Client Portal

The client portal is the view of Bitment your firm's clients sign into. It shows only the slice of your apps a client responds to, not the tools you use to run the engagement. A client never authors a signature request or builds a form; they open what your firm published, act on it, and leave.

Your team uses the portal every day without opening it directly: it is the surface a client sees when you share a file, send a document to sign, or send a form to fill out. Understanding it helps you set expectations with clients and troubleshoot what they're looking at when they ask you a question.

Where to find it

Clients sign in at your firm's own address and land in the portal automatically; there's nothing for them to install. Inside your workspace, open a client record and go to its Portal page to manage access and preview exactly what that client sees.

Key concepts

Portal access: a per-contact toggle that controls whether a specific person at a client can sign in at all.
Contact: a person at a client, from the client's Contacts page. Portal access is granted per contact, not per client.
Full-screen takeover: the signing and form-fill experiences open outside the portal's normal tabs, as a focused, distraction-free screen.
Portal preview: a read-only view inside your workspace that renders the real portal as a chosen contact, so you can see exactly what they see.

What a client sees

The portal has up to four tabs, matching what your firm has sent that client:

Files: the shared file space between your firm and the client. They can view, download, and (depending on how a file was shared) upload or rename files.
Signatures: documents your firm sent them to sign, split into what still needs their signature and everything else.
Forms: questionnaires and intake forms your firm sent, split into what needs their input and what's already submitted.
Bookkeeping: if the client has a book of accounts linked to them, this tab shows their ledger: chart of accounts, transactions, journal entries, and reports, scoped to their own data.

A client only sees a tab once your firm has something in it. A client with no books linked to them, for example, never sees a Bookkeeping tab.

Give a contact portal access

Portal access is on by default for a contact with an email address, and it's managed per person, not per client, so you can invite one contact at a client without opening the portal to everyone there.

Open the client and go to its Portal page.
Find the contact in the access list. A contact with no email address is shown but can't sign in until one is added.
Use the switch next to their name to turn access on or off.

Turning access off doesn't delete the contact or anything they've done. It blocks their next sign-in: instead of the portal, they see a message asking them to contact your firm. Turn it back on and they're straight back in.

A client signs in with the email address recorded on their contact record. The portal is branded with your firm's name, shown in the header, so a client working with more than one firm can tell whose portal they're in.

If a client is a contact at more than one of your clients, or is named on documents or forms belonging to more than one client record, their session isn't locked to a single client: they see everything they're a recipient or signer on, correctly scoped.

The signing experience

When your firm sends a document for signature, the client's Signatures list splits it into Awaiting your signature and everything else (completed requests, and ones they've already signed but others haven't). Opening a request that needs their signature takes over the whole screen: no portal chrome, no distractions, just the document and their fields.

The client opens a request from their Signatures list.
Opening it marks the request as viewed.
They complete their assigned signature fields and submit.
Once submitted, they land on a confirmation state and the request moves out of their pending list.

If a request isn't actually assigned to them, they see a read-only, informational screen instead of a signing session.

The form-fill experience

Forms behave the same way. The client's Forms list splits into Needs your input and Submitted.

The client opens a form.
It opens full-screen, the same focused takeover as signing.
Their answers autosave as they go, so leaving partway through and coming back later picks up where they left off.
Submitting the form marks it complete and generates a document in the client's Files space with their answers, so both sides have a record.

The client-facing bookkeeping view

If a book of accounts is linked to the client, the Bookkeeping tab gives them their own ledger: chart of accounts, bank and other connected feeds, journal entries, reports, and more, depending on what your firm has enabled for that book.

AI features are hidden in this view. A client never sees the Chat/AI-import surface, the AI-assisted CSV import, auto-reconcile, or any model picker. Those stay operator-only tools your team uses to work the books; the client's view is the ledger itself.

Preview the portal as a client would see it

Rather than guessing what a client's screen looks like, you can render the real thing.

Open the client and go to its Portal page.
Under Portal preview, use the Previewing as picker to choose a contact.
Click around Files, Signatures, and Forms exactly as that contact would see them.

The preview is read-only: every mutation is blocked, so you can look but not accidentally change anything on the client's behalf. If the chosen contact's access is turned off, the preview shows the same access-disabled screen they would see. The preview is available on desktop; on a phone or small screen, only the access-management list is shown.

Tips

Keep contact email addresses accurate. A contact without an email can't be granted portal access at all.
Turning a contact's access off is reversible and non-destructive: nothing they uploaded or signed is deleted.
If a client says they can't find something you sent them, check the Portal preview first: it's the fastest way to see exactly what's in front of them.