Customer and client portals
Customer portal development for B2B companies.
Secure portals where customers check invoices, reorder and raise requests, for distributors, manufacturers and service firms. First releases typically cost $12,000–$30,000 and take 6–10 weeks.
Illustration: two account screens from one portal. Each account sees only its own records, the boundary between them is checked on the server and internal items stay locked.
What is a customer portal?
A customer portal is a private website where your customers sign in to serve themselves. They see their own orders, invoices, documents and requests, and finish routine tasks without emailing your team. A client portal is the same idea for professional-services firms, built around matters or projects. Orvenant LLC, based in Lewes, Delaware, designs and builds custom portals for businesses in the US and UK, and sets up or extends portals on HubSpot, Salesforce and Microsoft Power Pages.
B2B ordering and reorder portal
For distributors and wholesalers. Customers see their own prices and order history, repeat an order in a few clicks, track deliveries and download invoices and statements without calling your sales desk.
View B2B ecommerce developmentDealer and partner portal
For manufacturers with dealers, distributors or channel partners. Each partner tier sees its own catalog, price lists and marketing files, registers deals and files warranty claims in one place.
Secure client portal
For law firms, advisory and consulting firms, agencies and property managers. Clients follow their matter or project, exchange documents securely, sign, pay and send requests instead of email attachments.
View Professional servicesSupport and account portal
For service and software companies. Customers open and follow requests, find answers in your knowledge base, manage the users on their account and update billing details.
View Customer support automation
A portal earns its place when the same questions arrive every week. If customers rarely need to sign in, a better email or a shared folder may be enough, and we will tell you so before you spend on a build.
What can customers do in the portal on day one?
A first release usually covers one or two of these jobs, chosen from the questions your team answers most. Each job reads from, or writes to, the system that already owns the record, so nobody types the same data twice.
Invoices and statements
Download current and past invoices, see what is open or overdue and get a statement for any period. The figures come straight from your accounting system.
Orders and reorder
Check order status and delivery tracking, repeat a past order and build a new one from the products and prices agreed for that account.
Documents and e-signature
Find the current contract, certificate or report, upload what you ask for and sign agreements inside the portal through an e-signature service such as DocuSign.
Requests and tickets
Raise a request, attach files, see who is handling it and get a reference number, instead of starting another email thread.
Users and roles
A customer administrator invites colleagues and decides who can order, approve, see prices or only view, without asking your team to change access.
Payments
Pay an invoice by card or bank debit, save a payment method and manage a subscription through a payment provider such as Stripe.
How does AI work inside a customer portal?
Most portals stop at showing records. Ours can also put an AI assistant inside the signed-in account. It answers from your knowledge base and from that customer’s own records, and it can carry out a short list of tasks for them. It works with the customer’s permissions, never more, and every step is recorded.
Answers from your knowledge base and the customer’s records
A customer asks “where is my order?” or “what does my contract say about returns?” and gets an answer that cites the record or article it came from. Search is filtered to the signed-in account on every query, so another customer’s records are never in reach.
Actions inside the signed-in account
The assistant can reorder, reschedule a delivery or raise a request. Each action is a defined tool that runs in the customer’s own session, never with an account number the model typed.
Permission checked on the server
Before an action runs, the portal checks on the server that this user may do it for this account. The model never decides who is allowed to do what.
A person approves high-impact actions
Credits, cancellations, address changes and anything above a limit you set wait for approval by your team or by the customer’s administrator.
Every step in the audit log
Questions, answers, actions and approvals are logged with the user, the account and the time, so you can see what the assistant did and why.
Document intake
Customers upload purchase orders, forms or certificates. The portal reads the fields, a person confirms anything uncertain and the result lands in the right record. Text inside an uploaded file is treated as data, never as instructions.
Triage
New requests are sorted by topic, urgency and language and routed to the right person on your team, with a short summary of the account’s recent history.
View AI agents & assistants
- OpenAI
- Claude
- Google Gemini
We use OpenAI, Claude or Google Gemini models, chosen per task, behind one layer so the model can change without a rebuild. The guardrails follow the risks named in the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications 2025, such as prompt injection, data leaks and excessive agency, and the NIST Generative AI Profile (NIST AI 600-1). The assistant tells customers they are talking to AI and hands over to a person when it cannot help.
