How a Client Gets In

This section walks through the Client Portal from your client’s side: how they get in, what each screen shows them, and what they can do. Use it to answer “what will my customers actually see?” and to train your office staff on what a client is looking at when they call.

Setting the portal up — buying the module, choosing your web address, deciding which sections clients can see, and inviting them — is covered in Section 21 — Client Portal (Admin).

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

A client cannot sign themselves up. Access always starts with an invitation you send from Settings → Client Portal → Portal Access.

1. The client receives an invitation by email, text message, or WhatsApp, depending on the channels you chose.
2. They open the link — Set Up Your Account in the email, or the link in the text.
3. Verify Your Email appears first. PSS emails a 6-digit code to the address you invited, and the client types it into six boxes. Continue stays greyed out until all six are filled.
4. The Set Password screen appears, branded with your logo. They enter a password twice. The minimum is 8 characters.
5. They are signed in immediately and land on the portal.

• The invitation link is good for 14 days. After that they need a fresh one — use Resend Invitation on the Portal Access tab.
• Once the password is set, the client signs in at your portal address with their email and that password.
• The email they sign in with is the Portal Login Email on their client record, which is not necessarily the same as the addresses that receive your invoices (see 21.10).
• A client who already has a portal password with you — a second client record on the same email, for instance — skips the code and password steps. The invitation link takes them to the sign-in screen with the notice “Your portal access is confirmed. Please sign in with your existing account password, or use”Forgot Password?" below to set a new one."

About the verification step. It only appears for a portal invitation whose account has no password yet — so a client sees it once, on their very first sign-in, and never again. It exists because the login email cannot be corrected by your office after the client accepts (see 21.10): the code proves the invited address really reaches them before the account is tied to it.

• The setup code lasts 15 minutes and allows 5 wrong guesses. After a wrong or expired code, PSS mails a fresh one automatically and says so: “That code is not valid or has expired. We have sent a new code to your email.”
• Asking for codes too quickly is throttled: “A code was sent to your email recently. Please check your inbox, or try again in a few minutes.” The limits are one code a minute and five an hour.
• If you have sent the client a newer invitation since, the older link stops working with “This invitation is no longer valid — it may have been replaced by a newer one. Please open the most recent invitation email, or contact the company that invited you.” Tell clients to use the latest email they received.

Tip: If a client says the code never arrived, the address you invited is the one to check — not the addresses on their client record that receive invoices. Those can differ. Use Re-invite with New Email on the Portal Access tab (21.10) to start again at a corrected address.

Signing in after that

Every visit after the first starts at your portal address, on a sign-in card carrying your logo, with Email, Password (with a reveal toggle) and Continue.

Note: The sign-in card is followed by a Powered by Pool Service Software line. It is the only PSS branding a client ever sees — the rest of the portal carries your name, logo and colours.

Note: The sign-in and password screens are branded with your logo and colours and are written in your company’s language, set by the Locale on Settings → Preferences — not the visitor’s browser language. There is no session yet at that point, so the portal has nothing else to go on.

If they forget their password

The portal has its own recovery flow, separate from the PSS staff login. Forgot Password? below the sign-in card starts it, and all three steps happen on the same page.

1. Recover Password — they enter the email they sign in with.

2. Verify Your Email — PSS emails a 6-digit code, which they type into six boxes. Enter another email goes back a step if they used the wrong address.

• The code lasts 15 minutes and allows 5 attempts, after which they must request a new one.

3. Set New Password — they enter the new password twice. The minimum is 8 characters, and Set Password stays greyed out until both boxes match.

Completing a reset does not sign them in. They are returned to the sign-in screen with their email already filled in and a confirmation that the password was changed.

Note: The portal tells a visitor plainly when an address has no portal access, rather than failing vaguely. The sign-in screen separates no account for this email from incorrect password, and step 1 of recovery answers an unknown address with “No portal account associated with this email” instead of pretending a code was sent. A client who mistypes their address therefore finds out immediately instead of waiting for mail that was never sent. Your PSS staff login deliberately does not behave this way — staff accounts stay unenumerable.

Tip: If a client cannot get past this flow, check the Portal Login Email on their client record (21.10) — recovery only works for the address the portal knows them by.