Client Portal: How to Give Clients Transparency Without Opening Up Your System

Every Friday, the same scene: the client sends a message asking "how are we doing?", and you spend forty minutes putting together a summary, taking a screenshot of the board and writing an email. The following week, you do it all over again. The client isn't being difficult. They're paying for a project, they can't see what's happening with it, and the only way to feel at ease is to ask.

Giving full access to the tool answers the question, but it creates another problem: the client starts seeing drafts, the team's internal discussions and tasks that haven't even been thought through yet. The middle ground is the client portal: a project page built for people outside the team, where you choose what shows up.

What a client portal solves

Three problems that come up again and again at almost every company that delivers services by project:

• Chasing for status. When clients have somewhere to look, the "how's it going?" question goes away. They see whether the project is on schedule, at risk or late, and how much has already been delivered.
• Rework caused by lack of visibility. A client who only sees the final result finds out about misalignment too late. One who follows the stages corrects course early, while it's still cheap.
• Lost approvals. When approval happens in a loose conversation, nobody remembers later who approved what. In the portal, it happens on the deliverable itself and gets recorded.

What to show

The golden rule: show what the client needs to trust and decide, and nothing more. In practice, these are the items that matter most.

Project status

Whether it's on schedule, at risk or late, the percentage completed and the time elapsed. In Tasskee, the portal compares the time that has passed with the work already completed and warns you before the project slips, and you set the "at risk" margin yourself.

Project stages

The project's workstreams appear in a read-only schedule. A closed stage shows its percentage and status; an open stage shows the deliverables the client is allowed to see. They understand where things stand without needing a crash course in project management.

Deliverables and what's waiting on them

The home screen gathers what's waiting on the client, what's in progress and what's been completed. It answers the question "do I need to do anything?" right away.

Delivery cycles, when there are any

In projects with sprints, the client sees the cycle in plain language, such as "12 of 15 deliverables completed" and, if you want, the burndown chart for those who like numbers.

What to hide

Transparency doesn't mean opening everything. Some things don't help the client and can cause confusion or noise.

• Internal tasks. Reorganizing files, reviewing the team's process, studying a new technology. That's yours.
• Internal discussion. The debate about how to solve a problem stays among you until there's a conclusion.
• Work in draft. Showing what isn't ready yet invites opinions before their time.
• Workstreams for other clients or for internal use. A workstream created tomorrow must not leak by default.

In Tasskee, control is section by section. In the project's "Client portal" tab, you turn on what you want to show: overview, tasks, workstreams, sprints and schedules. For each one, you choose between "all, including new ones" and "only these". Choosing "only these" ensures that an internal workstream created later doesn't show up unless someone decides it should. The "See what the client sees" button lets you check the result before you invite anyone.

How this reduces chasing and rework

Without a portal	With a portal
Client asks for status by message	Client checks whenever they want
You build a summary and send a screenshot every week	Progress is the same as the team's tasks
Adjustments only surface at the final delivery	Client follows the stages and corrects early
Approval in a loose conversation	Approval on the deliverable, recorded on the task
Full access or none	You decide what each client sees

One important detail: the number the client sees is the same one the team sees, because it comes from the same tasks. There's no "client report" put together by hand that could differ from reality. That reduces the chance of arguing over which number is right.

Delivery approval

Clients can comment on and approve a deliverable through the portal, and everything is recorded on the task, with the team notified. Two practical consequences:

• Fewer "I hadn't seen it." The deliverable shows up in one place, with a date, and the approval or comment sits right next to it.
• Fewer back-and-forth emails. The comment is created on the right task, and the assignee is notified, instead of the message getting lost in an inbox.

When the project requires a formal sign-off with a signature, the path is different: the delivery acceptance form covers that, with its own form for collecting a simple electronic signature.

Guests don't take up a seat

A common question from anyone thinking about opening the portal: "am I going to pay for another user for every client?" In Tasskee, a portal guest doesn't take up a seat. Each plan has a guest limit (5 on Start, 50 on Pro, unlimited on Max), and they don't count toward the users you pay for each month. That lets you give access to the people who need to follow along without making the plan more expensive.

How to get started with one client

1. Pick a project in progress and a client who tends to ask a lot of questions.
2. Turn on only the essential sections: overview and stages. Add tasks later.
3. Check with "See what the client sees" before sending the invitation.
4. Tell the client what they'll find and agree that, from now on, the status lives there.
5. Keep tasks up to date. The portal is only trustworthy if the team keeps its work updated, and using it is what builds the habit.

If you still send a periodic report, keep it for a while as a commented summary, in the format of the weekly status report, while the client gets used to looking at the portal. Over time, the report becomes the week's highlight and the portal becomes the source of reference.

Things to watch out for

• Align expectations. The portal shows progress, but it doesn't replace a conversation when there's a hard decision to make.
• Review what's visible when you open a new project. The setting is per project, and it's worth checking each one.
• Don't use the portal to hide problems. The "at risk" signal exists to be seen. A client who discovers a delay on their own trusts you less than one who was told.

Example: an agency with three active clients

Picture an agency in Porto Alegre with three projects running in parallel: a website, a campaign and a visual identity. Before the portal, the coordinator spent Friday morning answering the same question in three different conversations. Each client got a summary in a different format, and approvals were scattered across messages.

After organizing each client's project in Tasskee and opening the portal, things changed. The website client sees the stages and what's waiting for their approval. The campaign client sees the delivery cycle. The visual identity client sees only the pieces ready for review, and comments directly on them. The coordinator still sends the weekly summary, but now it's short, because the detail is in the portal.

Anyone who works with many clients at once might also be interested in using customer service to centralize conversations, which complements the portal when the client prefers to talk to the team instead of just looking things up.

Frequently asked questions

Does the client need to create an account?

They're invited to the project and access the portal. For details on the invitation, see the client portal page.

Does the client see hours and amounts?

The portal shows what you turn on. Amounts and hour costs have their own permissions in the system, separate from access to project progress, and what appears to the client is decided by the portal setting, section by section.

Can I change what the client sees in the middle of the project?

Yes. The setting lives in the portal tab inside each project, and you can adjust it whenever you want. If a project moves to a new phase, it's worth reviewing what's visible.