How do I give my customers a link to sign in and see their documents?

Under General, organization admins can claim a short web address for their business. Depending on your plan, that address becomes the page your customers use to sign in and see their own documents and payments. This card only shows up for admins, if you're not one, you won't see it on the General tab at all.

Claim your web address

1. Go to Settings, then the General tab, and scroll down to Your web address.
2. Type a short name for your business, lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens, 3 to 63 characters.
3. Click Save address. It's yours the moment it saves, nobody else can claim the same name once you have it.

If your plan includes the client portal

If your plan includes it, a link to your customer page appears above the form as soon as you've saved a web address. Click Copy and send that link to your customers, or put it on your website.

When somebody opens it they type the email address you already have on file for them, and we email them a link. Which link they get depends on the customer, and there's nothing for you to pick:

• A customer you've invited to the client portal gets a one-time sign-in link, and never sets a password.
• Everybody else gets their own read-only progress link instead, showing where their work stands and anything you're still waiting on from them. Most of your customers are in this group, because a customer only has portal access if somebody on your team invited them from their contact record.

Either way it only works for an email address already saved on one of your contacts. Someone who isn't a contact of yours sees the same "check your email" message and is sent nothing at all.

For what the progress link shows, what your AI will and won't tell a customer who asks, and how to choose the steps they see, read How do my customers check where their job is?.

What a signed-in customer can download

The Documents tab of the portal is the one place a customer can download files, because only they can open it:

• From your business. Files your team shared with them. Only an organization admin can share one: open the customer's record, go to Documents, tick Share with customer and click Upload document. The file shows "Shared with customer" on your side. Other team members can still upload files, which stay private to your team. Shared the wrong file? An organization admin can click Stop sharing next to it, and it leaves the customer's portal straight away.
• Signed agreements. A copy of every agreement they signed in the portal. See How do I get a customer to sign an agreement?.
• What they sent you. Their own uploads are listed so they know you have them, but they cannot download them again.

A file that is still being checked for viruses shows "Being checked" and can be downloaded once the check passes. The progress link never offers any file to download, because anyone holding that link could open it.

If your plan doesn't include it yet

You can still claim your web address now, it's reserved and waiting for you. You won't see a sign-in link until your plan includes the client portal, once it does, the name you already picked starts working on its own, you don't need to redo anything.

Changing or removing it

Type a new name and click Save change to switch it, or click Remove address to drop it entirely. Removing it immediately breaks every sign-in link you've already sent your customers, only do this if you mean to stop them using it.