Should you build a custom portal or use HubSpot, Salesforce or Power Pages?
If you already pay for a CRM, its portal may be enough. We set up and extend these platforms as well as building custom portals, so our advice does not depend on which one you pick. Test each option against your hardest customer journey, not the vendor demo.
| Option | Enough when | Gets hard when | Ongoing costs to plan for |
|---|---|---|---|
| HubSpot customer portal (Service Hub Professional or Enterprise) | Customers mainly need to follow their support tickets and read your knowledge base. | You need orders, invoices, account pricing or company-level roles. The portal is built around tickets. | Service Hub Professional or Enterprise seats. |
| Salesforce Experience Cloud | Your customer data and processes already live in Salesforce and you have admin capacity to configure it. | Partner tiers, many logins or custom screens push you into custom Salesforce development. | Login-based or member-based Experience Cloud licenses on top of your Salesforce edition. |
| Microsoft Power Pages | Your data is in Dataverse or Dynamics 365 and the portal is mostly forms, lists and documents. | You need a highly custom interface or many signed-in users across several sites. | Monthly capacity per authenticated user, per site. |
| No-code portal builder | You need a simple portal quickly, on top of a spreadsheet or database, for a small number of accounts. | Permissions, integrations or data volume outgrow the tool, or you need the code to run elsewhere. | A subscription per workspace or per user. |
| Custom portal | Your workflow, pricing or integrations are specific to your business, or several systems must meet in one place. | Your journeys are standard. Then a platform is usually cheaper to start. | Hosting and the third-party services the portal uses. |
Platform plans and prices change. We check the current plan and license terms with you before recommending one.
Custom portal vs off-the-shelf software
How to test a configured product and a custom build on the same difficult journey before you commit.
Read the guide: Custom portal vs off-the-shelf software
Which systems can the portal connect to?
The portal shows data that already lives in your systems and writes changes back to them. We agree, field by field, which system owns each record, so the portal never becomes a second source of truth.
Live or synced: balances, order status and open tickets are read from the source system when the customer opens the page. Catalogs, price lists and history are copied on a schedule or when the source system reports a change. New orders and requests go through a queue, so a slow system does not lose them.
When a system is slow, down or limiting requests, the portal says so. It shows when the data was last updated, holds new requests in the queue until the system responds and alerts your team, instead of showing a clean screen with old numbers.
CRM
HubSpot, Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics 365
Contacts, companies, deals and tickets. The portal reads account details, opens requests as tickets and keeps new users in step with CRM records.
View CRM & API integrations
Help desk
Zendesk or another help desk
Requests raised in the portal become tickets your support team already works from, and replies show up for the customer.
ERP and accounting
NetSuite, QuickBooks, Xero, SAP Business One or Odoo
Invoices, statements, prices, stock and orders, including Dynamics 365 Business Central. Balances and order status are read live; catalogs and price lists sync on a schedule.
Payments and e-signature
Stripe and DocuSign
Invoice payments, saved payment methods and subscriptions through Stripe, and agreements signed inside the portal through DocuSign. Payment and signature events are verified before anything is marked paid or signed.
Microsoft Entra ID, Okta or Auth0
Business customers sign in with their own company account through SAML or OpenID Connect, and users are added or removed automatically when their company changes staff.
How does each customer see only their own data?
Every request is checked on the server against the signed-in user and the account they belong to, including file downloads and AI search. We write the access rules down before any screen is designed: who can list, view, download, create and edit each kind of record, and what happens the moment access is revoked.
Example
| Record | Customer user | Customer administrator | After access is revoked |
|---|---|---|---|
| Invoices and statements | Yes, view and download | Yes, view and download | No access |
| Orders and reorder | Yes, create and follow | Yes, create, approve and follow | No access |
| Requests | Yes, create and follow | Yes, follow every request on the account | No access |
| Draft invoices and internal notes | No, internal until approved | No, internal until approved | No access |
| Users on the account | No | Yes, invite and remove | No access |
| Another account’s records | No, checked on the server | No, checked on the server | No access |
A similar email domain is not proof that two people belong to the same account.
