Managing Portals

Audience: MSP staff configuring and managing client onboarding. Company users should start with Open your onboarding portal.

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Before you begin

Your organization must have Client Onboarding enabled. Viewing requires onboarding read access; creating or changing templates and portals requires onboarding write access and active billing. Convert to Client requires onboarding management access. Your role and company scope can limit what appears. Portals are onboarding instances launched for a specific company. When you create a portal from a template, it copies the template’s phases and tasks into a draft workspace where you track progress, communicate with clients, and manage the onboarding process.

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Launching a Portal

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Portal Lifecycle

Portals move through these stages:

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The Onboarding Tab

The company onboarding page has six tabs for managing the portal: Overview, Tasks, Documents, Pages, Activity, and Settings. Where a company has multiple portals, select the intended portal on Overview and confirm its name before making changes.

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Overview Tab

The main dashboard showing:

• Portal status with progress percentage
• Phase-by-phase progress bars showing completion
• Task summary with counts by status
• Quick actions for managing the portal lifecycle

The Overview action bar is also where you open Manage dates (custom milestones and the portal countdown) and link an MSPortal or PSA project. See Custom Dates and Countdowns.

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Tasks Tab

The primary workspace for managing onboarding tasks.

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Status Legend

At the top, a legend shows the four task statuses with their icons:

• Pending (circle) — Not yet started
• In Progress (clock) — Work underway
• Completed (checkmark) — Done
• Blocked (lock) — Waiting on a dependency

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Phase Accordions

Tasks are grouped by phase in expandable accordions. Each phase header shows:

• Phase name and status badge
• Task completion count (e.g., “3 of 7 completed”)
• Progress bar

Click a phase to expand it and see all tasks within. Each phase header also has status controls: Start Phase, Complete Phase, Reopen Phase, and Complete All Tasks to mark every task in the phase done at once.

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Task Rows

Each task row displays:

• Status icon — Click to update, right-click for all options
• Task title — With evidence type badge (signature, credentials, meeting, etc.)
• Owner badge — MSP or Client
• Due date — Red if overdue, amber if due within 3 days
• Assigned user — Who is responsible
• Priority indicator — For high and critical tasks

Click a task row to expand its detail panel, which shows:

• Evidence content (signatures, credentials, uploaded files, form responses)
• Task description
• Comment threads — both client-facing comments and internal notes
• Checklist items (if attached)

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Task Comments and Internal Notes

Each task has two separate conversation streams:

• Client-facing comments — shared between your team and the client. Both sides can post and read, enabling back-and-forth without leaving the portal.
• Internal notes — visible only to your MSP team for tracking work, blockers, or handoff notes. Clients never see these.

A toggle (Client-facing / Both / Internal) controls which stream you’re viewing. A small indicator on each task shows the comment count and who posted last, color-coded by author so you can spot tasks awaiting a reply.

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Task Assignment

Assign tasks to MSP team members individually: For bulk reassignment, click Reassign in the toolbar to enter selection mode. Use checkboxes (with shift-click for range selection) to select multiple tasks, then assign them all at once.

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Sending Task Emails

Send task summary emails to client contacts:

• Send All Tasks — Emails a complete summary of all tasks with status and due dates
• Send Phase Tasks — Emails tasks for a specific phase only
• Send Task Reminder — Send a reminder for an individual task

Each email includes task descriptions, status badges, due dates, and a link back to the portal.

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Documents Tab

The document review queue where you triage files uploaded by clients. Summary tiles across the top show counts for Uploaded (needs review), Approved, Requested (still required), and Rejected. Documents are grouped by phase.

• Search — find documents by name, phase, or original filename
• Filter by status — All Documents, Requested, Uploaded, Approved, or Rejected (each shows a count)
• Review — for an uploaded document, click Review, optionally add notes, then Approve or Reject
• Download — open the Files panel to download each uploaded file (with uploader and upload date)

Required documents that haven’t been uploaded are flagged so you can see what’s still outstanding.

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Pages Tab

A review view of the Client Pages attached to this portal. The left pane lists the portal’s assigned pages with Visible and Hidden counts and a search box; the right pane previews the selected page. A source badge shows whether a page is still a Shared page (linked to your library) or a Portal snapshot, and the View as dropdown opens the client portal as a specific contact so you can read the pages in place. Pages are copied into a portal from the template when it’s created. To change which pages appear, edit the template’s Client Pages before launching. See the Client Pages guide.

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Settings Tab

Configure this portal’s client display sections and task interaction mode, then click Save Changes. These settings apply to this portal rather than changing the template defaults. Use View as afterward to check the result for the relevant contact or role.

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Activity Tab

Recorded portal activity, with server-side search and type filtering. A recorded event is useful evidence of an action, but is not by itself proof of email delivery or successful storage of a downloaded file. Events tracked include:

• Portal and phase status changes
• Task completions and assignments
• Document uploads, approvals, and rejections
• Contact access and invitations
• Signatures and credential submissions
• Meeting scheduling
• Comments and questions

Use the search bar to find events by description, actor name, or email. Use the type filter dropdown to show only specific event categories (Portal, Phase, Task, Document, Contact, etc.).

