The client portal - Cargoflow Support

Summary

The client portal is the part of the system your customer sees. From there they check their stock live, follow their receipts and shipments, give notice of what is arriving, request what they want shipped and upload their documents, without back-and-forth calls and emails.

Each person at the customer signs in with their own account and sees only their company’s data, and only the sections the warehouse opened for them. They never see locations, rates, invoices or anything from the warehouse’s operating system.

This article is the overall tour. The detail of each task is in:

For the full picture of everything the customer receives (portal, emails, reports), read What the customer sees and when.

Before you start: what must be in place

The portal works with a double key: the warehouse must have each section contracted and enabled, and the person’s account must have access to it. For a customer to use it you need four things:

The client portal module contracted and enabled for the warehouse. It is switched on per warehouse in the Cargoflow modules panel, which usually only the superadministrator sees.
The module behind each section enabled in that same warehouse: inventory for the Inventory section, receiving for Receipts, shipping for Shipments and KPIs for KPIs. A section without its module does not appear, even if the account has access.
The customer linked to the warehouse. Their home warehouse (where they were created) always counts; others are added on the Warehouses tab of their record. See Attach a customer to warehouses.
At least one portal user, created on the customer’s Portal Users tab, with the right access level for each section (No access, Read or Write). See Portal users.

To create portal users you need the Configure Clients permission, which the Admin and Superadministrator roles have by default. How modules, roles and permissions combine is explained in Modules, permissions and access.

Signing in

The customer signs in on the same login page as your staff, with the email and password the warehouse gave them. The system recognizes a portal account and takes them straight to the Overview page, in their home warehouse (or the last one they picked, if they have several).

There is no open sign-up: nobody at the customer can create an account on their own. If they forget their password, they can use the Forgot your password? link on the login page and receive an email link to choose a new one.

Important: if someone on your team opens a portal link (for example, the button in a receipt-confirmed email) and has permission to see that receipt or shipment, the system sends them to the equivalent warehouse view. Without permission, they get an access-denied page. The portal is only for customer accounts.

The header and the menu

At the top left you see the customer’s name and the label «Client Portal». On the right:

The warehouse — if the customer operates in several warehouses with the portal enabled, a selector to switch; if only one, its name in grey.
EN / ES — switches the language of the whole portal instantly.
Sign out — ends the session.

Below is the menu: Overview, KPIs, Inventory, Receipts and Shipments. Overview is always there; each of the others appears only if it is enabled in the selected warehouse and the account has at least Read on it. That is why two people from the same customer can see different menus, and the same person can see a different menu after switching warehouses.

The Overview page

Element	What it shows	When it appears
Notify inbound	Opens the inbound notice form.	Write on Receipts.
Notify shipment	Opens the shipment notice form.	Write on Shipments.
On-hand units	The total pieces the customer has in the selected warehouse.	Read on Inventory.
Active SKUs	How many different products have stock above zero.	Read on Inventory.
Open receipts	Receipts that are neither confirmed nor cancelled (Pending, In progress or Captured).	Read on Receipts.
Open shipments	Shipments that are neither shipped nor cancelled.	Read on Shipments.
Recent receipts / Recent shipments	The last five of each with their status; View all opens the full list.	Read on the section.

What the customer can do in each section

Section	With Read	With Write, in addition
KPIs	Sees the KPI cards the warehouse marked for the portal, computed only from their data.	Does not exist.
Inventory	Sees their stock by SKU, what is available, what is reserved and its aging.	Does not exist.
Receipts	Sees the list and detail of their receipts, expected against received, and the documents their company uploaded.	Gives inbound notice, edits or cancels it while the warehouse has not started, creates new products and uploads documents.
Shipments	Sees the list and detail of their shipments and the documents their company uploaded.	Requests shipments (they arrive as drafts), edits or cancels them while still drafts and uploads documents.

What happens on the warehouse side

Everything the customer does in the portal lands in the same flows your team uses:

An inbound notice creates an advance ship notice (ASN) and a pending receipt with its lines. The staff bell shows «New arrival notice / receipt (ASN)» if that event is on for the warehouse. From there the normal path follows: From notice to stock.
A shipment notice creates a draft shipment and the bell shows «New shipment notice». Your team confirms, allocates and dispatches it: From order to departure.
An uploaded document appears among the receipt or shipment attachments, marked as uploaded by the customer.
When the warehouse confirms the receipt or closes the shipment, the customer may get the matching email, depending on their Notifications tab. See Emails and reports to the customer.

