be used, because it cannot point anywhere else while it serves your website. A firm can have up to 3 domains in use at once.

2. 2

   Add it in Settings

   Enter the address under Domains you own. Atlas then shows the two DNS records to publish, with a button to copy each name and value.

3. 3

   Publish the two records

   At the company that manages your domain, add a TXT record named _atlas-portal followed by your address, holding the value shown, which proves your firm owns the address. Then add a CNAME record for the address itself, pointing at the target shown. Some providers add your domain to a record name for you, in which case enter only the part before it.

4. 4

   Let Atlas find them

   Atlas looks for the records automatically for 7 days, and Check now looks at once. A new record can take from a few minutes to a day to be visible. When both are found, the domain waits for the Atlas team to approve it.

5. 5

   Approval and the secure certificate

   Once the domain is approved, a secure certificate is issued for it, usually within an hour. It then shows as live for clients, and you are told in Atlas.

What each state means

Waiting for DNS records

Add the records below at the company that manages your domain. Atlas checks for them regularly, or you can check now.

Waiting for Atlas approval

The records are in place. The domain is waiting for the Atlas team to approve it.

Issuing certificate

Approved. The secure certificate is being issued, which usually takes less than an hour.

Live for clients

Your clients can open the portal at this address.

Setup failed

Setting up this domain failed. The Atlas team has been told.

Not approved

The Atlas team did not approve this domain.

• While a domain of your own is live, invitations and emails link to it rather than to the subdomain.
• Clients sign in on the Atlas sign-in page and are brought back to your address automatically. They need no separate account for it.
• Removing a domain stops the portal answering there at once. New links fall back to your subdomain, or to the main Atlas address, and the domain record is kept for your history.

Revoke an invitation that has not been accepted from the invitations panel. Withdraw an accepted client's access from the access register on the same tab, or turn the portal off for every client in Settings, Client Delivery.

An invitation can be accepted for 14 days, unless your firm sets a different period in Settings, Client Delivery. After that it stops working and a fresh one is needed, which limits how long a link that goes astray remains useful.

Days a finished engagement stays open, from 0 to 365, 90 unless you change it. When an engagement closes or ends early, its client can still read it for this many days.

• Open the link in the invitation email and sign in with the address it was sent to, or create an account with that address. If the link has expired, ask your contact at the firm for a new one.
• No Atlas account yet? Open the link in your invitation: the sign-in page then leads with an email code. Enter the address the invitation was sent to and choose Send code to my email. Entering the code creates your account and takes you back to the invitation.
• Return to your portal at the /portal page of the address in your invitation. You see every engagement you have been invited to.
• Open an engagement and go to Notifications to choose which emails you receive about it.
• If you can read an engagement but cannot approve, reply or upload, your access is read only. Ask your contact at the firm to change it.

The portal is laid out like the rest of Atlas and painted in the firm's colour. This is what a signed-in client finds on an engagement they can open.

• A navigation bar on the left, grouped into Home, Work, Conversations, Governance, Files and People. Each item shows how much is waiting on the client. The bar folds to icons on a wide screen and opens from the menu button on a phone.
• A portfolio home that lists every engagement the client can open, with what is waiting on them, the health and progress of each, and what is due in the next 14 days. A client with one engagement goes straight to its dashboard.
• An engagement dashboard with progress, overall health and its history, the next milestone, deliverables by stage, requests by age, actions due, changes awaiting a decision, the latest status report, upcoming meetings and recent activity.
• An analytics page with charts over the last 30, 90 or 365 days or the whole engagement: deliverables accepted and time in review, requests and turnaround, milestones planned against actual, changes and their effect, health over time, how quickly the firm answers threads, and commercials when the firm shares them.
• Every section opens with its key figures and a chart, then a list the client can search, filter and sort, and the browser remembers the choice. A row opens its details in a side panel or on its own page.
• Risks and decisions lists only the risks, issues and decisions the firm chose to show the client. The rest of the firm's register stays private.
• A client who can act can start a new thread from the Threads page or from the dashboard, with a title, a message and its kind. The engagement team is told at once. A read-only client can read threads but cannot start or answer them.
• The bell in the top bar shows what changed on the engagement since the client last looked, with an unread count. Opening the bell marks its items as read after a moment, and Mark all as read does it at once. The bell checks for news every minute while the tab is in view.
• Upcoming meetings offer Add to calendar, which downloads a calendar file the client's own calendar opens.
• Documents can be searched and filtered by who shared them, by type (PDF, spreadsheet, document, presentation, image, text or archive) and by month. A PDF or an image opens in place; any other file downloads.
• A deliverable's page shows its review history: each version issued to the client with its files, each client review round with its outcome and dates, and the sign-offs from the client's organisation with their comments. Drafts and the firm's internal reviews never appear.
• A client who can act can send several files at once, by dragging them in or choosing them, against a request or into the document library, with progress shown for each file.
• The dashboard and the analytics page print cleanly. Use the Print button and choose Save as PDF in the print dialog to keep a copy.
• The account menu in the lower left sets light, dark or the device's theme, and the language. The language is saved to the client's profile as well as the browser, so it follows them to another device.

The invitation did not arrive

When you issue an invitation, the panel says whether the email was sent. Where it was not, copy the link it shows and pass it to the client through a channel you trust.

The link has expired or stopped working

An invitation works once and only until it expires. Issue a fresh one from the same panel.

The client is told the invitation is for another address

They are signed in with a different email address from the one invited. Ask them to sign in with the invited address, or record the address they use on the contact and invite them again.

The client is told the portal is turned off

Your firm has turned the portal off in Settings, Client Delivery. Turning it back on restores every client's access.

The client sees an empty page

Nothing of that kind has been shared yet, or the invitation is limited to other workstreams. Share the records they should see.

A finished engagement has disappeared

It has passed the number of days a finished engagement stays open, set in Settings, Client Delivery.

The client cannot approve or reply

They hold restricted guest access, which reads but cannot act. Invite them again as a guest. Their access changes when they accept.

Atlas cannot find the DNS records

Check that each record name includes your full address and that the CNAME record is the only record with that name, since a CNAME cannot share its name with any other record. Remove any AAAA record for the address. A new record can take up to a day to spread.

The domain stays at issuing certificate

The secure certificate is still being issued. If your domain has CAA records, they must allow the certificate authorities letsencrypt.org and pki.goog, or no certificate can be issued.

The domain was not approved

The reason is shown beside the domain in Settings. Remove it, put right what the reason names, and add it again.

• Client DeliveryEngagements, deliverables, status reports and the rest of the module the portal is part of.Module guide
• Collaboration and chatHow your team talks among itself, next to the work.Guide