Choosing Your Portal URL

Your portal needs its own web address before you can invite anyone. You pick the first part of it; PSS supplies the rest.

• The address is https://yourname.poolportal.app.
• Most companies use their own name — for example, Wotter Pools would use wotterpools.poolportal.app.
• The name must be unique across all PSS companies, so a common name may already be taken.
• Allowed characters are lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens only — no spaces, capitals, or punctuation.
• It must start and end with a letter or number, so pools- and -pools are refused even though every character in them is allowed.
• The field accepts up to 30 characters.
• Shorter is better. Clients type this address, read it in emails, and may save it as a bookmark.

Note: Your portal address always ends in .poolportal.app — for example, yourcompany.poolportal.app. Addresses shown in screenshots are examples.

To set it:

1. Open Settings → Client Portal → General.

2. Type your chosen name into the Portal URL field. A character counter tracks the 30-character limit, and a warning — Only lowercase letters, numbers, and hyphens allowed — appears the moment you type a character that is not permitted; Check stays disabled until you remove it.

   

3. Click Check. PSS confirms whether the address is free:

   • This domain is available — the name is yours to take, and the button changes to Apply.
   • This domain is already taken – try something else — another company has it. Edit the name and check again.
   • This is your previous address — applying it switches back to it — you are re-entering an address you renamed away from (see Changing your portal address later).
   • If the name starts or ends with a hyphen, Check finds nothing wrong on screen but returns no result — the field simply stays as it was. Remove the hyphen and check again. (The full rule, enforced by the server, is 1–63 characters, lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens only, starting and ending with a letter or number.)

   

4. Click Apply. The address is filled in on screen, but nothing is published yet: the line under the field reads Not active yet — click Save to publish https://yourname.poolportal.app, and the status pill at the top of the page reads Portal is not active — save to activate.

5. Scroll to the bottom of the General tab and click Save. This step is required — Apply only stages the address. If you leave the page without saving, the address is not kept. Once saved, the line switches to Domain Active with your full address as a link, a Copy link action appears beside it, the status pill turns green, and the Preview portal button appears at the foot of the tab.

   

   

Note: Apply does not save. This is the step people miss: the status line reads Portal is not active — save to activate until you finish with Save, and PSS refuses to send invitations until a Portal URL is saved. If you try to leave with unsaved changes, PSS asks Leave page with unsaved changes? — choose Stay on page and save. PSS confirms a save with Client Portal settings saved.

Once the address is saved:

• Copy link puts the full address on your clipboard, ready to paste into an email or your website.
• Preview portal at the foot of the General tab opens your portal home page in a new tab, so you can see what clients will see. No sign-in is needed and no real client data is shown — the client-specific cards use sample figures.
• Client invitations can now be sent. PSS refuses to send invitations until a Portal URL is saved.

Changing your portal address later

You can rename the address after clients are already using it, and PSS keeps the old one working so nothing you have already sent breaks.

• Change the name the same way you set it: type, Check, Apply, Save.

• Apply opens a Change Portal URL? dialog before anything happens. It shows your CURRENT address and the NEW one side by side, and lists what the change will do:

  • your current address “keeps working and forwards here, so invitations already sent and bookmarks clients saved still open the portal”;
  • if you already have a forwarding address, that it “will stop working — only your current address and the one before it forward”;
  • that existing clients’ accounts are not affected;
  • to share the new URL with clients going forward.

  Choose Yes, change URL to go ahead, or Cancel. If the address you are replacing was never saved, the dialog says so instead — “This address was never saved, so nothing is forwarding from it yet” — because there is nothing to forward.

• The new address becomes your current address. It is the one shown here, the one Copy link copies, and the one PSS puts in every invitation from that moment on. Underneath it, the panel shows the one you came from: https://oldname.poolportal.app still works and sends clients here.

• The old address becomes your previous address. It keeps working and forwards anyone who uses it to the same page on the new address — so an invitation you sent last year, a bookmark, or a link on your website all still land in the right place.

• A company has two addresses at a time: the current one and the previous one. Rename a third time and the oldest of the three stops forwarding.

• Both of your addresses stay reserved to you. No other PSS company can take either one while you hold it.

Note: The forwarding address is a safety net, not a second front door. Give clients the current address, and use Copy link rather than typing an address from memory — that way the link you hand out is always the live one.

Note: A client who was already signed in at the old address will be asked to sign in again when the forward takes them to the new one. Their account, password and history are untouched — the two addresses are separate web sites as far as the browser is concerned, so the sign-in does not travel between them. It is worth a line in your announcement if you rename a portal that clients are actively using.

Tip: Renaming twice in quick succession is the one way to lose a link. If you rename and then change your mind, rename back rather than picking a third name: your previous address is still yours, so switching back to it restores every old link at once. When you type it, Check confirms as much — “This is your previous address — applying it switches back to it” — rather than reporting it as available.