The client portal

What the client portal is

Beyond the one-time links you send for a single proposal or invoice, Catertoo gives every client a sign-in portal at pay.catertoo.com/portal where they can come back anytime to see everything tied to them. There's nothing to set up on your side: any client contact with an email on file can sign themselves in the first time they visit.

How a client signs in

A client enters their email on the sign-in page, and if it matches a contact on file, Catertoo emails them a one-time sign-in link, no password required (if that email is a contact on more than one of your clients, the email contains one link per client). Each link is valid for 15 minutes and works once; if it expires, they just request a new one from the same page. Once signed in, their session stays open for up to 2 hours of inactivity, and 24 hours overall, before they need to sign in again.

What a client can do

Once signed in, a client sees:

• Your events - every event tied to them, most recent first.
• Your proposals - any proposal that has actually been sent to them, showing whether it's awaiting their response, accepted, or declined. A proposal still in Draft on your side never appears here.
• Your invoices - any invoice that has been sent, partially paid, or paid. One that still has a balance shows a Pay now button that opens Stripe Checkout; a fully paid invoice just shows its status.
• Saved cards - payment methods saved from an earlier payment, which the client can remove themselves at any time.
• Requests - a simple form to ask for something new: the occasion, a preferred date, an estimated guest count, and any notes.
• Messages - a running conversation thread with your team, separate from the one-off reply links on individual proposals and invoices.

A request becomes a lead

When a client submits a request, Catertoo turns it into a lead in your pipeline automatically, tagged with Client portal as its source, so it shows up right alongside your other leads with the client already linked. See Track your lead pipeline for what happens from there.

Isolation between clients

A portal sign-in only ever shows that one client's own events, proposals, invoices, and saved cards, never another client's. If the same email address is a contact for more than one of your clients, that person gets a sign-in link for each client in one email, and each link opens only that one client's own data. Message threads stay private to the specific contact who sent them.

What's next?

• Track your lead pipeline to see how a portal request turns into a lead.
• Invoice and get paid for how an invoice reaches the pay link a client sees in the portal.