Customer Portal
The customer portal is a white-label window into a customer’s own orders. Your customer signs in with their own portal account and sees exactly one slice of APEX: their work orders with a plain-language progress timeline, their quotes waiting for a decision, and their certificates and invoices ready to download — under your logo and brand color, not APEX’s.
This guide has two readers:
- The MRO operator setting the portal up — inviting customer contacts, revoking access, understanding what customers can and cannot see. Start with Getting access.
- The end customer using it. The pages Tracking work orders, Quotes & requests, Documents, and Account & invoices are written so you can hand them straight to your customer.
How access works
Nobody signs up for the portal on their own. Access always starts with you: on a customer’s profile (Customers → Portal access) you invite a contact by email. They receive a branded invitation, set a password, and land in the portal — scoped to that customer, permanently.
The invitation link is valid for 7 days; after that you simply send a new one. Revoking a user removes their access immediately. The full walkthrough — both sides — is in Getting access.
What the customer sees
Screen: The portal home. A sticky header shows your company logo on the left and a Sign out button on the right, over a horizontal navigation bar: Home · Work Orders · Quotes · Documents · New Request · Account (plus Invoices when pass-through invoicing is enabled). Below, three KPI tiles —
Open Orders,Quotes for You,Ready to Ship— then panels for “Quotes awaiting you” (with a Review button per quote), “Open work orders”, and “Recent activity”.
| Portal section | What it holds | Guide page |
|---|---|---|
| Home | KPIs, quotes awaiting a decision, open work orders, recent activity. | this page |
| Work Orders | Every job you’ve placed with the shop, with a stage timeline per order. | Tracking work orders |
| Quotes | Quotes published to you — approve or decline right on the page. | Quotes & requests |
| Documents | Certificates, invoices, and reports across all your orders, filterable. | Documents |
| Invoices | Pass-through invoice upload — only when the MRO enables the plugin. | Account & invoices |
| New Request | The request-a-quote form. | Quotes & requests |
| Account | Company info, your profile, change password. | Account & invoices |
The scoping rule is absolute: a portal user sees only their own company’s work orders, quotes, and documents — and only sell prices, never your cost or margin (see what the customer sees in the quoting guide).
Branding
Pre-sign-in pages and the portal itself carry the branding you configure in Settings → Branding: your logo and accent color appear on the sign-in card, the portal header, buttons, and the invitation and password-reset emails. If no branding is configured, the portal falls back to a neutral look.
No messaging thread. The portal has no chat or comment feature. Customers communicate decisions through quote approvals/declines (with an optional reason) and new quote requests — anything else still goes through email or phone as usual.
Some texts inside the portal — status pills such as In Work or SENT, and document-type
names such as FAA 8130-3 — are served in English regardless of language settings.