Setting up your branded client portal

Before a client portal becomes useful, it has to feel like it belongs to you. A client who clicks a link and lands on a page wearing your logo, your colour, and your business name reads it as part of your service. A page that looks like generic software reads as a tool you bolted on. The setup that gets you from the second to the first takes about ten minutes, and it's worth doing properly before you invite a single person. This guide walks through it in order: brand it, configure what clients see, then test it as a client would.

What the portal actually is

The client portal is the single place your clients go to deal with you. From one link they can review proposals, sign contracts, pay invoices, and check the status of their projects — no separate logins, no chasing four different tools. It's the visible front of everything else Kliently does behind the scenes, which is why getting it set up well matters: it's the part of the system your clients actually see.

Step 1: Add your branding

Open your workspace branding settings and set three things:

1. Logo. Upload a clean version — ideally with a transparent background — that reads well at small sizes. This is the first thing a client sees.

2. Brand colour. Pick the accent your clients already associate with you. It carries through buttons and highlights so the portal matches your site and your proposals.

3. Business name. Set the name clients should see — your studio or trading name, not an internal label.

These three settings flow through every client-facing surface: the portal itself, the proposals clients review, and the invoices they pay. Set them once and the whole experience lines up. A quick note on plans — Kliently's own branding shows on the portal on the Free plan only; paid plans remove it so the space is entirely yours. You can see exactly what each tier includes on the pricing page.

Step 2: Decide what each client sees

The portal has four areas — proposals, contracts, invoices, and project status — and you don't have to expose all of them to everyone. Granular visibility lets you choose which areas each client can see. A retainer client who never receives new proposals doesn't need a proposals tab; a client mid-onboarding might only need contracts and status until the first invoice goes out. Decide this per client as you set them up. We cover the strategy in depth in controlling what each client can see, but the default instinct is sound: show what's relevant, hide what isn't.

Step 3: Turn on the right payment methods

If clients will pay through the portal, enable the methods that suit them before you invite them — every enabled method shows up as a pay button on their invoices. Kliently supports Stripe for cards and wallets, PayPal, Wise, manual bank transfer, and regional rails like SSLCommerz (bKash, Nagad, Rocket) and Razorpay (UPI). Money lands in your own connected accounts; Kliently isn't in the middle of it. Enable what your client base actually uses — the full set is on the payments and integrations page — so nobody hits a wall at the one moment you want to make easy.

Step 4: Invite clients with a magic link

There's no password step, for you or for them. Clients sign in with a magic link sent to their email — they click, they're in. That removes the most common reason a client never opens a portal: the friction of creating and remembering yet another login. You control access per client: you can disable a client's access entirely or rotate their link if it's ever shared too widely. Magic-link access is worth understanding on its own; we go deeper in the magic-link client experience.

Step 5: Test it as a client

Before you roll it out, open the portal the way a client will and check the details that quietly undermine trust:

• Does your logo render crisply, not stretched or pixelated?

• Does the brand colour match your site, or is it a near-miss that looks off?

• Is the business name the one clients expect to see?

• Are only the right areas visible, and do the pay buttons work end to end?

Ten minutes of setup and one honest test pass, and the portal stops looking like software and starts looking like you. From there, every proposal, contract, and invoice your clients touch arrives in a space that feels like a natural extension of working with you — which is exactly the impression you want to make.