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Exporting an Onboarding to Excel

Audience: MSP staff with onboarding access. Company users do not see the button, because the workbook includes MSP-only items and every client response. Open the company’s Onboarding tab, pick the portal in the Portal selector if the company has more than one, and choose Export to Excel in the page header. The button appears on every onboarding tab. MSPortal downloads an .xlsx workbook for the selected portal. The export changes nothing in the portal. The workbook always has an Overview sheet. Other sheets appear only when the portal has rows for them. Each data sheet has a frozen, filterable header row. Files stay in MSPortal; the workbook lists their names. Credentials and secure file contents are never exported. The workbook uses your tenant’s brand color and your current language. To export the plan rather than a client’s run through it, use the Excel tab in the template’s Import / Export dialog. See Templates.

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Contact Management

Manage who has access to the client portal.

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Adding Contacts

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Contact Roles

Select an available client role configured by your MSP. Roles help identify responsibility and can affect task visibility or assignment. Common examples include:

• Primary Contact
• IT Contact
• Decision Maker
• Finance Contact
• Office Manager

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Managing Access

• Send invite email — Send the access link again if the contact lost it
• Revoke Access — Immediately disable a contact’s portal access
• Regenerate invite link — Create a replacement access link; the previous link and active sessions are invalidated. Share the replacement deliberately.

Contact activity is tracked — you can see when each contact last accessed the portal and how many times.

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Previewing as a Client

Use the View as dropdown to open the client portal using a selected contact or role context. It appears in three places:

• The portal’s Overview tab
• The portal’s Pages tab
• The portal list under Settings > Onboarding

Pick a contact from the dropdown, and the portal opens in a new tab in an MSP preview with that contact’s visibility context. If the portal has no contacts yet, preview by role instead. Preview works on Draft portals. You do not have to start the portal or send invites to see what clients will get, which makes this the right way to test a template before it reaches a real client. Build the template, create a Draft portal on a test or internal company, then View as.

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Meeting Scheduling

Schedule meetings directly from meeting-type tasks.

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Credential & Signature Review

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Reviewing Credentials

When a client submits credentials through a credential handoff task:

1. Open the task detail panel.
2. Read Retrieve onboarding credentials and secure files before choosing Reveal & Delete or Download & Destroy.
3. Prepare to retain the returned information securely. These actions consume the stored submission; opening a task does not retrieve it.

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Reviewing Signatures

When a client signs a signature task:

1. Open the task detail panel to view the signature image
2. See signer details: name, email, IP address, and timestamp
3. If a document was attached, the signed document is also available

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PSA Integration

Use Link Project to choose MSPortal Projects or the company’s available PSA project system. MSPortal Projects supports native project tracking without a PSA. Provider availability, company mapping, permissions, and PSA defaults determine external options. Link Project and Create & Link save when used; they are not unsaved selections awaiting portal activation. Creating tickets is another write action in the chosen project system. Review the target and selected tasks first.

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Linking a Portal to a PSA Project

Once linked, a PSA project badge appears on the portal overview showing the linked project name with a direct link to your PSA.

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Creating PSA Tickets from Tasks

Convert onboarding tasks into PSA tickets to track them in your ticketing workflow. Click any task’s PSA ticket badge to open the ticket directly in your PSA.

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Logging Time

Log time entries against onboarding tasks directly from the portal.

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PSA Project Defaults

Set tenant-wide defaults for how onboarding portals connect to your PSA in Settings > Onboarding > PSA Projects (this tab appears only when a PSA integration is active). You can configure:

• Auto-create tickets — create a ticket for each task when a project is linked
• Status sync — keep ticket status in sync bi-directionally
• Default billable — whether new time entries default to billable
• Provider defaults — the default board/team, priority, status, and ticket type per connected PSA (plus Halo category, impact, and urgency)

All values are chosen from dropdowns populated from your synced PSA data — there are no IDs to type.

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Completing a Portal

When all tasks and phases are complete:

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Managing Portals from Settings

The portal list in Settings > Onboarding > Portals provides a centralized workspace across companies. Use the status filters and search to select a portal, inspect its detail, and open its actions. Available actions depend on its status:

• Open — Navigate to the company’s onboarding page for this portal
• Archive — Deactivate the portal and revoke all client sessions. Portal data is preserved but clients can no longer access it. A confirmation dialog explains the impact before proceeding.
• Restore — Return an archived portal to draft status so it can be reactivated. Only available for archived portals.
• Delete — Permanently remove the portal and all associated phases, tasks, documents, and contacts. This action cannot be undone. A confirmation dialog requires explicit approval.

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Dashboard Integration

Your MSP dashboard shows onboarding information in two places:

• Active Onboarding Banner — Quick-link pills showing each active portal with company name, portal name, and a progress bar. Click to jump directly to the portal.
• My Onboarding Tasks Widget — A card showing your personally assigned onboarding tasks across all active portals, ordered by phase and task order. Click any task to go to its portal.

Both are visible only when you have onboarding permissions and there are active portals.

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Best Practices

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Frequently asked questions