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welcome to day 14 of vlogmas in today's video I'm going to walk you through my client portal so every time I sign a new client now I give them access to their own client portal and this is where we're managing their project so instead of going back and forward with email or uploading things at 100 different one places we both have access to this one space everything is managed here we both can see the progress we can edit we can update and all that good stuff now I will say this is something I've only recently introduced I've used it with three clients so far and so far it's gone well but I'm still a little bit on the fence about using it because I know that some clients aren't so good with technology so I'm still a little bit in the testing period but I thought I'd share it with you in case it's something you want to implement in your business now in terms of giving away templates today I've got two to share the first one is my actual client portal that I use for website design so if you're a designer absolutely use it customize it make it your own and if you're not a designer you will have that as a reference point of what a filled in one looks like and I'll be sharing a blank one with you as well so you can customize add in your own steps and adjust it to your own business so hopefully giving away those two will set you up well and as we go through this video you'll see how it works and how to edit and customize it now I'm going to break it down into a few parts first we'll go through the client portal then we'll go through the backend databases that run the client portal and then to finish off I'm going to show you how I add this in my projects in action task database so that the client only sees their client portal but I'm managing things on the back end in my projects database and we're going to see how those two intertwine so it's not duplicating tasks in a bunch of different places so to begin let's make my big head a little bit smaller because it doesn't need to be that big we'll move over here and I'll walk you through the portal so at the top here I'll change this to the client's logo obviously I'll change the name out to their name I'll add a little welcome message here and then I usually embed a limb video so I'll just record a quick couple of minute video and I'll share it in here showing them how to use and edit the client portal so they're not confused on what to do then over here on the right we have a project tracker so they can see their progress and I'll show you how that works in a minute then we have help and support and this basically replaces email so instead of sending emails all the time they can come in here they can add a new message they can give it a name we'll just call it new message then they can open it up they can add in their details and then they can change the status here to needs review or if I'm adding a message for them I could change it to client action required once they've done that say it's reviewing something we can come in here change it to client approved and then I will mark it as complete and yet it's still here so everything is stored in one place there's no going through Gmail it's only our project in here so this is just for us then if we come down a little bit you'll see I've got a project management section and we've got a bunch of different views here so I've got a step-by-step process and you'll see here I've broken it down into my various stages then we have a project timeline now nothing is appearing here because I haven't added dates in but as soon as I add dates they will appear here then we have all the documents related to the project we have our meetings here and then we have resources and this is all based off of this we're just filtering it by what type of Step it is for example invoices and payments would be a document so here is the main page and they can just go through and say we're starting with project inquiry they can open it up now sometimes clients want a follow-up to their inquiry call or I just invite them to book a 20-minute call with me whenever they need so I'll include that in here and I'll just insert my scheduler from Acuity so it's just a case of embedding that in here if you use a different platform that works too so they can go through this step and once they've booked that they can go back to the client portal and I can change this to complete they can view all of their invoices and their payments here once I invoice them in PayPal which is what I use is I'll download their invoice upload it here it's all set up I'll adjust their payment status here if they want to make the payment through PayPal they can just click this button and it'll take them through to do that then we have a brand proposal now this is something we've discussed in vlogmas and I've shared the template already but what I'll do is once the proposal is approved and I set up the client portal is I'll just click to the right of the proposal and I'll move it into here so I'll move it into this project management database so that when they click in it will be viewed here and they can see the proposal that they agreed to and again I would just Mark these as say this one's in progress say this one is complete and as I start marking things off as complete if we come up you'll see here it adjusts the project tracker so they can see their progress then we have things like the brand strategy assessment so this is before I have a strategy call I ask them to complete an assessment that's all in here so then I can review that before our strategy call they can come in here and they can book the call so again I've embedded my scheduler just to show you an example of what that looks like you would just embed your own and they can book that in and again when they're ready to upload their website copy and brand assets they can come in here and do that I've also included prompts and guidance for them with that and then we have all of our various other steps as well and I won't bother walking through all of them just know that they're here we're following the process including refinements things like that so everything is managed here for the client and this is run off of two databases the main one is this project process so if we open this up you'll see here it looks a little bit messy but I'm going to walk you through it so here we have our various steps and I break them down by phase so you'll see here I've just got this Arrow you could customize this but then I've got my different phases and this is linked into a different database called my project tracker and I need to do this in order to get that percentage it's the easiest way to access it so this is just linking to that so that we can get that progress by but because this phase isn't a step we're taking it shouldn't impact the progress the steps within it will but the phase itself won't so I don't link this one and I don't give a stage I just change it to type as a phase and then I'll select the status here then we have our actual step so here we've got our project inquiry we are linking this to the tracker this would