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How to give clients one place to review work without turning feedback into a chase

Give each client one secure review portal for projects, updates, feedback, and requests—without a Clipflow account.

Updated

Give clients visibility without giving them your whole workspace

When a client has to ask for an update, hunt through email, or find last week’s review link, the working relationship starts to feel harder than it should. A portal is a standing page for one client. They open a single link, bookmark it, and see their projects laid out as a board. No account, no password, no fresh link in their inbox every Tuesday.

Share links are for a moment: here is the cut, tell me what you think. A portal is for the relationship. Both use the same link infrastructure, so a portal is effectively a share link that points at a whole board rather than a handful of files.

Why use a portal?

Common problems solved:

  • Sending a new review link every time something is ready
  • Clients asking where a project is up to because they have nowhere to look
  • Requests arriving by text, email, and voice note with no record
  • Clients seeing more of your workspace than you intended

What you get:

  • One URL per client that stays valid
  • A board they can read without an account
  • An optional request form so new work arrives in the right place
  • Control over how much they see and whether they can add anything

Before you start

You need permission to edit organization settings. Projects that should appear on the portal need to exist in the organization first.

Step 1: Create the portal

  1. Open Organization settings → Portals.
  2. Choose Add portal.
  3. Give it a title. Clients see this, so use their brand name.
  4. Save. Clipflow creates the portal’s share link at the same time.

Step 2: Choose what it shows

Setting What it controls
Project scope Whether the portal shows every project or a narrower set
Board layout How projects are arranged on the page
Colour scheme Light or dark, to sit closer to the client’s brand
Read only Whether the client can only look, or can interact
New project enabled Whether the client can request new work from the portal

Read only is the setting to get right first. Leave it on for clients who should watch, and turn it off when you want them contributing.

Turning on new project gives the client a way to ask for work that lands in your workspace as a project, rather than as a message you have to transcribe later.

Step 3: Add your contact details

Portals carry a contact block: name, email, phone, opening hours, and a short message. Fill these in. It is the difference between a page that looks abandoned and one that looks like a service.

The message is a good place for how you work: turnaround times, what you need from them, when you are offline.

Copy the portal’s share link and send it once. Tell the client to bookmark it.

Links can carry an expiry. Leave a portal’s link without one, since the whole point is that it keeps working.

Most agencies run both:

Views and comments on both are recorded, so you can tell whether a client actually opened the thing they said they never received.

Tips and best practices

  • One portal per client, and keep the organization matching. Mixing two clients into one portal is how the wrong brand sees the wrong work.
  • Start read-only. Open it up once the client is comfortable with the board.
  • Use hidden projects for internal work. Anything that should not appear on the portal should not be visible in the scope you gave it.
  • Check it as they see it. Open the portal link in a private window before you send it.
  • Say what the statuses mean. A client seeing “Changes required” needs to know that is normal.

Frequently asked questions

Does a client need a Clipflow account to use a portal?

No. The portal link works without one.

Does a portal use a seat?

No. Portals are links, not memberships. See Plans and Billing.

Can I see whether the client opened it?

Yes. Views are recorded against the portal’s share link.

Can a client comment through a portal?

Turn off read-only and they can interact. With read-only on, they can look but not contribute.

Can one client have two portals?

Yes, though it is usually a sign the scope on one of them needs narrowing instead.

What happens to the portal if I delete the client's organization?

The portal belongs to the organization, so it goes with it.

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