How those internal alerts are configured is explained in The bell and live alerts.

Example: a week with the portal

Valley Distributors stores goods in the Principal warehouse. The warehouse created two accounts: Ana López (traffic) with Write on Receipts and Shipments, and Luis Pérez (purchasing) with Read on Inventory and KPIs.

Monday. Ana gives notice of a delivery for Wednesday: 400 pieces of SKU DV-100 and 120 of DV-200, with her purchase order PO-5531 as Reference and the packing list as a PDF. A pending receipt appears in the warehouse and the bell rings.
Wednesday. The truck arrives; the warehouse counts 398 pieces of DV-100. Ana sees «Expected 400 / Received 398» in the detail and, once confirmed, gets the receipt-confirmed email.
Thursday. Luis checks Inventory: 518 pieces in total, all in the 0–30 day range.
Friday. Ana requests a shipment of 150 pieces of DV-100 to Northern Trading Co. The warehouse sees it as a draft, confirms and allocates it; in the portal it moves to Allocated and then Shipped.

What the portal does not do

It does not show invoices or balances: the portal is about operations, not collections. Invoices are sent by email.
It does not export inventory to Excel. The customer can get it by email as PDF and Excel; see The daily inventory and the monthly summary.
It does not let them change a notice the warehouse has started working, nor edit receipts or shipments created by the warehouse.
It has no profile page: name, email and access are changed by the warehouse.
It has no notification bell. Everything the customer receives arrives by email.
It does not show locations inside the warehouse, internal lots or the warehouse’s internal paperwork.

Customers with several warehouses

The portal’s warehouse selector comes from the customer’s home warehouse plus the warehouses attached on their Warehouses tab that have the portal enabled. Switching warehouses switches the whole portal: inventory, receipts, shipments, KPIs and new notices, which are created in the selected warehouse.

Important: attaching a customer to a second warehouse opens it in that warehouse’s portal, but it does not add the customer to the staff’s customer list or pickers in that warehouse: those only show customers created there. Before offering the customer a second warehouse in the portal, agree with your team how it will be operated. See Working with several warehouses.

Best practices

One account per person, with the minimum access they need.
Give Write only to whoever sends inbound notices or requests shipments.
Use the same email for the portal account as for the customer contact: that way the receipt-confirmed email includes the button to view the detail in the portal.
After creating the account, sign in with it once to check the menu shows what it should.
Explain to the customer that notices are reviewed by the warehouse: the date they request is not a confirmed appointment.

Troubleshooting

The customer signs in and gets a «not found» page.

The portal is not enabled for their warehouse. Check the module in the Cargoflow panel, or that their warehouse is active.

«Your portal account is not linked to a client. Contact the warehouse.»

The account lost its customer or the customer was removed. Check the customer record and, if needed, create the account again from its Portal Users tab.

A section is missing from the menu.

The account is on «No access» for that section, or the section is not enabled in the selected warehouse. If the customer operates in several warehouses, try switching.

«Your account does not have access to this section. Contact the warehouse.»

The customer opened a direct link to a section where their account is on «No access» or only Read (for example, the notice form). The warehouse changes it on the Portal Users tab.

The Notify inbound or Notify shipment buttons are missing.

The account only has Read. It needs Write on Receipts or Shipments.

The receipt-confirmed email has no button to view the detail online.

The button only appears if one of the email recipients is also a portal user, with the same email and access to that section.

Frequently asked questions

Can a customer see other customers’ data?

No. Everything in the portal is filtered by the account’s customer and the selected warehouse. Asking by URL for another customer’s receipt, shipment or document returns «not found».

Does the customer see their invoices?

No. It is a product decision: the portal shows operations, not collections. Invoices are emailed from billing.

How do they change their password?

With the Forgot your password? link on the login page, which emails them a link. The warehouse can also set a new one on the customer’s Portal Users tab when editing the account.

Does the portal alert the customer to anything?

Not inside the portal: it has no bell. The customer gets emails (receipt confirmed, shipment shipped, daily inventory, monthly summary and invoices) according to what the warehouse configures on their record.