Built into every portal
- Roles inside each company account, set by the customer’s own administrator
- Company sign-in through SAML or OpenID Connect, and multi-factor authentication
- An audit log of sign-ins, downloads, changes and AI actions
- Sign-in and the main journeys designed and tested against WCAG 2.2 AA, including accessible authentication
- Data export and deletion requests handled through the portal, to support GDPR and UK GDPR duties
- Tests before launch that try to open another account’s records by changing a link or identifier
How do you move customers from email, spreadsheets or an old portal?
Most portals replace something: an inbox, shared spreadsheets or a portal that no longer fits. We plan the move so customers keep working and your team keeps a way back.
Map accounts and history
We match each customer to one account, clean up duplicate contacts and agree which history comes across: orders, invoices, documents and past requests.
Move users without password resets
Existing users sign in with their current password and are moved to the new portal on that first sign-in, or skip passwords entirely through their company sign-in. There is no mass reset email.
Run old and new side by side
A pilot group uses the new portal while the old one stays available, and we compare what both show for the same accounts before inviting everyone.
Cut over and keep a way back
We freeze changes on the old system, load the final changes, send customers a direct link to their first task and keep the old system readable until the new one has settled. Public help pages get permanent redirects, so search traffic follows.
View Website redesign & migration
How much does customer portal development cost?
These are indicative ranges for the portal work we do most often, in US dollars. They give you a realistic budget before the first conversation; the exact price follows a full review of your request in a written proposal.
| Scope | What it usually includes | Indicative price | Typical timing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Focused first release | One or two customer journeys and one integration | $12,000–$30,000 | 6–10 weeks |
| Multi-role portal | Several user roles and several integrations | $30,000–$70,000 | 10–16 weeks |
| Complex portal | Two-way ERP sync, company single sign-on, AI actions or a migration | From $70,000, scoped after discovery | Set in the proposal |
| Portal on HubSpot, Salesforce Experience Cloud or Power Pages | Setup or extension of the platform’s own portal | $6,000–$25,000 plus platform licenses | Set in the proposal |
| AI assistant added to an existing portal | Answers from your knowledge base and account records, with scoped actions | $5,000–$20,000 plus model usage | Set in the proposal |
Not included in these ranges: third-party licenses (for example your CRM, portal platform or e-signature plan), hosting, and AI model usage, which the model provider bills by volume. Your proposal lists each one and who holds the account.
These ranges are indicative, not a quote. The exact price follows a full review of your request and is set out in a written proposal. Integrations, single sign-on, data migration and approval rules are what most often move a project within or above its range.
Customer portal development cost
The decisions that move a portal estimate, with a worked example of two first releases.
Read the guide: Customer portal development cost
How a portal project runs
You see working software early and decide on each next step with real results in front of you.
Discovery
We review your request, the systems involved and the questions customers ask most, then agree the first one or two journeys, the access rules and a written proposal.
Gates: Proposal approved
First release
We build those journeys end to end on your real systems and test them with a pilot group of your customers.
Gates: Pilot accepted
Expand
Further journeys, roles, integrations and AI actions follow in small releases, each with its own scope and price.
Gates: Release accepted
Handover
You receive the documentation, runbooks and an admin guide, and we train the people who will run the portal day to day.
Who owns the portal, the code and the data?
Ownership of the code, the data and every account is set out in your agreement before work starts. The split below is where most projects begin; your proposal confirms it.
Your team
Approves what customers may see, owns the customer relationship and the source systems, and decides who administers the portal.
- Customer relationships
- Source systems
- Approval of shared records
- Portal administrators
Orvenant
Builds and tests the portal, documents every integration and access rule, and can support it after launch under a separate agreement.
- Build and tests
- Integration documentation
- Access rules
- Admin guide and training
Agreed in writing
Code and data ownership, hosting accounts, third-party licenses, support after launch and how another team can take the portal over.
- Code and data ownership
- Hosting accounts
- Third-party licenses
- Support after launch
See a customer portal working
Follow an example portal from an invitation to a resolved request, and switch between a customer administrator, a customer user and your staff.
Customer portal walkthrough
An interactive example with example data: invitation, shared view, request and an exception.
