Life without a portal
The latest version of anything is somewhere in a 40-email thread.
Hours a week answering 'where are we with…?' that a screen could answer.
Sensitive documents in inboxes are a breach story waiting for a headline.
Premium service delivered over WeTransfer links doesn't feel premium.
Try ClientVault yourself
Our live portal demo: secure document exchange and return tracking for a professional practice. Real screens, real flows, sample data — open it and click around.
What a bespoke portal can include
ClientVault, our live demo, shows a practice-grade portal. Yours matches your service: what clients see, do and sign.
Secure document exchange
Encrypted upload/download with versioning and an audit trail — GDPR-ready by design, hosted in the UK.
Live status tracking
Clients see exactly where their job, case, order or return stands — without asking.
Approvals & e-signatures
Sign-offs happen in the portal, recorded and timestamped, not scattered across inboxes.
Payments & invoices
Invoices presented and paid in the same place the work lives.
Automated chasing
The portal politely pursues missing documents and overdue approvals so your team doesn't.
Your brand, their login
A professional, branded experience that quietly says 'we have our act together'.
One client, one week, start to finish
Portals are hard to picture, so here is a real one. This is the path a client takes through ClientVault, the accountancy portal you can open and click through yourself — the same shape works for a solicitor, a surveyor, a broker or anyone else who collects documents and sends work back for approval.
| They log in and… | What that saves you |
|---|---|
| See exactly what is still needed, item by item, and what has already been received | The “what else do you need from me?” email, and your reply listing it again |
| Photograph a receipt or drag a file in, tagged to the right job or year | Renaming attachments and filing them by hand |
| Read the finished work with the figures explained, then approve or query it | Printing, posting, and wondering whether it arrived |
| Sign it on a phone | Print, sign, scan, resend — and the week that takes |
| See what is owed, how it was worked out, and the reference to pay with | Three emails establishing which invoice this is |
| Message you in the thread attached to their own record | Searching six inboxes for the answer you already gave |
| See their deadlines and what is outstanding on one screen | Chasing people who genuinely did not know |
ClientVault is a demonstration, not a product you buy. It is there so you can judge the standard of the work and see how a portal behaves before you commission one. Yours would be built around your own stages, your own documents and your own wording — a lettings portal tracks tenancies and certificates rather than tax returns, and neither is a rename of the other. Open it and click around →
What a portal is made of, and what each part costs
A portal is not one lump. It is a core with pieces added, and you can see the price of each before you decide — these are the same figures the instant quote uses, not a guide price that moves when you ring up.
| Part | Price | When you need it |
|---|---|---|
| Portal core | £3,400 | Always. Client logins, their own record, the screens they work in |
| Document upload & management | £750 | Anything where they send you files |
| Customer accounts / self-service | £1,100 | They update their own details instead of asking you to |
| Team roles & permissions | £700 | More than one person your side, or partner-only visibility |
| E-signatures & approvals | £600 | Anything that needs signing off |
| Automated SMS & email reminders | £650 | Chasing you would rather not do yourself |
| Online payments (Stripe) | £900 | They settle invoices in the portal |
| Xero / QuickBooks sync | £800 | You would rather not re-key anything into the accounts |
| Third-party connection | £850 | Per system it has to talk to — practice software, a case system, your own database |
| Compliance logging & certificates | £850 | You have to show who did what, and when |
| Reporting | £800 | You want to see throughput rather than guess at it |
| Moving your existing data across | £700 | Nearly always, and it is scoped honestly rather than waved at |
A working portal for a small practice is typically the core plus documents, e‑signatures and reminders: £5,400, delivered in four to six weeks. Add payments and a Xero or QuickBooks connection and it is £7,100. Those are the actual sums of the rows above, not rounded-down teasers, and VAT at 20% is added to them. Ongoing is a care plan at £30, £75 or £150 a month, or nothing if you host it yourself. Price your own combination →
Access, data and the questions procurement asks
Straight answers, including where the answer is “that is an extra” or “we do not claim that”. You should be more suspicious of a supplier who says yes to all of this than one who does not.
Included in every build
- Served over HTTPS, hosted in the UK
- Each client sees their own record and nobody else’s — that is what the core is
- Daily backups, security updates and uptime monitoring on a care plan from £30/month — £75 if you want 2 hours of changes a month with it, which carries into the next month if you do not use it
- Full source code and documentation, yours outright, so your own IT or an auditor can read every line
- No per-user licence, so adding a client costs you nothing
Priced separately, or not claimed
- Staff roles and permissions are a £700 module, not a given — a single-user practice does not need it
- An audit trail of who did what is the £850 compliance module
- We hold no ISO 27001 or SOC 2 certification and will not imply otherwise
- We can build to your policy; we cannot certify your compliance, and nobody honest sells that as a feature
- Penetration testing, if you want it, is yours to commission — and you can, because you own the code
On where the data lives: UK hosting as standard, on infrastructure you can be told the name of before you commit. If your own policy requires something specific — a particular region, your own servers, your existing provider — say so at the scoping stage and it gets built that way or you get told plainly that it cannot be.
From "this is doing my head in" to shipped — in weeks
Free tech audit
We map how you work today and pinpoint exactly what's costing you time or customers.
Fixed quote
A clear scope and a fixed price, in writing. You know the number before we start.
We build
Delivered in weekly increments you can see and steer — no black box, no drift.
Launch
Tested, your data migrated, live in weeks. We're there for the go-live, not gone.
It's yours
Full source, docs and UK hosting. Own it outright — grow it with us or anyone.
Software that fits you — not a subscription you fight
Off-the-shelf
- Monthly per-user fees that grow with your team, forever
- You bend your process to fit the software
- The features you need are locked to the "enterprise" tier
- Your data lives inside someone else's roadmap
Bespoke, built by us
- Fixed price up front — owned outright, no licences, no per-seat fees
- Shaped precisely around how your business actually works
- Only the features you need, so it stays fast and simple
- UK-hosted, GDPR-first, and it grows when you do
Questions we get asked
Who are client portals for?
What does a custom client portal cost?
How secure is it?
Can it plug into our existing systems?
Who can see what?
What happens to our data if we stop working with you?
Can our IT team review it before we commit?
How long does a portal take to build?
How do clients actually log in?
Our clients are not especially technical. Will they use it?
Do we need a mobile app as well?
Get a price in minutes
Answer a few questions about what you need and get an itemised quote you can shape yourself — delivered in weeks, owned outright by you.
Get an instant quote