What we build
Customer and Vendor Portals
Your customer service team spends half the day answering "where is my order?" Your purchasing team chases vendors for claim documents over email threads that die without a reply. Both sides want the same thing—status, documents, a way to act—and your people are the expensive middle layer relaying it.
A customer or vendor portal opens a controlled window into your operation: outside parties see exactly what you choose to show—order status, shipment tracking, open claims, invoices, spec sheets—and submit what you need from them, in the format your systems need it in. Your internal platforms stay closed; the phone stops ringing for questions a screen can answer.
When you need this
- A large share of inbound calls and emails are status questions your systems already know the answer to.
- Customers email purchase orders, remittance details, or claim photos that someone then re-keys by hand.
- Vendor claims stall because evidence, approvals, and credit memos move through unstructured email.
- Key accounts ask for self-service—order history, documents, reordering—and the honest answer is "call us."
- You will not give outsiders ERP logins, so the alternative has been copying data into emails all day.
What the system does
- Shows customers their orders, shipments, backorders, invoices, and documents—scoped to their account, refreshed from your systems.
- Accepts structured submissions: purchase orders, claims with photos, remittance details, packing slip confirmations—validated before they reach your team.
- Runs vendor claim workflows with deadlines and escalation, so unanswered claims age visibly instead of quietly.
- Enforces strict access boundaries: each outside account sees only its own data, and nothing internal—costs, margins, other customers—is ever exposed.
- Logs every outside action against the underlying order or claim, so your team sees one history whether the touch came from a customer, a vendor, or an employee.
What a vendor portal looks like
A vendor logs in and sees exactly the claims open with your company—what you are asking for, what is overdue, and where their credit memo stands.
Concept Interface — illustrative content, not a client system
Vendor Claim Portal — Vendor View
Millbrook Packaging Supply · open claims with your account
| Claim | Opened | Amount | What we need | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claim 4412: short shipment, PO 7714 | Mar 4 | $2,180 | RMA acknowledgment | Vendor response overdue |
| Claim 4455: pricing discrepancy on invoice | Mar 12 | $640 | Corrected invoice or credit memo | Awaiting cost confirmation |
| Claim 4461: damaged cartons, photos attached | Mar 15 | $390 | Under review by receiving | Ready pending inspection |
| Claim 4398: freight overcharge | Feb 20 | $515 | Credit memo received — reconciling | Ready to close |
Claims unanswered for 10 business days escalate automatically to the vendor's account manager.
How it connects to your existing systems
The portal never touches your ERP directly and never stores its own copy of the truth. It reads order, shipment, and invoice data through the same integration layer as everything else we build, and submissions from outside flow into your internal workflows as structured requests—not emails someone must interpret. A customer PO arriving through the portal can become a validated order through our document workflows without a human re-keying a line.
Related problems and industries
- Customer status requestsThe call volume a self-service window absorbs.
- Vendor claim managementWhy claims die in email, and what a deadline-driven process recovers.
- Wholesale distributionHigh order volume, thin margins, and customers who expect answers now.
- Dental laboratoriesCase status and remake handling for clinics that call twice a day.
Common questions
- Access is scoped at the account level and enforced server-side: a customer account can only ever query its own orders and documents, and internal fields—cost, margin, internal notes, other customers—are never sent to the portal at all. We design the data contract first and test the boundaries before any outside login exists.
- Customers adopt self-service quickly when it answers their top question—order status—without a phone call. Vendors adopt it when it is the channel where claims move fastest, which it becomes once unanswered claims escalate visibly. We keep the email channel open during rollout and let volume shift on its own.
- No. eCommerce is a catalog and a cart aimed at selling. A portal is an account window aimed at the relationship after the sale: status, documents, claims, reorders of contract items. For distributors with contract pricing, the two often connect—the portal supplies the account-specific logic a generic storefront cannot.
- They keep emailing, and those emails still enter the same claim workflow through our document processing. The portal is an acceleration lane, not a gate—nobody's claim gets ignored because they did not log in.
Every status call is a question your systems already answered.
A Workflow Review counts what that relay work costs and defines the window worth opening first.