Customer, Vendor, Employee and Partner Portals: Which to Build First

Key Takeaways

There are four common portal types: customer, vendor, employee and partner.
Each gives a different group secure self-service, connected to your systems.
Build the one that takes the most weight off your team first.
Once the first is live, adding another reuses much of the same work.

A portal is a secure login where a group of people can do for themselves what now goes through your team by phone and email. The group decides the type. Most businesses end up with one or two of the four below, and the trick is knowing which to start with.

Customer portal

For the clients you sell to. They sign in to check orders and quotes, view and pay invoices, and track delivery status. A customer portal usually takes the most weight off a support or accounts team, because the questions it answers arrive all day.

Vendor portal

For the suppliers you buy from. They see their purchase orders, submit invoices against them, and update delivery dates. A vendor portal ends the email back-and-forth with suppliers and brings invoice and delivery data in clean, structured against the order.

Employee portal

For your own team. Staff raise leave and expense requests, view payslips and documents, and self-serve the routine asks that otherwise land on HR and managers. An employee portal is a good first project when most of your inbound is internal.

Partner portal

For resellers and partners. They track deals and pipeline, check stock and pricing, and download sales material. A partner portal suits businesses that sell through others and need to give partners current information without emailing it out.

Which to build first

The simplest way to choose is to look at where your inbound calls and emails actually go:

Order, invoice and delivery questions: build the customer portal.
Supplier purchase orders and invoices: build the vendor portal.
Leave, expenses and payslip queries: build the employee portal.
Partner deal and stock questions: build the partner portal.

Start with the one group that generates the most routine contact. Because the portals share the same connection to your ERP and back office, the second one you build reuses much of the first, so you do not start from scratch each time.

Frequently asked questions

What are the main types of portal?

The four common types are a customer portal for the clients you sell to, a vendor portal for the suppliers you buy from, an employee portal for your own team, and a partner portal for resellers and partners.

Which portal should we build first?

Build the one that takes the most weight off your team. Look at where your inbound calls and emails go: if it is order and invoice questions, build the customer portal; if it is supplier purchase orders and invoices, build the vendor portal.

Can we build more than one portal?

Yes. The portals share the same connection to your ERP and back office, so once the first is live, adding another for a different user group is quicker and reuses much of the same work.