See the walkthrough: Customer portal walkthroughSome of the teams we have worked with.
Across talent, fitness, mobility, payments and local commerce.Questions about customer portals.
How much does customer portal development cost?
A focused first release with one or two customer journeys and one integration typically costs $12,000–$30,000. A multi-role portal with several integrations costs $30,000–$70,000, and complex portals start from $70,000. These ranges are indicative: the exact price follows a full review of your request in a written proposal. Third-party licenses, hosting and AI usage are not included.
How long does it take to build a customer portal?
A focused first release usually takes 6–10 weeks from the approved proposal, and a multi-role portal 10–16 weeks. The biggest variables are access to your systems’ APIs and test environments, and how quickly the access rules are agreed.
Should we build a custom portal or use the portal in HubSpot or Salesforce?
Use the platform when your journeys are standard and your data already lives there. HubSpot’s customer portal suits ticket-based support on Service Hub Professional or Enterprise, and Salesforce Experience Cloud suits teams with Salesforce admin capacity. Build custom when ordering, pricing, documents or several systems must meet in one place. We do both, and we test the options on your hardest journey before you commit.
Can the portal connect to our CRM and ERP?
Yes, through their APIs: HubSpot, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365, NetSuite, QuickBooks, Xero, SAP Business One and others. Early in discovery we confirm that your subscription includes API access and a test environment, and we agree which system owns each field.
What happens when our ERP or CRM is slow or down?
The portal shows when its data was last updated, keeps new orders and requests in a queue until the system responds, and alerts your team. Request limits and expiring connections are ordinary conditions with accounting and ERP systems, so the portal is designed for them from the start.
How do you make sure one customer never sees another customer’s data?
Every request is checked on the server against the signed-in user and their account, including downloads and AI search. Before launch we test with two controlled accounts and try to open one account’s records from the other by changing links and identifiers.
Can our business customers sign in with their company account?
Yes. Customers can sign in through their own Microsoft Entra ID, Okta or other identity provider using SAML or OpenID Connect, with multi-factor authentication. Users can be added and removed automatically when their company changes staff.
What can the AI assistant do without a person?
Only what you allow and what the signed-in customer could do themselves: answer questions, look up their records and run low-risk actions you choose, such as repeating a past order within a limit. Credits, cancellations, address changes and anything above that limit wait for a person to approve. Every step is logged.
Is our customer data used to train AI models?
We use the model providers’ paid business APIs, whose published terms exclude API data from model training by default. Before any customer data is sent, we confirm the provider’s data-processing terms, retention and region with you, and the assistant only receives the records of the signed-in account.
Which AI models do you use, and can we switch?
We work with OpenAI, Claude from Anthropic and Google Gemini, and choose per task on answer quality, cost and data terms. The portal calls models through one layer, so a model can be changed without rebuilding the portal.
Can customers move to the new portal without resetting their passwords?
Yes. Existing users sign in with their current password; the new portal checks it against the old system once and moves the account across. Business customers can instead sign in with their company account and skip passwords entirely.
Who owns the code and the data?
Ownership of the code, the data and the accounts is set out in your agreement before work starts. The proposal also lists the hosting and third-party accounts and who holds each one, and the handover includes the documentation another team would need to run the portal.
Does the portal work on phones, or do we need an app?
The portal is a responsive web application that works on phones, tablets and desktops, so most customers need no app. If your customers need offline use or device features, a mobile app can share the same back end.
Which security certifications does Orvenant hold?
Orvenant does not hold a SOC 2 report or an ISO 27001 certificate. We design and test access controls against the OWASP Top 10, can host the portal with cloud providers that publish independent security audit reports, and answer your security questionnaire control by control.
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Lead capture & follow-up
We connect your website forms, inboxes and campaigns to your CRM, so each enquiry is accepted once, reaches the right person with its context and stays visible until someone has followed it up.
View Lead capture & follow-upWebsites & platforms
From a clear business website to a connected customer portal, we design and develop web experiences around the people who use and manage them.
View Websites & platforms
Bring the request your customers send most often.
Tell us who your customers are, which systems hold their records and what they keep emailing about. We will shape a first release around that one job and give you an indicative price before any commitment.
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