What it solves
Without a portal, working with a subcontractor runs on phone calls, email and WhatsApp, and comes back as a PDF days later. With a portal, every job has a status: waiting for acceptance, accepted with a date, in progress or closed.
What it should let them do
- Accept or decline each job with a reason, and propose a date.
- Log hours and parts without seeing your prices.
- Close the job with the service report and the customer’s signature.
- Hand in the documents you require, with their expiration dates.
- Give each person at the subcontractor their own login, seeing only what concerns them.
Subcontractor portal and customer portal
They are the same idea for a different audience. The customer portal is where customers request and follow their work. The subcontractor portal is where the people working for you receive and close it.
The usual mistake
Giving the subcontractor a shared login to your internal system “to save time.” They see what they should not, there is no trail of who did what and, when the relationship ends, nobody remembers to remove the access.