have a date attached the stage is on board in so to change any stage just click in Click these three dots change the label change the color delete any you don't want to add a new one just start typing and you'll see here it lets you create a new one I've got responsible and then under type this is where things get interesting so here I've got project face I've got an action step document meetings resources inboxes and invoices so everything we're doing is run off of this one database but by breaking it down into type we can add filters so we can view certain things in certain places so we have that inbox everything that goes in there is marked as inbox if we have an action step it's marked as an action step and that's going to affect the progress tracker documents are all stored in one place all of our meetings can be viewed in one place because we're adding these tags and that's creating those filters and the same with invoices as well so if we go on process you'll see here that's the view that we viewed in the client portal where I've just broken it down and if I come over here you'll see all I've done is I've made it a list I've changed properties to show status but I would probably show due date as well or I could turn that off and then we have it gripped by stage and I've worked it so that it's in the right order then we have project timeline so we haven't assigned dates but if we go back and we start a sign in dates here so we'll just do this one is today and tomorrow and the next day if we come back in to project timeline you'll see here these now all appear on our timeline SO meetings you'll see this is filtered by the type is meeting document same thing filtered as document resources are filtered by resources so it's really simple when we break it down and then inbox is filtered by inbox and then we have our project calendar and again anything assigned a date will appear here so that's pretty straightforward now if we go back to the tracker this is really basic all it is is it's a sign in the task to the project so that we can do this roll up and figure out the percentage of action tasks completed so we don't even have to touch that it does it automatically but it's just so we can give this view to our clients and usually I will just hide this or I'll even move it into my projects database once it's all set up so this is my client portal and how I give access to clients is I come up to the top hit share and I will add their email in here and invite them once we have given them access they will be able to come in here and edit it and what I'll usually do on certain databases like here is I'll come over here and I'll lock the views so they can customize or edit this because it's locked but anything where I need them to be able to access it I'll leave that unchecked but you'll see here because this is really straightforward as far as the client knows they just hit new and add a new message they don't have to worry about what's in the back end same with all the steps they're just going to follow step by step and see exactly what they need to in the right place now this is all client facing so let me show you how I set this up with projects on the back end so if we come into my action Zone here and I click on the drop down to add a new project I'm going to pick new client template I'm going to open this up and that's going to take a few minutes to load just because it's a relatively large template so error layer in vlogmas I shared a projects and action tasks database with you again just sign up link is in the description but I shared two different templates and one of those was a project template and the other one was a client template and I said during that video These are identical but I'm going to show you later in the month where they differ this is where they differ so here if we come in we just add in all of our regular information for a new project I won't go into that in too much detail so if we scroll down you'll see I've got my project overview and if you watched that last video on projects in action tasks you'll be familiar with this section here our project management so if I click here and I show the database title you'll see this is linked to my action task here and all I've done is filtered it to show only this project now what's different about this is if we come up here you'll see I've moved the client portal to in here once you've got this all set up you can pull this client portal into your new client template within your projects action task you can pull this in so it'll create a new one every time all set up for you so this is what we're given access to the client so they're only seeing this page they're not seeing anything else but what we can do is we can come in here and we can pull in the information so we can pull in the inbox from that client portal into our projects database so we don't have to go into the client portal all of that information is here in our project and again here we can pull in their documents we can pull in the resources and we can pull in the meetings so the way I did that is added a linked database so we've got the client portal set up and all I've done is add a linked view of the database I'm pulling it in from this project process which we've set up and you'll see here I've got all of the different views set up so I can pull in whatever step that I want to take so if I wanted to pull in the whole process I could do that here if I just want to do the inbox I would show that here so this is what the client is seeing but we're managing it all within our projects section where we have all of our action tasks and all of our calendars set up so that we're not having to go into the client portal come back into our project go back in we can manage it all in one place we can adjust the different settings here without having to go into it as well but we have our own space for managing our own action tasks and write in our own notes separate from the client so this is where we carry out the internal work and then we give access to the client portal here so like I said what you can do once you add that template in is you can go into your projects you can click this drop down here you can click edit this template hit edit open this up and you can move your client portal in here and then every time you create a new project under the new client template it's automatically going to add that client portal all set up for you and all you have to do is come in here and customize it to your client so I found that to be really helpful like I said I'm still playing around with it I know more and more people are switching to notion and exploring steps like setting up a client portal in here so I didn't want to hold back I wanted to share it with you if it's helpful let me know in the description it'd be super helpful to hear your feedback if you want access to this template and all of the templates I'm sharing this month just sign up uh for my newsletter the link is in the description be sure to subscribe click the Bell icon all that promotional stuff and I'll see you again tomorrow with another video [Music] thank you [Music]